Everything the Foundation does rolls up to two objectives: 1/ attract the best talent to Solana, 2/ attract capital to Solana. Capital is necessary to attract talent. Talent is necessary to attract capital. Neither stands alone.
"King making" is short sighted and self limiting: it caps how much of either can form.
The other extreme, “credible neutrality”, sounds like high-minded fairness. In practice it’s great for code but comes up short applied to humans, whose express role is to exercise judgment, at risk of fallibility. Aspiring to eliminate the need for taste, judgment, and leadership doesn’t remove human judgment. It pushes it into the shadows.
The principle we operate on is open meritocracy: actively facilitate competition, let the market decide. No one is bigger than the market - for capital, for talent, or for users.
On perps, the ecosystem (and the Foundation) holds many views, argued hard and usually reconciled. Sometimes what surfaces publicly are a subset of voices rather than the settled position.
In actuality, the Foundation has always supported diversity across the perps builder ecosystem. The public perps program and frontier traders are two of the more recent efforts. I don’t think our socials presence has fully represented the actual diversity of support or range of perspectives on perps. (This will change).
The claim that only one team in Solana can build fully on chain perps is just not true. Many have taken on the challenge in recent months.
Perps are very hard to build fully on chain, and fully on chain is more valuable to the future of DeFi (and Solana) than pool trading, off chain execution, or any number of alternative architectures. Dydx first attempted this in 2017. Nearly 10 years on, our industry is still working on it and Solana is very very close.
You can be clear-eyed that not all architectures are equal and still be welcoming to everyone who comes to build here.
Entrepreneurship is a brutal battle. Most attempts fail, for all kinds of reasons. The presence or absence of RTs aren’t high on that list.
Our job is to try to attract the best talent and capital to Solana to compete. The Foundation doesn’t decide who succeeds or fails - the market does.