Movement founder: The public doesn't really care about decentralization, but we care even less about having users
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Movement founder: The public doesn't really care about decentralization, but we care even less about having users
Deliver a brand-new product with a全新 developer/user experience, and then consider decentralization.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: rushi
Compiled by: TechFlow
As someone committed to achieving these goals, I ask myself every day: Does anyone really need decentralization?
Decentralization is like "open source"—a principle frequently violated, blurred, ignored, or even glorified. While important, the public doesn't truly care.
As someone advancing in these areas, I can confidently say that unless you make people care about decentralization, no one actually does.
For example, everyone knows admin keys in multisigs should be disabled, yet we still stake SOL into random memecoin multisigs based on social trust ("you'll be 'punished' if you run away"). I don't even think this is wrong—most projects today rely on social trust, so multisigs are acceptable. Most L2s are also essentially multisigs to some degree, and people seem perfectly fine with it.
What people actually care about is user experience—"How does a certain feature improve my trading or transferring experience?"
Here are a few things L2s need to do to avoid underperforming (largely agree with Cygaar, just want to rephrase):
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Decentralized sequencers. This isn't just for the spirit of decentralization—it's crucial for optimizing token economics.
We can discuss technical feasibility and performance between centralized and decentralized sequencers, but focusing on user experience, here are the key points.
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L2 tokens need to go beyond governance tokens. With decentralized sequencing sets, functionalities such as staking, MEV, cross-rollup fee markets, and state finality guarantees backed by dual staking (essentially AVS) become possible. Say goodbye to useless governance tokens!
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This is the first critical step toward solving the L2 token dilemma.
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Don't over-rely on validity proofs. I agree the future is zk, and validity proofs are great, but the difference between them and optimistic rollups or other rollups isn't that large. If you want to enter the market and differentiate yourself as an L2, just being a ZK-EVM isn't enough—there are already seven of those. zk fraud proofs are also excellent, addressing most concerns around optimistic rollups, such as withdrawal times, proof costs (for zk rollups), and security parameters.
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Prioritize high throughput and low latency execution. If there's one thing SOL tech has taught the Ethereum ecosystem, it's that speed matters. Especially during periods of high usage, fast transactions are paramount. If an L2 collapses at 100 TPS and sequencers fail due to traffic overload, it completely defeats our purpose.
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If we can't actually handle high-throughput execution under native load balancing, our system becomes meaningless.
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Be creative. Use different programming languages, new rollup architectures, unique SDKs, etc. Do something impossible on any other L2—simply marketing yourself as a social L2 and launching a generic EVM L2 isn't sufficient.
The market has already shown that the era of EVM L2s is over. There's no loyalty, no vendor lock-in, and almost no chance of building a winning ecosystem because copying and pasting my Uni V3 contract across 10 chains is too easy. The market can easily treat your token as just one among 500 other EVM L2 tokens.
So, I agree with Cygaar—the core rollup teams should work toward decentralization, but that shouldn't be the primary goal, otherwise we won't succeed. First, deliver a novel product offering a new developer/user experience (e.g., Movement combining Move-style verification with Block-STM optimistic parallelization), then consider decentralization.
Otherwise, we're decentralizing for the same small group of users and building "air products" that nobody truly wants or needs. Is Solana the most decentralized? Probably not—but who cares? Clearly, they've done well prioritizing user experience, community, and growth, which brought today's users. Over time, they've gradually decentralized and will be in good shape in the coming months.
Today, developers aren't complaining about lacking economic security or insufficiently decentralized rollups—they're complaining about having no users.
We need to bring L1 principles to Ethereum.
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