People misunderstand Ethereum's rollup strategy. The killer feature isn’t TPS, it’s latency game resistance. Resistance to: - Maximum extractable value - High frequency trading (HFT) - Cartels and corruption Play the HFT game, lose your soul. There’s constant pressure on any trading chain to slash latency. Faster blocks, better UX. So they keep pushing it down: L1s: Solana – 400ms Monad – 400ms Hyperliquid – 70ms L2s: Arbitrum – 250ms zkSync – 200ms MegaETH – 10ms Then there’s Ethereum: Ethereum – 12,000ms. It might one day do 2,000–6,000ms, but it will *always* be slower than the instant block-rate chains. That’s by design. Why does this matter? Because low latency makes MEV cartels. This is how long it takes a packet to cross an ocean in practice: 80–200ms – data centers 150–400ms – home setups If your block time is in the low hundreds of ms, only co-located data-center nodes see the flow in time. They get the orderflow. They get the MEV. They get the power. Being in Amsterdam / Frankfurt / major hubs gives a material edge. Being in the same rack as everyone else? Even better. Relentless market pressure to co-locate. To go even lower, you don’t use the public internet. You use private dark fiber. DoubleZero. TradFi tools. This doesn’t create global fairness. It creates colo races, MEV cartels, self-dealing and extraction. Slowly, then all at once. Corruption is cancer. A bad cell that keeps replicating until it kills the body unless the immune system stops it. Centralization turns off the immune system. That’s why L2s are brilliant. Ethereum knew HFT games were inevitable. So instead of playing the game on L1, it contains the game on L2s. Arbitrum can crank block times below 100ms. MegaETH can run at 10ms. Sequencers can co-lo max and play HFT harder than any L1. But they’re still kept in check. They can’t steal user funds or permanently censor them because there’s always an exit to Ethereum L1. L2s are fenced by thousands of decentralized validators, globally distributed, many running from homes, settling at a calm 12,000ms heartbeat. L2s can centralize sequencing and play the speed game. Ethereum can remain decentralized and incorruptible. Decentralization is corruption-resistance tech. It’s an immune system against theft, censorship, inflation, and extraction by self-dealing elites and powerful cartels. Exactly what the global financial system lacks. Ethereum = incorruptible world ledger ETH = incorruptible world reserve asset
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