Cloudflare Exec Says Ethereum’s Original Sharding Plan Could Work for Stablecoin Payments

Will Papper, Cloudflare‘s director of product for agent payments, said a blockchain split into parallel shard chains, the design Ethereum dropped for rollups, could carry the stablecoin micropayments Cloudflare is building, because payments avoid the pricing problem he said made shards hard for DeFi.

“Ethereum wanted to pursue this. It was way too difficult for DeFi. But I think you can pull it off for payments, which is exciting,” Papper said on Unchained Premium, in an episode recorded Sept. 17 and released Sept. 22.

When host Laura Shin said on the show that fragmentation was Ethereum’s issue and that Cloudflare was after “scaling without fragmentation,” Papper called that “the holy grail,” adding, “that’s what Ethereum’s original roadmap was.” Papper said trading and lending across shards leave slightly different prices on each one, and every added shard means more work to correct them. Payments don’t have that problem, he said, because “a dollar is a dollar. If you send it somewhere, it still stays a dollar.”

Ethereum changed course in October 2020, when Vitalik Buterin proposed a rollup-centric roadmap. He argued that rollups storing their data on shards would scale further, and sooner, than shard chains running their own computation. Shard chains are “no longer part of the roadmap,” ethereum.org says.

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Papper has said before on X that charging for even a small slice of Cloudflare’s traffic would take more throughput than every blockchain combined, and he repeated it on the show: “So if we monetize even a small percentage of our HTTP requests, that’s more scale than every single blockchain combined.”

General-purpose chains have mostly scaled, Papper said, by “putting it on a really big server,” which can get them to between 10,000 and 100,000 transactions per second. That works for now, he said, because “crypto today has not exceeded that throughput yet.” When Shin asked whether what Cloudflare wanted sounded like “a Solana-like solution,” Papper put Solana in the big-server group, calling it “a really big, powerful server,” and added that “there’s nothing wrong with that approach.” Once a chain hits that limit, he said, “you need to add more instances, which in the Ethereum world is rollups.”

Cloudflare’s payment products for agents, the Monetization Gateway for sellers and Wallets for buyers, are announced and “going live soon,” Papper said.

Asked whether Cloudflare might launch its own blockchain, Papper said “we know that we need the scale” of the internet and that the company is “seeing what’s out there.” “I’m spending a lot of time figuring out what that looks like,” he said. He added: “please do DM me if you’re working on a blockchain solution that horizontally scales.”

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