I realized that I don't know what "global price discovery at the speed of light" actually means. As I understand it, the thesis is that if there's a trading venue operated by a globally decentralized validator set, then anytime there's an event anywhere in the world, a trade can be included by the nearest block producer and propagated to the rest of the network for price formation. Nodes located in Djibouti don't have a disadvantage vs nodes located in NYC or London (for trading on information that originated in Djibouti). By contrast, venues like NASDAQ, Binance, Coinbase, Hyperliquid operate in a single geographic location. Traders who are colocated with these venues or who can get information to these venues more quickly have an advantage. Note that trading venues that are not globally decentralized can operate at much lower latency, which improves liquidity, compresses spreads, etc. The claim is that global price discovery at the speed of light will be better than NASDAQ, because someone who sees a critical event happen in Singapore can immediately trade on that information before the light cone even reaches NYC. Ok. There's an immediate problem, which is that decentralized NASDAQ will underperform NASDAQ on all information that originates near NYC, because NASDAQ's matching engine operates at much lower latency. Financial activity tends to be localized around financial hubs, so decentralized NASDAQ will underperform in the average case. But I'm not sure that I understand the microstructure. Let's say that an event happens in Taiwan that affects NVDA. I submit a trade to the Taiwanese block producer and this trade is propagated through the rest of the network. It seems like the same problem exists in both decentralized and centralized NASDAQ. Market makers are providing liquidity for NVDA globally, in NYC, London, by submitting trades to local block producers. As a taker/aggressor, if I can be the fastest to get information from Taiwan to these block producers, I can pick off those orders and make money at market makers' expense. Depending on the ordering in MCP, my trades might end up being placed higher in the block than those from the block producer in Taiwan. This seems like the same case as if I'm fastest in getting information from Taiwan to NASDAQ in NJ: I'll make money. But given that decentralized NASDAQ is at a disadvantage in how quickly it can match orders, it's hard for me to see how it's not strictly worse from a liquidity and execution standpoint. Even with dedicated fiber networks like doublezero, I'd imagine that professionalized HFT firms will either take priority for themselves on lines that they lease to decentralized protocols, or they'll outbid protocols for priority on information that they can profitably exploit. The actors with the strongest incentive to be fast should be fastest in propagating information. Of course, there are benefits to decentralization: permissionless access, liveness, censorship-resistance, different mechanism design, etc. But it seems like "global price discovery at the speed of light" already exists. Traders compete to be the first to communicate information from where it originates to a trading venue...at (almost) the speed of light.