Preface · I Built a 30,000 TPS Chain. It Did Not Win.
If you are a technical founder who believes “build the best product and users will come,” this preface is for you. I believed that twice: once about twenty years ago in early cross-border B2B e-commerce, where I served as CTO, and again about eight years ago when I founded and led HPB, a hardware-and-software public chain. We built a hardware acceleration engine and pushed signature verification to roughly 30,000 TPS with a team of more than one hundred. That was my founder’s account, not an external audit claim. By the standards of the time, the performance was not weak.
And then the chain did not win. It faded.
I am not telling this as a trophy story. I am telling it because the lesson was expensive.
The Most Expensive Lesson
The chain taught me one sentence:
Performance is the entry ticket. Distribution is the moat.
Technology answers “can it work?” Distribution answers “who makes anyone use it?” They are different species.
We put almost everything into being faster: higher TPS, deeper hardware acceleration, a more ambitious technical stack. I put nearly all the money I had made in the previous cycle, plus a large position in BTC and ETH worth tens of millions of dollars, into R&D, ecosystem building, and global marketing. The technology was respectable. It did not buy us a reason for users to switch.
Users do not leave what they already use because you are ten times faster. Migration costs, default entry points, liquidity, and ecosystem inertia matter more than any benchmark.
Eight Years Later, the Same Rule Showed Up Again
Stablecoins replayed the lesson in cleaner numbers.
USDT did not win because it had the most advanced technology. It won because it became the default settlement currency for exchanges, cross-border flows, and OTC desks. Distribution hardened. Circle gives the opposite lesson. It has strong technology and compliance, yet it has to buy distribution with a large share of reserve income. In Q1 2026, Coinbase-related distribution costs alone were $330.6M, roughly six times Circle’s own continuing-operations GAAP net income of $55.2M.
Same business, different ownership of distribution. Whoever owns distribution takes the profit.
Three Rules Bought by a Chain That Did Not Win
- Technical lead is only an entry ticket. It lets you sit at the table. It does not make you win.
- Think about distribution on day one. Who owns the user? Who is the default entry point? Are you renting distribution or owning it?
- Business model beats white paper. A design that earns cash and keeps the profit is more valuable than a higher TPS number.
Why Stablecoins Are Worth a Book
I write about crypto finance not because I won this game, but because I lost enough to tell product-market fit from narrative. Mainstream fiat-backed stablecoins were the first thing I saw in crypto where distribution and real cash flow existed at the same time. They do not depend on the next buyer paying more. They depend on reserve spread and real settlement demand.
That is a real business. That is why this book exists.