Seeing parallel sharding being brought up and hyped again these past few days is honestly a bit annoying. The technology is cool, but the liquidity fragmentation problem isn’t something that can be solved in just a day or two. The more the pools get split into smaller slices, the more arbitrage opportunities you see on paper—until you actually want to act, and then you’re really thinking about two things: asset safety and whether the exit path is smooth.

In the group these days, people keep circulating screenshots of stablecoin depegs, reposting and reposting the announcements about reserve audits. Once the emotions kick in, everyone gets panicked. As for me, I’d rather—no matter how much people argue—focus on the actual on-chain reserve ratios and the liquidity of the pools I hold. Anyway, for someone like me, a small retail trader, I’ll first make sure the water in my little fish tank doesn’t leak away, then figure out how to catch the bubbles.

To put it plainly, no matter how lively the narrative is, in the end it still comes back to the pool itself—funding pool, trust pool. Don’t just obsess over sharding and forget whether the fish in the pool are still there.