Technical Excellence Over Opposition

In discussing the blocksize war "as a one-sided competence trap" Vitalik once wrote:

One side monopolizes all the competent people, but uses its power to push a narrow and biased perspective; the other side correctly recognizes that something is wrong, but engulfs itself in a focus on opposition, failing to develop the technical ability to execute on its own.

I've seen this relatively recently with the discussion over Aquarius Proposition 98, and its related discussion. For posterity, I won't link to the exact specifications. Made briefly, the two sides in the discussion were either for or against migrating AQUA DAO reward tokens to Soroban AMM contracts.

The chat here extended quite a few months of discussion amongst top community members including SDF leadership about the expanding role of the DEX. I sort of recognized quite a while ago that many of my efforts didn't particularly excel in the traditional centralized organizational viewpoint. Namely, extremely ambitious multi-decade work tends to require very extended fundraising labor to attract startup-risk capital.

Thankfully, I've been able to avoid that path by pure sweat and the good fortune of discovering a diverse and responsible community dedicated to an efficient securities trading system. Regardless of material efforts widely dispersed around public forums, I have not had much luck spreading the valiant DRS principles we all came to understand due largely to the failings of the custodial holding system. I feel like I am in the second group highlighted by Vitalik, so deeply troubled by the quandaries of centralized liquidity.

However, I've come to deeply reflect on our positions and my failure to convince even my closest developer equals of the merits behind direct ownership for trading. It seems an endless flood of logical reasoning will not be enough for me alone to show them the drastic need for exclusively canonical implementations of exchange. All this despite the true reality that anyone in the network¹ with experience on Wall Street understands completely the dire importance of free markets.

So I'm leaning in not to pointless opposition, but towards a future where we together act as a driving force in the Network by developing the technical excellence to bring the DEX to all securities. Indeed, I choose to push ahead with the ones who understand the reality, with an undying belief that they can and will convince the rest of them. It sounds a little like religion, but how else do you succinctly convey many thousands of hours of research?²