The Scale Law of Blockchain Development: Exploring the Limits of DeFi Rise

Recently, the large language models in the field of artificial intelligence, such as DeepSeek R2 and Musk's Grok 3.5, have not been released as scheduled. This reflects that even in the case of ample funding, the development of technology has its inherent laws. This phenomenon has prompted us to think about the development laws in the Blockchain field.

In the context of the current boom in Layer 2 solutions and Ethereum refocusing on Layer 1, we attempt to draw on the scale laws of the artificial intelligence field to explore the development patterns of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Insights from the Data Scale of Full Nodes in Public Blockchains

The data scale of full nodes is an important indicator of the degree of decentralization of public chains. Currently, the data of Solana's full nodes has reached 400TB, far exceeding Ethereum's 13TB and Bitcoin's 643.2GB. This data difference reflects the trade-off between decentralization and efficiency in different public chains.

Bitcoin's founder Satoshi Nakamoto considered Moore's Law at the outset of the design, limiting data growth below the hardware expansion curve. This foresight is particularly important in the context of the current slowdown in hardware development. Whether in the fields of CPU, GPU, or storage, technological progress shows a trend of diminishing returns.

In this context, Ethereum is committed to ecological optimization and reconstruction, focusing on new areas such as the on-chain of physical assets. On the other hand, Solana pursues extreme performance, but its large node scale has already limited individual participants.

The rise limit of the token economic system

Although the field of artificial intelligence has not deeply integrated with cryptocurrency as expected, certain projects have still achieved significant rise. Based on current market capitalization, the economic scale limit of mainstream public chains is approximately $300 billion. This is not an absolute limit, but a reasonable estimate based on current market performance.

Drawing on the concepts from the book "Scale," we can observe that the cryptocurrency market exhibits characteristics of superlinear and sublinear scaling. For example, the rise of Ethereum from $1 to $200 is faster than its growth from $200 to its historical high.

The Evolution of DeFi Yield

DeFi, as an important component of the Blockchain ecosystem, its yield changes also reflect the development trend of the entire industry. From the early projects' annualized yield of 20% to the current mainstream projects' yield of around 5%, DeFi yields show a declining trend. This is in line with the sub-linear scaling law, which states that the expansion of the system's scale does not necessarily lead to an improvement in capital efficiency.

It is worth noting that while tokenizing real assets may expand the scale of Decentralized Finance, it could further reduce the average yield. This once again confirms that the relationship between scale growth and efficiency improvement is not a simple linear one.

Conclusion

Looking at the development history of Blockchain, we can see that the differentiation trend among public chains is still ongoing. Bitcoin is gradually separating from the on-chain ecosystem, while the imperfections of on-chain credit and identity systems have led to the over-collateralization model becoming mainstream.

Stablecoins and innovations such as physical assets on-chain essentially represent a leveraged migration of off-chain assets to on-chain. This reflects the advantage off-chain assets still have in terms of credibility. Under the current technical conditions, the blockchain ecosystem may have approached its rise limit. From the emergence of DeFi to now, it has only been 5 years, and the entire Ethereum ecosystem has only been around for 10 years; we may be witnessing the gradual manifestation of the development patterns in this field.