EthLabs Co-founder Ansgar Dietrichs on why Ethereum must be the central node of the on-chain global economy “When we say the global economy is coming on-chain, I believe there are two very different ways that can play out. What I see as the default is you have this world of all these different, independent chains [with different use cases] and then you tie them all together with brittle links. Over time you try to derisk these links, but we’ve seen this multiple times in the past — bridges keep failing. Bridges between independent chains can only ever be so secure/robust because ultimately these chains don’t have a shared state.” Ansgar continues: “The alternative outcome is one where the global economy has one central node — that doesn’t mean that all the activity is on that node or Ethereum L1, but it means that there’s one central node that everything links back into. We are in a fundamentally better state for the world, when all these different parts of the economy can talk to each other trustlessly and without friction. And we really believe that it’s only Ethereum that can play that role. There is no second-best, neutral chain that actually has a shot at this. But that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. We could just end up in the worse world.” This is why EthLabs is focused on, as Ansgar puts it, “talking to the builders in Ethereum, figuring out what are the friction points — especially as we build toward bringing finance and these economic flows on-chain — and iteratively removing them and strengthening Ethereum.”