0. Intro
In November 2025, I wrote in my blog
(web3) It is chaotic, savage, full of scammers and bandits. But there really is oil and gold buried under its feet, and the tracks have already been laid
Looking at it now, describing today’s Web3 as a global railway network pieced together from all kinds of private railways is a god-tier metaphor
If we cut the perspective back to pure infrastructure architecture, in 2026 this heterogeneous network stitched together from countless state machines, consensus algorithms and cross-chain bridges has a very cyberpunk true face
People used to fantasise that eventually there would be one great unified perfect public chain (the so-called Ethereum killer, the ultimate Layer1 and similar) to unify the whole world. But by now we’ve long recognised reality: that kind of perfect unification — the same gauge for carts and the same script for writing, Qin Shi Huang style — does not exist
Today’s Web3 is a super global railway network in which all kinds of project teams and capital each build their own private railways, then forcibly stitch them together with countless transfer stations and unified standards
1. Layer 1
Layer1 is more or less the main chain. These are the lowest and thickest tracks, but the work they do now is completely different
1.1 Ethereum
Nowadays hardly any ordinary person plays directly on the Ethereum mainnet. Its block space is too expensive — it’s like Fedwire, the very bottom layer of the global financial system.
What runs on it now is mainly Wall Street’s RWA (tokenised treasuries), the state proofs of the major Layer 2s, and institutional-grade DeFi settlement worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It is slow and expensive, but it is the security bedrock of the whole network, an armoured bulletproof train
1.2 Tron
Nobody talks about lofty technological revolutions on Tron; its technology is even a little dated. But it is extremely rugged and extremely cheap. It is packed with stablecoins like USDT
Tron shuttles back and forth every day mainly between bosses in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. It is the lifeline of the entire Web3 with the largest freight volume and the most down-to-earth presence
1.3 Solana
This is the maglev of the railway network. It is extremely fast, monolithic in architecture, and does not support layering. On it are all the retail traders doing high-frequency trading, the Memecoin meat grinder, and the tiny payment instructions automatically issued by AI Agents.
Although there’s still the occasional small malfunction, engineers have hammered it to the limit with technologies such as Firedancer (an independent validator client), satisfying humanity’s greed for instant feedback
Layer 2 / Layer 3
In that November 2025 blog, I said I wanted to build railways, but at this point there are already more than enough railways, and serious problems of capacity oversupply and mismatched gauges have appeared
From 2024 to 2025, Web3 went through a great leap forward of reinventing wheels. Thanks to technology stacks like Rollup (OP Stack, ZK Stack), the cost of launching a chain dropped to just a few minutes
The result: everyone went off to build Layer 2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Blast, Mantle… it’s like reciting a menu). Every fund and every major exchange wants to build its own private railway
This caused extremely severe liquidity fragmentation. Your USDT is on chain A, and you want to go to chain B to buy something — it’s like taking a train from Russia to China: because the gauges don’t match, you have to get off at the border, unload the goods, and load them into a different kind of carriage (that’s a cross-chain bridge)
The current situation is that more railways have been built than there are passengers, and the various private railways fight each other for passengers. This is the overcapacity of shovel-selling and railway-building
3. The Real Engineering Breakthrough: Chain Abstraction
Faced with hundreds of private railways that don’t connect to each other, we didn’t forcibly tear up the tracks; instead we made an extremely pragmatic architectural upgrade: building a global routing layer on top of all the private railways. That is chain abstraction
- In the past, users had to configure RPC nodes, buy gas coins for different chains, find cross-chain bridges themselves, and bear the risk of funds being hijacked by hackers along the way
- Now you only need a smart wallet. Behind the wallet, Solver networks and cross-chain messaging protocols (such as LayerZero, CCIP) automatically plan the route for you within a second, advance all kinds of miscellaneous gas, and complete the cross-chain swap
Users have no idea which underlying private railways they crossed, and don’t need to care whether it’s broad gauge or narrow gauge; they just pay the money and the goods are delivered. The underlying private railways are completely abstracted away
This is the ultimate goal of chain abstraction: users only need to know what they want to do, not which chain to do it on. The chain becomes infrastructure that is transparent to the user
I think this is a key step for web3 to reach the masses
4. Account Abstraction ERC-4337 Goes Mainstream
Remember how, back in the day, setting up a Web3 wallet meant writing down 12 completely illogical mnemonic words? Lose them and you’re bankrupt — utterly against human nature
Now we have smart wallets: we use Passkey technology directly, and can create a wallet with just a Google or Apple ID
In the past, buying something required specific ETH / SOL. Now you can hand over whatever stablecoin you like, or the app developer will pay the gas for you directly to attract customers
5. Conclusion
If you look now at that 1840 wasteland I mentioned, you’ll notice a very interesting phenomenon:
Nowadays there are fewer people who talk about Web3 and decentralisation all day long Because this technology has finally sunk down, like TCP/IP
This pieced-together global railway network is still imperfect; cross-chain bridges occasionally still get blown up by hackers the way Zhang Zuolin was (although the stolen amounts are dropping sharply), and some garbage private railways carry nothing but scammer express trains
But for those of us who write code, this thing has finally reached the stage where its APIs can be called smoothly. Whether it’s tokenising US Treasuries, letting cross-border e-commerce settle foreign exchange in seconds, or renting computing power in the cloud and paying for it, this cryptography-based global state machine is already ready, and is ingesting and emitting packets around the clock without rest
We no longer need to explain to the public what a blockchain is, just as we don’t need to explain to the lady selling vegetables what HTTP is. The railways are built, the scheduling system runs; what comes next is quietly watching this system erode the territory of traditional finance and cross-border data flows. That is the meaning of web3’s existence in 2026
