Here's a blunt observation: Many times, on-chain users verbally complain about the lack of decentralization, but what they actually want is centralization.
Especially for on-chain wealth management users, their interaction with the on-chain infrastructure is very long (including the entire time they deposit money). What they care about is the safety of their money, not the narrative of decentralization.
Hyperliquid's performance clearly took off precisely after Jellyjelly was shut down.
Last year's Sui security incident saw no one in the ecosystem disagreeing with freezing stolen assets at the chain level.
Regarding Drift, if it were a centralized exchange with distributed servers like Hyperliquid, the outcome might have been very different.
There's nothing wrong with this, because you're serving users, not narratives. Show wealth management users your determination to protect their assets even if it means shutting down the network; only then will they follow you.
However, the situation is different for projects in lower-tier markets: the biggest risk for users isn't theft, but the struggle with the project team. Therefore, the new generation of platforms almost all follow the proven path of clean contracts and true "decentralization." Improving security is the right thing to do; the question is how to improve it, which requires understanding the context.
