Why am I cozying up to my fellow alt L1’s? Because our decentralized survival depends on it. The fact is: the Ethereum/L2 model is incompatible with a diverse, decentralized, multi-chain future. This is both a complement to Ethereum/L2’s, and a call to action for alt L1’s to step things up. Let’s dissect: A potential route we’re going down is: Bitcoin and Ethereum (plus L2’s) become really the only choice of chains. Yep, you just heard that from a non-Eth guy. Which could mean we end up in a future where Bitcoin is digital gold, Ethereum is the only trusted settlement layer, and everything else is accepted by new entrants as – “best done on an L2”. They can make a decent argument for that – and you’re now seeing that more and more of that on your TL. As “what CAN’T you do on a single sequencer??” From perp dexes, to corpo L2’s, to prediction markets, to permissioned environments, etc etc. Trust me, all that stuff is way easier to build when you don’t have validators to work around. And If there’s regulatory cover – why wouldn’t every CEX just also call themselves an L2? A few tweaks and you’re off to the token launch races! So if the rest of us alt L1’s with validators get complacent – the above could be our ghost of Christmas future. But is that the future we want? Is that the better decentralized world we promised our kids?? Not in my mind. The end result of the “Eth takes most” future is just effectively decentralizing DTCC and retaining a lot of the same trust assumptions at the execution layer we have with CEX’s. No thanks. We can do better. And history has shown L2 fragmentation result in poor UX, composability, finality, etc. It’s the reason Solana was able to make such gains against Eth these past years (until the 2 Vlad’s entered L2 stage right). So what’s the counter to that? Optimized L1’s with independent validators not under common control. And we need to win on the UX and composability and finality and other protections that come with that. L1’s are stronger together. Game on.