Ok no, it’s not a death sentence. But it could be. If the wrong decisions are made. If Ethereum tries to compete with Tempo directly it will fail. It’s going to ship faster, be quicker and have better distribution via Stripe’s integrations. So if Ethereum tries to do normie payments and optimise the chain over time for it. Rekt. Tempo will simply make the trade offs and do the centralised regulatory capture games necessary to take payments. If it’s lucky. Tempo itself will also be competing with a plethora of other corpo chains attempting to do the same. Google, other stable slop L1s, VISA, banks, central banks are all gonna have a bash. It’s just a use case not meant for highly decentralised and permissionless architectures. So Ethereum must go the other way. It needs to become the cypherpunk chain. It needs to be programmable money. Bitcoin adjacent. Strong immutability, permissionlessness and ultimately privacy. There will be voices in the Ethereum world that want it to institutionalise. They will want to kill solo validators, go to sub-second slot times, play low latency games and concede to regulator demands. Ethereum simply cannot win on that frontier. It neither has the consensus, nor the bankroll for it. Earlier in the year I gave a talk called FORK OFF at @protocol_berg in which I made the argument that we should think about forking away from the crypto stuff that is less value aligned. Not how I imagined it to happen, but effectively this is what this is. The corpo-institutional technological trajectory is exiting Ethereum and finding its own trade off space to execute in. Good. But, Ethereum must find its own space now. It needs to hit technological vectors that the centralised chains will not. Things like hard privacy tech, decentralised stablecoins, infofinance, DAOs, agentic systems, crowdfunding, permissionless DeFi. And fundamental freedom tools we haven’t even imagined yet. Serious cryptonative cypherpunk technologies. It also has something that tempo will never have. Culture. Ethereum needs to go more subcultural and capture the mindshare of the artists, the revolutionary thinkers, the anti-corporate minded, the disaffected, the academics etc. If it plays it right it will be basically the “Bitcoin but better” asset and without the security budget time-bomb. Optimistically this might be the best thing that ever happens to Ethereum, but it must go its own way to win.