Scalability in web3: Fireside Chat hosted by Iterative Ventures

Scalability is what drives us here at Linera. What is it? Why does it matter in web3?

Scalability is what drives us here at Linera. What is it? Why does it matter in web3? In this recent talk hosted by Iterative Ventures, Linera’s Founder/CEO Mathieu Baudet walks us through these questions and how we approach scaling at Linera.

Bring to mind your favorite web2 app: no matter how many people are using it at the same time, the application’s responsiveness mostly remains consistent across users. This is because the web2 app can add (or remove) capacity whenever needed. This is called elastic scaling. Elastic scaling has made a tremendous impact on web2. We at Linera hope to bring this level of performance, reliability, and ease to web3.

Linera provides elastic scaling by running many lightweight chains, called microchains, in parallel in a single set of validators. Validators scale by dividing their workload between as many internal workers as needed. In contrast to blockchain sharding, each validator in Linera is optimizing their own assignment from chains to workers (aka internal sharding). This is important to allow seamless re-assignment of shards and because each validator may use different hardware.

Microchains open up unprecedented scaling to web3 applications and make them easier to run on commodity hardware, including mobile, without a “light” client. We share more about our architecture in this overview.

To dive into the technical details of Linera, the full version of the whitepaper is available for download. For the latest updates on the project, including the availability of our Devnet, follow us on Twitter. Join our Telegram channel for announcements and to participate in our discussion group. We look forward to hearing more from you about how our infrastructure can support what you build next.