Modular blockchains might lead to a poor user experience, but — unlike Solana — they remain functional even during periods of high demand.
Everyone agrees that blockchains must scale. What they don’t agree on is how. This is the “modular” versus “monolithic” discussion unfolding across the industry, and it’s one of the most interesting — and sometimes contentious — debates.
Modular scaling calls for moving small-value transactions to a tiered system of layer-2s and even layer-3s that eventually settle to a base chain. This approach, which has been embraced by the Ethereum (ETH) community, has a major drawback: it leads to network fragmentation and an inferior user experience.
Monolithic scaling — best exemplified by Solana (SOL) — calls for keeping all transactions on the same chain and optimizing the network with hardware, software, and consensus upgrades to give it greater throughput. The primary benefit of this approach is a better user experience. The main downside is that it can’t possibly work, not without sacrificing the very features that make a blockchain appealing in the first place: decentralization and resilience.