Why Blockchain Needs Speed: The Last Mile Problem

Heard an interesting take last week: "Crypto doesn't need faster chains."

The speaker's logic? DeFi works fine on Ethereum. Solana's already fast enough for degens. Everything else is just engineers solving problems nobody has.

This is exactly how industries die—when "good enough" becomes the ceiling instead of the floor.

Remember when 56k modems were "fast enough" for the internet? When flip phones were "good enough" for mobile? The builders who accepted those limits aren't names you remember.

Here's what the "performance doesn't matter" crowd misses: We're still at the fax machine stage of blockchain.

Sure, faxes worked. They sent documents. Job done. But accepting fax machines as the endpoint would have killed email, cloud storage, and everything that followed.

The YouTube parallel hits different when you understand it. YouTube didn't succeed because someone optimized video compression by 2%. It succeeded because multiple technologies converged—broadband, Flash, cheap storage—until the friction disappeared completely.

That convergence moment? That's what real-time blockchain enables.

Think about what "last mile" actually means. It's not the technology—it's the touch point where technology becomes invisible.

• DoorDash isn't logistics software. It's dinner appearing at your door. • Alipay isn't payment rails. It's buying groceries with your face. • ChatGPT isn't an LLM. It's having a conversation with intelligence.

In blockchain, we've built the highways but forgotten the driveways. We have the infrastructure but not the last inch that makes it human.

Real-time blockchain isn't about shaving milliseconds. It's about crossing the threshold where the technology disappears and only the experience remains.

The builders get this. The "good enough" crowd never will.