The goal was never just to build a fast blockchain. If that were the only goal, we could have been done three and a half years ago by running geth, or erigon, or reth, or solana, with minor changes, on a bigger box, on a few nodes located close to each other. We could have done that quickly, and people might have been excited for a little while. But we would not have really contributed anything, and the hype would quickly fade, and you would already have forgotten about us. Every startup needs a north star, a reason for being. Market sentiment is inherently volatile, but without a reason, faith falters when sentiment wanes. A team and a community can keep moving consistently forward, gaining new strength and experience every day, regardless of the sentiment, if there is a clear raison d'être and a clear plan of attack. For our team, the north star has always been decentralization. Empowering decentralized systems with new architecture that makes the most of every cache line, every SSD IOP and every bit of bandwidth. Existing blockchain systems don't have the performance engineering advancements that characterize modern finance (Nasdaq ITCH, CME Globex, Goldman SecDb). We can change that, and support an ecosystem of ambitious builders who take advantage of these new superpowers. We can change that. Rolling out the last round of features soon, open sourcing the execution client soon, audit contest soon, mainnet soon. The future is indeterminate and incredibly exciting.