How I almost took down Arbitrum - and how it radicalized me 🧵

Back in 2023, Arbitrum was a FIFO chain and had no priority gas ordering With its centralized sequencer, Arbitrum was indistinguishable from a centralized exchange

At broadcast time, the sequencer randomized the order of its WebSocket connections from full nodes before broadcasting blocks This meant that with just 1 WebSocket connection, you'd never get blocks consistently fast But what would happen if you opened many?

Eventually we reached 10,000 connections each, and this was when Arbitrum started to notice The sequencer started to slow to a halt trying to service all of these connections while also building blocks

Decentralization doesn't matter until it does