Web3 Leader Spotlight: Preston Van Loon
This week, we had the pleasure of chatting with Preston Van Loon, an Ethereum Core Developer at Offchain Labs. As the original creators of Arbitrum, Offchain Labs has been pivotal in revolutionizing the blockchain industry with their leading network scaling solutions.
Preston's passion for tackling tough problems led him to work for industry giants like Google, and eventually brought him into the blockchain space to help scale Ethereum.
Feel free to follow him on X at @preston_vanloon.
Having previously worked as a Software Engineer at Google, what attracted you to the world of blockchain?
Many of the reasons I joined Google were the same reasons that I wanted to contribute to Ethereum: solve hard problems and maximize my impact. Google attracts some of the smartest and brightest software engineers in the world and blockchain projects are attracting the same. In fact, I witnessed a very real "brain drain" (exodus of smart people) from Google to blockchain in my time with the company. I discovered Ethereum late in 2017 when the technology was very young and problems were beginning to surface quickly as ICOs and CryptoKitties were pushing the limits of Ethereum's throughput.
Within a few short months, I went from buying $100 worth of ETH to reading as much as possible about the core protocol. I thought it was an incredible emerging technology and wondered how I could contribute to its success. Scaling was the hardest and most important problem to solve, and I was interested in becoming a part of the collaborative and welcoming community of developers working on it.
Naturally, I was very attracted to this opportunity and pivoted in order to work on it. Raul Jordan and I formed the Prysm team with Terence Tsao and Nishant Das at the beginning of 2018. We helped shift Ethereum from PoW to PoS and continue to contribute to Ethereum's core protocol scaling and L2 scaling via Arbitrum.
Given your extensive experience with Ethereum and its scaling solutions, what is a common misconception about blockchain scalability? Why do you think this is?
There are many misconceptions about what it means to scale and what the effects are of scaling. Recently, I've seen the community speaking about the low gas prices on L1/L2 and misconcluding that Ethereum is dead / users have left for a greener pasture. This couldn't be further from the truth! Ethereum's combined usage is higher than ever when measuring a more meaningful metric such as gas per second.
Even the less meaningful "transactions per second'' of combined L1+L2 shows that Ethereum has high throughput and low gas fees can be explained by an increasing adoption of L2 networks alongside L1 improvements for L2 data posting by way of EIP-4844. I don't fault people for believing these misconceptions as Ethereum's scaling landscape is constantly improving. A few years ago, reviewing L1 gas prices was a good indicator of block space supply, demand, and Ethereum's ability to keep up with user activity. In the L2 centric scaling paradigm, L1 gas prices tell a very different story than years past!
How do you foresee the evolution of Ethereum’s scaling capabilities over the next few years?
I subscribe to the idea that Ethereum's L1 will become a settlement layer for L2s and nearly all user activity will migrate to outer layers (L2s, L3s) that inherit from the L1 security. However, If I answered this question a few years ago, I would have likely been very wrong about where we are today and the direction we are going.
Ethereum is a rapidly developing and evolving protocol that is constantly improving. The future is bright, unpredictable, and exciting! There are endless challenging and interesting computer science problems in blockchain which will continue to attract the best and brightest minds in the world.
For developers looking to transition into Web3, what advice would you give them?
Dive deep and ask questions. There is a mountain of free, open source, and interesting information on Ethereum scaling. Find an aspect that interests you and share the answers to the questions you asked yourself. Especially if you are asking in an underrepresented area of the protocol.
If you are thinking about taking the leap to web3, feel free to reach out to me anywhere you can find me on the internet. If you want to work together, we are hiring! Let's build something together and make history!
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