This is the most bullish thing for Ethereum. The recent wave of big fintechs (Stripe, Circle) launching their own L1s isn’t a sign that the L2 thesis is dead. It’s the clearest signal yet that the world is splitting into two camps: Infinite censorship resistance /or/ Zero censorship resistance. And in that split, Ethereum owns one of the poles. People imagine censorship resistance as a sliding scale, where you can park yourself somewhere in the middle and get “just enough” decentralization. But in practice, the middle collapses. The moment a chain can censor at all, it becomes impossible to distinguish between “some censorship” and “total censorship.” Users, regulators, and counterparties treat it as fully centralized. That collapse forces builders to choose. If you need your system to be unstoppable, you choose the infinite censorship-resistant option: Ethereum and its rollups. If you don’t, you might as well go fully permissioned, because the regulatory, operational, and commercial advantages of centralization only pay off when you stop pretending to be decentralized. This is why the middle (Aptos, Sui, Avalanche) will be squeezed to zero. They’ll try to buy relevance with incentives and partnerships, but they’re competing in a no-man’s-land where neither the censorship-resistant camp nor the permissioned camp takes them seriously. History is littered with these failed hybrids — the AOLs of the open internet, the proprietary “almost Unix” systems of the 80s, the closed “sort-of open” software ecosystems that vanished when real open source and fully closed platforms took the market. The bifurcation is already here.