Ok, for once, it’s time for me to be angry. I am very concerned about people who are “concerned about Ethereum”. When I was building Polygon, at the time, I was very angry about Polygon not being included in the “inner circles of Ethereum”, even though we were doing as much as we could to grow the Ethereum footprint - first by building the Plasma implementation, and then eventually doing Polygon PoS, then the zkEVM and growing Ethereum apps globally. However in retrospect, I get it - Ethereum’s leaders were justifiably concerned about the tendency of people to use their proximity to OGs for personal gain. But today, when people say they are fighting against the inner circles of Ethereum, it irritates me in a completely different way. Times have changed, the ecosystem and industry has gotten far bigger. The “Ethereum inner circle” is still there, but it doesn’t really have the kind of influence it had - which is good for Ethereum and for the industry as a whole. Today, this concern trolling against Ethereum’s inner circle is actually a whole new layer of ecosystem politics, cloaking itself in "concern" for Ethereum's North Star. There is a whole new social engineering game in town. It’s primarily a bunch of VCs and operators and “marketers” who are running the show now because they know that’s the way the game is played. You have this new social layer that talks about Ethereum’s competitiveness vs their investments and advisories, often not fully disclosed, and is extremely “concerned” but is essentially playing the “lawful-evil” game. Some of these “concerned” individuals position barely 1 year old ecosystems as a competitor to Ethereum because comparing their investments to a $450-500bn asset could pump their bags. It’s a sophisticated, subliminal play that most people do not have the time or the attention to understand and repeating the same fiction dozens of times can make it appear like fact. To be clear: This isn't about legitimate competition. Solana, for instance, has built their developer ecosystem, distinctive technology and new applications through two cycles, surviving both unexpected success and a near death experience. That kind of credible competition strengthens both Ethereum and the industry. In fact, the competition from Solana is good for the Ethereum+ ecosystem. To be clear, Ethereum+ is Ethereum and the L2s - regardless of stage and trust assumptions - the Ethereum scaling strategy is via L2s. My main point is about “concerned” folks cleverly spinning 1 year old ecosystems with hardly any apps or users as a legitimate competitor to Ethereum. Celestia for example is a Tendermint chain with stake concentration that resembles a multisig. It is also prone to growth hacking campaigns and creative marketing that claim 50% of the DA market by dumping SVM voting transactions onto the DA. It’s also hard to get excited about teams that sell founder tokens pre launch and pre vesting. Comparing Ethereum to fledgling ecosystems via complex “research flavored” stories is a sophisticated form of "appeal to authority" mixed with narrative manipulation - using the established credibility of Ethereum's vision (the "North Star") as a platform to bootstrap legitimacy for their bags, not that different from “KOLs” shilling charts and tickers on twitter, just more polished and sophisticated. Starting with widely accepted principles about Ethereum's vision, weaving in references to new projects as if they're natural extensions or implementations of that vision. We chose to build Avail because I thought Ethereum’s DAS roadmap was going to take a lot of time. And rollups would need that in 2024, not in the long term. So we built the infra around that. But I am under no delusions to think we are competing with Ethereum today - that takes a few cycles, not a year. I have been silent for a long time because I like to think I am a decent founder and any fights should be over substance. Over the years, I have come to believe that Vitalik, Dankrad, Justin are all researchers and builders of impeccable integrity, driven by vision and conviction rather than commercial gain . But this new concern trolling social layer that is trolling Ethereum now is very different. As someone who has been building in the Ethereum ecosystem since 2017, it's not really possible for me to stay silent on these low quality psyops. Staying silent is not the solution. So I am becoming vocal. Much more vocal. I will call out bullshit when I see it. Also Ethereum is the first modular blockchain and the leading one. It’s also the one that produced the research that has led to the creation of modular ecosystems - and I identify with the Ethereum ethos.