1/ When it comes to L1s, the crypto community is married to the question of “how decentralized the X chain is”. This is a shallow question to ask. Sharing some thoughts about this and why we are building foundational tools to solve this problem.

Co-Founder - Scale3 Labs (scale3labs.com) | ex-Coinbase

3/ The traditional view is that Decentralization is a function of number of nodes in the network. But any network need “quality” nodes with high uptime and reliability to sustain its decentralization degree.

4/ More the nodes not necessarily mean more decentralization when it can also mean more low quality nodes on the network. This is directly proportional to the overall quality and security of the network.

5/ This is why things like client diversity matter in ETH. We are living in a world where our mobile apps get over the air updates without us realizing. But, the user experience for the consumption of blockchain node software is still in the early days.

6/ Software releases are tagged GitHub releases with build instructions and scripts. Network events are spread across telegram, discord and twitter. Software stability is questionable and monitoring tools are just not available.

7/ As a node runner, I need to be decently technical to run and manage a node myself. Sure alchemy and Infura help if I want to build Dapps without having to worry about my node infra but that doesn’t answer the original question of how to decentralize a network.

8/ The solution to this is building foundational tools for managing node infrastructure in the short term and a feedback loop to push the quality and availability metrics of it to move the needle in the long term.

2/ Different L1s exist to solve different problems. As a result the node software is designed and built very differently from one another with varying degrees of hardware/software requirements. This is why you can run an ETH node on a raspberry pi but Solana requires higher specs