Why Dapp Users will Hate Cross-Shard Communication (and what you can do about it)
Duration: 00:09:23
Speaker: James Prestwich
Type: Breakout
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
ETH2 is approaching, and initial indications are that substantially all dapp experiences will suffer. Some problems may be addressed with significant changes to design and development processes, but several tradeoffs are unavoidable without sacrificing scale, security, or decentralization. For example, essentially all popular dapps rely on the fungibility of Ether in a managed pool (e.g. Uniswap, Augur, Maker). In a sharded ecosystem, Ether is meaningfully non-fungible across shards, and users will bear monetary and management costs as a result.This talk will give an overview of cross-shard communication strategies and discuss their impact on developer and user experience. These include merged consensus, shard relays, consensus introspection, and credit markets. For each mechanism, we'll discuss expected impact on user experience metrics like execution time, transaction outcome, and price slippage.The talk is not all bad news. We've discovered some elegant new approaches that give dapps a variety of communication choices. The last section of the talk will discuss specific communication strategies that are amenable to specifi
