Today, there appear to be two categories of solutions to this problem: either design your protocol to tolerate segmentation of your state, or aggregate interactions with that state.

Misconception 3 : The only way to solve this is through centralization.

Centralization is a way to solve this problem, but it is not the only way. See below.

Misconception 2 : Only one user can interact with a smart contract per block/transaction.

Also not true; the point of contention is around the UTXO, but many UTXOs may be governed by the same smart contract.

This fundamentally comes down to the shift in thinking from ...

Misconception 1 : Cardano is flawed because it only allows 1 transaction per block.

In fact, it is quite the opposite. Cardano allows many hundreds of transactions per block.

Instead, it is accurate to say that Cardano allows a given transaction output to be spent a s...

Cardano chose, instead, to improve on the UTXO model enough that dApps themselves could make these tradeoffs between independent operation and centralization. The eUTXO model that Cardano led the research on introduces three new primitives for smart contracts: The datum, the redeemer, and the val...

The difference between these two can be analogized to the difference between the cash in your pocket and the balance in your bank account.

Access to global information, such as price, is trivial in these models. However, there are a lot of downstream negative side effects of this choice.

Many people have pointed out that Cardano’s choice of eUTXO can create issues when porting protocols. This is certainly true; we alluded to this in our whitepaper many months ago. Similarly Lars Brünjes, the Di...