Ethereum 2.0's Composability Concerns, Explained

Money legos is the term used to describe the way Ethereum allows different financial services to be plugged into each other, also known as composability.

There remains a $10.9 billion question: Will composability work as well on Ethereum 2.0 as it does now on the original version of the world computer?

Even though a lot of fanfare is going on right now about Eth 2.0 launching soon, it's really just the first phase, and there will be no shards in that.

"Eth 2 with shards is likely still some time off," Avichal Garg of Electric Capital told CoinDesk in an email.

Since basically everything anyone does on Ethereum yields a token to account for it, composability is as easy as tossing an asset into one smart contract, taking the token it produces and tossing that token into something else.

There are worries that composability might be stymied in some cases in a sharded environment.

There are worries that such synchronous operations might not be possible if two or more of the dapps in the sequence aren't on the same shard.

"Between the shards they are considering asynchronous message passing. It would be kind of a second-class way of integrating smart contracts," Brendan Asselstine, CTO of no-loss lottery PoolTogether, told CoinDesk in a phone call.

"Every contract will have to be rewritten to handle synchronous calls that come from within a shard and asynchronous," he said.

If it does turn out there is a very pricey shard, for example, and even if Ethereum remains pricier than other blockchains after all this happens, Burniske believes Ethereum will remain the home for DeFi, despite the fact that every other base layer is trying to make the case for itself as the next home for DeFi."When you have transactions that are less important, you can go to other shards, other layer 1s," Burniske said, using an analogy that he credited to Luis Cuende, co-founder of Aragon.