Cloudflare Exec Eyes Ethereum's Sharded Past for Stablecoin Scalability

Cloudflare's Will Papper recently stated that Ethereum's original sharding plan could be viable for stablecoin payments, despite being deemed too complex for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. In an interview on Unchained Premium, Papper said that shard chains were 'way too difficult' for DeFi but could work for payments because they don't involve pricing problems.

Papper noted that Ethereum's original roadmap included shard chains as a way to scale the network, but the project was later dropped in favor of rollups. However, he believes that shard chains could be used for stablecoin micropayments, which require less complexity than DeFi applications.

The Cloudflare executive emphasized that 'a dollar is a dollar' when it comes to payments, meaning that the value remains consistent regardless of where it's sent. This simplicity makes shard chains more suitable for payment processing than for DeFi, which requires more complex pricing mechanisms.

Cloudflare is currently building its own payment products, including the Monetization Gateway for sellers and Wallets for buyers, which are set to launch soon. While Papper did not rule out the possibility of launching a blockchain solution, he stated that the company is 'seeing what's out there' in terms of existing solutions.