These past two years, I've been pondering a question — it seems our industry has been hijacked by "performance."

Everyone is talking about how the underlying public chains need to be faster and cheaper, almost like a religion. But on second thought, is that really what blockchain needs?

Looking back at the development path over the years, it's quite interesting. During the 2018 public chain wars, everyone was competing on TPS and block times. And what was the result? The damn thing still failed. In this cycle, the focus shifted to Layer 2, another round of performance competition. Now, a new batch of high-performance public chains has emerged again, and it feels like history is repeating itself.

But after all these years, performance has become increasingly crazy — transactions are cheaper, and speeds are faster — so what’s the outcome? The ecosystem isn’t as prosperous as imagined. What does this tell us?

Perhaps the problem isn’t performance itself. Blindly piling up performance metrics is like constantly adding horsepower to a car without considering where it’s headed. We need to think about whether high performance truly addresses user pain points or if it’s just hype.