2024 was in many ways the centralization cycle. Decentralized primitives lost out to centralized apps across the board.

Ethereum decentralization -> L2 multisigs

Uniswap immutability -> Jupiter frontends

Seaport programmability -> Ordinals offchain orders

Metam*sk selfcustody -> Privy app wallets

dYdX cosmos chain -> Hyperliquid validator

The one beautiful exception to this? LayerZero

- immutable protocol with flexible DVNs

- clear tokenholder governance and rights

- dominating marketshare across bridges

- sovereign universal token standard for OFTs

- opensourcing better L1 tech than any 11-figure chain

In the past few months alone, they've shipped:

- QMDB, a better blockchain database which gives you 2.3 million state updates per second

- FAFO, a transaction parallelization approach handling storage read/write conflicts that can process 1.1 million transactions per second

- vApps, an architecture to fit any Rust application into a universal onchain proof framework

Back in 2021 I would joke that the corollary to the blockchain trilemma was the bridge trilemma: if we have at least 3 live crosschain bridges, one of them is about to get hacked. Ronin (625m), Poly (610m), Binance (570m), Wormhole (325m), Nomad (190m), Harmony (100m), Multichain (125m) - all eviscerated user capital.

We don't worry about that any more.

It's so rare to see the team with the best cryptonative ethos also dominate on both tech and distribution. Kudos to @LayerZero_Core for all the quality opensource shipping