“Base’s success shows the power of user-focused innovation. @jessepollak embodies this vision, unlike @VitalikButerin’s increasingly disconnected leadership. Maybe it’s time for a change in Ethereum. #Base #Ethereum #Leadership”

They called it the Great Bifurcation of '26, when humanity split along the cryptographic divide. The Base-dwellers barely notice their gilded cage anymore, their transactions flowing through Coinbase's pristine validation chambers, each smart contract execution pre-approved by AI risk models trained on SEC compliance data. Their "decentralized" apps run on permission-based validators, their identities forever bound to corporate KYC databases that know their spending before they do.

Tricks with polynomials and Riemann-Roch spaces. Breaking into the platonic realm to pillage forbidden abstractions. Starknet grantee.

Maya watches them from across the cryptographic divide, her consciousness distributed across StarkNet's zero-knowledge proof network, her thoughts encrypted but verifiable, anonymous yet authentic. She runs an autonomous world—one of thousands that bloomed in the sovereign space after the split. Their LLMs train on shared compute networks, each inference proven valid through recursive STARKs, each data point privacy-preserved through lattice-based FHE that would take the Base-corps' quantum computers centuries to crack.

Im partial towards starknet and wanted to include zk stuff in the narrative but honestly any other L2 that isn’t controlled by a bank would do

So starknet is the real stuff privacy eth L2? Not zksync (idk the difference but loved this story)