Parallels/sharding has been a hot topic again recently, but I really can't just focus on the narrative now… To be honest, I’ll start by asking two questions: where to put the assets, and can they be withdrawn. Running through the interaction path—permissions, upgrades, cross-chain bridges, emergency switches—these are more decisive for whether you can sleep well at night than “throughput.”

The recent NFT royalty debate also resembles a lot: on one side saying they want to protect creators, on the other complaining about the lack of liquidity in secondary markets. Either stance is fine, but for someone like me, a cynic, it ultimately comes down to whether the “sell-out channel gets blocked” or whether the market is willing to take over.

I used to say “I only look at on-chain data,” but I later realized that my own stubbornness can also be a trap: no matter how detailed the on-chain data, if emotions collapse, a stampede still happens. Now I think I’ll walk on two legs—first to survive, and if I can exit, then I’ll talk about stories.