HYPE has devils hiding in the details: Co-located low node count, off-chain ordering & it is closed source! Yet, dismissing it as "centralized" is foolish, as its core design is decentralized! HYPE is decentralizing more, racing SOL to win. Pay attention or get left behind: 🧵 The reason why HYPE has been so successful, leading the charts in fees, is that their product is superior to everyone else's, including SOL's! SOL's leadership is well aware of this & its future upgrades, Alpenglow & MCP, are meant to close that gap In the meantime, HYPE has been running unopposed within its particular niche, which includes Perp trading & RWA's! The Latency Race: HYPE currently only has 24 validators, most of which are located in the same data center in Tokyo. This is an extreme degree of centralization! Despite the validators themselves still being permissionless This happened because of the high demand for low latency. We will not defend this design; however, we do still have to recognize the market demand for lower latency It gets exciting when we realize that both SOL & HYPE want to achieve such low latency within a fully decentralized design environment. It then becomes a question of who gets there first! Fake It Till You Make It: The truth behind HYPE is that people are not trading on-chain at all. Their orders are getting matched in the mem-pool & are only included on-chain later Most people cannot tell the difference; that is how HYPE managed to offer a superior product. They took shortcuts others were unwilling to make. Which, honestly, can also be said for SOL during the early days However, contrary to my own expectations. As I was a SOL critic at that time. SOL fixed all of its issues & managed to take the lead in usage. Convincing me in the end to pivot & support the project HYPE is also saying & doing all of the right things, giving us a clear path towards full decentralization in its future The Prize: Make no mistake, whoever wins this race wins the entire crypto game! The use cases these chains cover collect the vast majority of fees. Which is what ultimately pays for decentralization, security & scarcity That means, from an evolutionary perspective, whoever comes out on top of this competition. Becomes "Bitcoin 3.0"; the most decentralized & performant chain The blockchain trilemma was effectively solved years ago. The trade-off space now entirely revolves around latency instead Trillion Dollar Questions: Will SOL close the gap before HYPE fixes all of its problems? Or will HYPE decentralize before SOL catches up? These are the trillion-dollar questions HYPE is committing to open-sourcing the codebase & moving trading fully on-chain. While increasing & better distributing their validators globally Do we bet on the more decentralized chain, which is catching up in performance? Or do we bet on the more performant chain, which is catching up on decentralization? Or maybe it comes down to which team we trust more to get us across the finish line first. Or what technical challenges are harder or easier to overcome? It is a combination of all of these factors that will determine the ultimate winner Conclusion All that matters in the end is that we, the people, get a fully permissionless, decentralized & performant chain at scale. How we get there matters far less in the grand scheme of things The crypto revolution is inevitable exactly because of the type of utility SOL & HYPE offer the world. Building competitive products for mass adoption is the only way we can make a real impact That is why this should all matter more to the cypherpunk movement, as only highly performant & decentralized chains can liberate the world. By making financial sovereignty & privacy available to all! 🔥

Vitalik finally acknowledged the failure of "L2 scaling"! As we successfully predicted in 2022. Four long years were wasted on a technological dead end! So what will ETH do now? Spend the next four years on another overly complex & over-engineered scaling solution ofcourse: 🧵 The latest pie-in-the-sky idea is the "ZK-EVM", which will take at least 4 to 5 years to fully implement before we see any significant scaling benefit What is even worse is that a ZK-EVM will keep ETH block times slow indefinitely, as slow block times are required under this plan due to the time it takes to compute a ZK proof! The "great" gas increase promised by Vitalik this year is unlikely to exceed another 50%. Which sounds like a lot until you realize competitors like SOL already have 134X the capacity right now... Bragging about low fees on ETH is not the flex most people think it is, either. The fees are low because all usage has already shifted to competing L1s & L2s! The truth is that no serious apps will build on ETH's L1 until there is real capacity. Which again will take many years. That means competing chains like SOL got a 4-year lead & will now get another 4-year lead on top of that. Giving an 8-year lead in total to build a bigger & better ecosystem & gain an even greater technological edge The celebration of yet another pivot back to L1 scaling in ETH is misplaced. If you read between the lines, this represents a massive failure of leadership & consequently the ETH network as a whole It is also surprising how quickly the entire community went from religiously supporting "L2 scaling" to now adopting the new narrative of "L1 scaling", almost overnight Especially considering how I was ridiculed & ostracized by the ETH community for being one of the earliest prominent critics of "L2 scaling". Something that also happened overnight. As I went from respected researcher & investor to a "phony" & "scammer" when I published my first ETH "L2 scaling" critique in 2022 Those same people who attacked & mocked us are parroting the same talking points we all did by 2023. Seriously makes you question the state of "groupthink" in the Ethereum ecosystem now I suppose it makes sense; without stakeholder governance, they have effectively embraced the idea of having a "dictatorship" by a small centralized cabal of "devs" over the rules of the protocol instead The ZK-EVM plan is particularly frustrating, as they could simply adopt one of the multiple viable scaling technologies that are already fully implemented & proven on other chains today. Instead, they are taking a path that objectively has terrible trade-offs Gaining capacity at the cost of speed & decentralization due to the extreme computational costs of builders. I covered these trade-offs in other pieces in more detail The deeper problem here is bad governance, which allows developers living in ivory towers to dictate the future of what was supposed to be the future of finance. It is no surprise, then, that we end up with overly complex solutions that are simply not competitive So, despite my overall critique over the years being validated by Vitalik himself. I remain critical as the same dysfunctional governance that led to the disastrous "L2 scaling" roadmap is now making a similar mistake by backing the over-engineered, centralizing & slow ZK-EVM roadmap As an early Ethereum supporter, I literally pointed my entire old mining farm to ETH within the first week of launch in 2015! Ofcourse, I want ETH to succeed; culturally, there is a lot of good here. Unfortunately, good intentions alone are not sufficient to win in this market. The future belongs to the chains that scale & can do so competitively The future of finance is not ETH & it has not been ETH for a long time now. The good news is that the market keeps innovating, routing around all of the failed experiments. So that eventually the cypherpunk crypto vision will come to fruition, that is at least inevitable We will make that dream come true with or without Ethereum!❤️