Viewpoint: The narrative of encryption has entered the "post-performance era", and excessive optimization of infrastructure performance is meaningless

Author: Cem | Sovereign

Compiled by: DeepTech TechFlow

Recently, the main discussions on Crypto Twitter have focused on improving the performance of the general environment.

Base is achieving the 'Gigagas' goal by utilizing Reth and Ethereum's blob upgrade.

Solana is getting closer to its vision of reaching 1 million TPS (transactions per second) through Firedancer and its C-based networking stack optimizations.

MegaEth completely removes gas limits with a highly optimized sorter.

As a crypto enthusiast, I have nothing to complain about. During the DeFi summer and the bull market of 2021, I paid hefty fees on the Ethereum mainnet, but now I can enjoy low-cost transactions on Solana. And in the future, I will also enjoy cheaper and faster transactions on all of these platforms.

However, since around 2017 when I first entered this industry, I have been obsessed with making cryptographic technology mainstream, and a question has been lingering in my mind recently:

We are rapidly approaching the point of over-optimization.

By the end of 2025, blockchain space will become abundant, and performance will become a commodity. Once near-instant and free transactions become the norm, pure speed will no longer be the key to standing out. As developers, we need to change our mindset.

Post-performance era

We call it the "post-performance era" because the performance battle has been overwhelmingly won. Most platforms can now achieve fast and inexpensive transactions, so differentiation must come from other aspects: unique features and experiences.

This is where full-stack customization comes in handy. It's now 2025, trading is both cheap and fast, but most applications still look and feel the same. At the same time. The market premium derived from another Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has disappeared. Just look at Unichain, it has not been able to attract widespread attention or liquidity:

At the same time, the winner of this round, Hyperliquid, has taken a bold strategy. It built the entire stack from scratch and optimized it for specific use cases. Among the many interesting customizations it introduced, two points stand out in particular:

Priority cancellation and limited order placement only

By enforcing transaction order within the block by type, Hyperliquid protects outdated orders from being easily taken by high-frequency traders. This reduces harmful order flow, making market making easier and increasing liquidity for all traders.

Vault-based copy trading

The Hyperliquid Vault allows anyone to automatically copy the transactions of the vault builder. As the vault logic runs as part of the block creation, there is no need for external maintainers. The Hyperliquidity Vault operates market-making strategies, allowing anyone to provide liquidity and share the resulting profits and losses.

Combining these unique features with high performance, low latency, and seamless user experience, it is not difficult to understand why Hyperliquid has become the preferred derivatives DEX.

The result speaks for itself:

The real bottleneck: virtual machine

One of the main reasons why most applications lack differentiation is virtual machines (VMs). Many of our tools are built around virtual machines (or derived versions of Ethereum and Solana clients), which to some extent hinder customized development.

In recent years, there has even been a trend in the industry to push for all Rollups to achieve full EVM equivalence, allowing them to be based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and run natively. This is really cool for us tech geeks, but is this what the market truly needs?

I don't think so. In fact, the more you can differentiate yourself on those features that truly impact customers, the more likely you are to win the market.

Isn't interoperability the key?

Yes, even in a dedicated blockchain, cross-chain communication is key. Standardized and shared liquidity and messaging tools are still crucial.

That's why open source messaging libraries like @hyperlane and intent-based bridging frameworks like @RelayProtocol are expected to succeed. But developers should have the freedom to fully customize their applications, in addition to being able to integrate these interoperability components on custom chains.

Meet market demand

What the market needs is finely tuned, purpose-built applications that provide a seamless user experience - not just another ordinary EVM derivative. Therefore, build something truly custom and optimized for your use case.

Only in this way can we create applications that truly bring encryption technology into the mainstream.