Migration; a sociology term that has entered the crypto lexicon
Blockchain projects often begin their lives as whitepapers that promise innovative technologies to follow at a later date. The journey from design paper to real product often takes many twists and turns and sometimes projects change their plans in fundamental ways like choosing to move to an entirely different blockchain. During the 2017 Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom, many blockchain projects raised funds by issuing tokens on the Ethereum blockchain and other third-party smart contract platforms. Some of these projects later created their own blockchains and thus needed to transfer their tokens from the third-party platforms to their own chains (e.g. Tron). This process is referred to as a token migration. Migrations may also occur for other reasons, such as migrating the entire project from one third-party blockchain to another for technical or financial reasons which are among the most recent cases that have created the second wave of migration in blockchain projects.
The emergence of the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has been largely built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, adding credence to the platform’s decentralized functionality. The surge in the use of the blockchain has come at a steep price though, as network speed and transaction costs are directly affected as more users and platforms are added to the blockchain. The increased cost to transact during periods of high network demand significantly impacts Ethereum’s overall utility and has made it impossible for many projects to run any microtransaction payments on Ethereum. This defeats the idea of using the Ethereum network for one of its principal use cases. High network activity has created spikes in transaction costs on multiple occasions throughout Ethereum’s history and it is not something new. One of the first notable warnings of the network’s inability to handle high demand came at the end of 2017 with the launch of a simple collectibles game, CryptoKitties, brought the Ethereum network to a temporary standstill.
The Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, one of the most highly anticipated updates in the protocol’s history, has been put forward as a solution to Ethereum scalability issue but the upgrade has been delayed multiple times and according to experts many of the expectations from this new upgrade are likely too optimistic in the short-term, and will become more material in the long-term. Faced with all these challenges, projects built on Ethereum have three options:
- Do nothing and hope that users find enough value in the project to justify paying high fees.
- Migrate the project to a less congested blockchain with smart contract functionality.
- Build on Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling solutions.
Unsurprisingly, many projects are exploring the second and third options. Ethereum’s scaling issues have forced some projects to migrate to other blockchains, among them is MyLottoCoin.
Launched on Ethereum in November 2020, MyLottoCoin is a fully decentralized DeFi-powered gaming platform, the long sought solution to a fair and modern lottery model, leveraging the advantages of blockchain technology that offers a practical approach to simplifying the current online lottery model and fixing its defects by enabling fast, reliable, and tamper-proof technology access to players, while maintaining the traditional elements and cultivating a culture of trust to a damaged reputation of centralized lotteries. ”Staking Plus”, a term that MyLottoCoin gave birth to, is a unique reward program powered by project’s native token, MYL. MYL token was originally created to facilitate the reward program, empowering players to always be part of the game and win. MYL holders receive 10% of total ticket sales in proportion to the tokens in circulation, autonomously every 3 months. From the total supply of MYL (100 million), 50% is locked in the games’ smart contracts for free redistribution among players.
With Ethereum’s soaring gas fees and a slow block processing rate, MyLottoCoin as a DApp has suffered from this disadvantage like many other Ethereum-based projects. therefore, MyLottoCoin team, in search of scalability solutions to give their users the cheapest and fastest experience possible, has decided to fully migrate from Ethereum to the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). This strategic decision, although comes with some challenges, brings many advantages especially in boosting the project’s adoption. The migration is estimated to take place by the first half of October 2021, and more details can be retrieved from the project’s official social channels.
It seems likely that gas prices will continue to force many established DApps to migrate from the Ethereum mainchain. Whether that migration will be largely toward Layer-2 solutions or alternate blockchains may depend on the nature of the applications themselves. Many of those DeFi applications benefiting from composability and large liquidity pools will likely prefer the familiarity of Ethereum or Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility (e.g. BSC). MyLottoCoin and many other projects migration in 2021 are examples of 2nd wave migration, the blockchain type, once a sociological term that has now become a part of crypto lexicon.
