The Scale Law of the Crypto Assets Ecosystem: Where Are the Bottlenecks in DeFi Development?

Recently, the pace of development in the field of artificial intelligence seems to have slowed down. DeepSeek R2 was not released as scheduled in May, but had a minor update for R1 on May 28. Similarly, the release of Grok 3.5 has also been repeatedly postponed. Driven by a large amount of funding, the scale effect of large language models seems to be gradually reaching its limit.

This phenomenon exists not only in the field of AI but also shows a similar trend in the blockchain world. With SVM L2 entering the token issuance phase and Ethereum refocusing on the L1 track, it is necessary for us to reassess the scale laws of the blockchain ecosystem.

The Data Scale Limit of Public Chains

In terms of the scale of full node data, Solana currently leads other public chains and L2 networks with a volume of 400TB. In comparison, Ethereum has only about 13TB of full node data since its genesis in July 2015. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has strictly controlled data growth below the hardware expansion curve, currently at only 643.2GB.

This difference reflects the technical routes of different public chains. Ethereum focuses on ecological optimization and reconstruction, hoping to maintain an advantage through its own L2 network and adopting a new architecture. Solana, on the other hand, pursues extreme performance, but its massive node scale has effectively excluded individual participants.

From the perspective of hardware development, whether it is in the CPU, GPU, or storage field, technological progress has begun to slow down. This means that the underlying hardware of public chains may not have breakthrough advancements for a considerable period of time.

The Scale Limits of Token Economic Systems

Based on the current market capitalization, we can roughly estimate that the upper limit of the public chain economic system is around 300 billion dollars. This does not mean that individual projects cannot exceed this value, but rather represents the reasonable capacity of the entire market.

The yield of the DeFi ecosystem has also shown a significant downward trend. From the early 20% APY of UST, to the 150% over-collateralization ratio of DAI, and now the 90-day average APY of sUSDe at 5.51%, the overall yield of DeFi is on a downward trend. Even with real-world assets worth trillions being put on-chain, it is difficult to reverse this trend.

The Development Bottlenecks of Blockchain Ecosystem

Throughout the development of blockchain, we can identify several key issues:

1. The differentiation trend among public chains has not eased, and Bitcoin is gradually becoming disconnected from the on-chain ecosystem.

2. The failure of on-chain credit and identity systems has led to over-collateralization becoming the mainstream model.

3. Whether it is stablecoins or RWA, they are essentially leveraged on-chain representations of off-chain assets, reflecting the inherent higher credibility of off-chain assets.

Under the current technological conditions and market environment, the blockchain ecosystem seems to have reached some limit of scale laws. It has only been 5 years since the outbreak of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and it has only been 10 years since the birth of Ethereum, yet the development speed of the entire industry has obviously slowed down. How to break through these bottlenecks in the future will be a major challenge faced by the entire industry.