Let’s build open highways, not railroads

In the 1880s, railroad barons didn't just own trains — they owned the only way to move goods across America. Farmers had no choice but to accept whatever rates the railroads charged, often surrendering a substantial share of their crop value in transportation costs.

The railroads didn't compete; they divided territory. They didn't serve everyone; they served those who could pay. The lesson was simple: whoever controls the infrastructure, controls the commerce.

During my time at Mozilla, I watched this same pattern play out on the internet — not with physical rails, but with the browser layer that determined how billions of people experienced the web.

When Firefox launched, Microsoft's Internet Explorer wasn't just dominant — for most people it was the internet. They bundled it with Windows, made their own web standards, and actively worked to make competing browsers unusable.

Firefox eventually captured 30% market share not because we outspent Microsoft — we couldn't — but because we built something better and gave users what they'd lost: real choice. That transparency — the ability for anyone to audit our code and confirm we weren't tracking them, selling their data, or building backdoors — is what real trust looks like in technology.

But even as we won that battle, we watched the open web get carved up anyway. Today, five companies control critical layers: Google owns search, Apple owns mobile, Meta owns social, Amazon owns commerce, Microsoft owns enterprise. Together, they represent over 25% of the S&P 500's total market capitalization.

But blockchain isn't another application layer to be captured. It’s like the internet - blockchain is the infrastructure itself. We often refer to blockchains as payment rails because they operate like a rail network. Allowing private companies to own the financial transmission rails is history repeating itself.

During the fight for net neutrality, internet service providers wanted to control which websites you could reach and how fast they loaded. When ISPs threatened the open web, we understood the danger immediately: Whoever controls the infrastructure, controls the commerce.

It was true for the railroads. It was true for websites. And it's true for money.

When private entities control financial infrastructure, they don't just facilitate transactions — they get to make the rules. They provide preferential pricing to favored entities, they censor content or projects they disagree with, and exert influence within their walled garden. Every additional layer they control means another opportunity to monitor payments, deny access, or trap value — not in the abstract, but as actual money.

Blockchain promised to eliminate these tollbooths, not rebuild them. Yet that's exactly what's happening.

We're not fighting for browser choice anymore. We're fighting to keep what should be open infrastructure from becoming private property.

Let me be clear: I'm not accusing anyone of bad faith. The private companies building blockchain infrastructure are doing exactly what they're designed to do — maximize shareholder value.

But that creates predictable patterns. Coinbase's Base captured 18% of Layer 2 market share within a year by offering developers a seamless experience backed and subsidized by a trusted exchange. JPMorgan's Kinexys has processed over $1.5 trillion by giving institutional clients the compliance and integration they need.

Stripe's "Open Issuance" via Bridge offers genuine convenience: launch a stablecoin with a few lines of code, use integrated custody partners, and tap into existing payment rails. For businesses, it may be an obvious choice. But convenience naturally leads to dependency, and dependency gives way to pricing power. That’s how vertically integrated platforms work.

The question isn't whether these platforms provide value. The question is: what happens when mission-critical financial infrastructure is owned by entities legally obligated to prioritize financial returns?

When Coinbase's Base generates 90% gross margins on sequencer fees, reducing them means leaving money on the table. When JPMorgan's Kinexys serves select clients, expanding access dilutes competitive advantage. These aren't bugs in the system — they are the system.

My concern isn't that these blockchains exist. It's that they could become the default because of incentives or out of convenience — even when open alternatives provide better products that are reliable, accessible, and universally compliant.

Modern permissionless blockchains — with no shareholders to satisfy — can offer protocol-level compliance tools while maintaining the type of open infrastructure that enables competition, which in turn drives innovation, and fosters trust with users.

This structural difference changes everything. When you're not beholden to shareholders, you can make decisions that would be irrational for a public company: keeping fees minimal, maintaining open standards, refusing to privilege certain users over others. That’s why the internet infrastructure has worked so well for decades and is still accepted by everyone.

When the individuals and organizations who support and maintain the network infrastructure can't extract profit from it, you build the ultimate currency: trust.

Here's what extraction looks like in practice: traditional cross-border payment rails cost an average of 6.35% per transaction. On Stellar, the same transaction is nearly free — a fraction of a fraction of a cent.

When private entities control critical financial infrastructure, every design choice reflects their incentives. From wide spreads that obscure true costs, to heavy fees that maximize revenue, to censorship of network transactions. Each incentive positions infrastructure controllers as unavoidable intermediaries.

Fragmentation makes it worse. We're building a world of fragmented blockchains: isolated islands that can't talk to each other. Cross-chain bridge hacks have cost billions in the last decade — largely because there are no standards, no interoperability requirements, no shared security models.

The technology exists to build interoperable, low-cost, open infrastructure. Whether we actually build it depends on us.

The architecture choices we're making now will shape financial infrastructure for decades. We've seen this pattern before — in railroads, telecommunications, and the internet itself. The lesson is always the same: infrastructure works best when it's accessible to everyone, controlled by no one.

And open, permissionless infrastructure has the ability to deliver:

Better outcomes through competition. When developers can build on any network without asking permission, they build where the infrastructure serves their needs best. Networks compete on speed, cost, security, and features — not on lock-in. This is how SMTP made email universal, how TCP/IP made the internet possible, and how open protocols create value that far exceeds what any single company could deliver.

Trust that is grounded in transparency. When infrastructure code is open source, anyone can verify it works as claimed. When governance is distributed, no single entity can change the rules to serve itself. When economics are transparent, fees can't hide extraction.

Interoperability that benefits everyone. When systems are designed to work together, value flows freely. When they're designed as walled gardens, users pay the switching costs. Open standards let people choose tools that work best for them without sacrificing connectivity. This is why you can email anyone regardless of their provider, and why financial infrastructure should work the same way.

Innovation at the edges. The most valuable applications emerge when creators can experiment freely. Open infrastructure lets builders solve local problems with global tools. The developer in Lagos and the startup in São Paulo don't need anyone's permission to create financial services their communities need. This is how new use cases emerge — not from central planning, but from the creativity of thousands of builders solving real problems.

We've made this choice before. The internet succeeded because we chose open protocols over proprietary networks. Now we're at the same crossroads with blockchain.The difference this time is that we can see the pattern coming. We don't have to wait thirty years for legislation. We can build the right architecture now — infrastructure that serves the many, not the few.

The hardest thing to change about infrastructure is infrastructure itself. Not because it's technically difficult — blockchain makes upgrading protocols easier than it's ever been. But because switching costs compound.

There aren’t enough voices making the case that open, permissionless infrastructure is about equal access, meaning everyone shares the same requirements for participation. They pay the same fees, they get the same access and the same level of service. To win they need to innovate and offer better products and services. Not just today, but in perpetuity as scale doesn’t itself yield an infrastructure advantage.

When railroads divided up territories, entire supply chains organized around each of their respective monopolies. When web platforms captured markets, colossal businesses built customer and user dependencies that became impossible to untangle. The longer that fragmented, private infrastructure operates, the more the world shapes itself around it.

We're early enough that the architecture choices we make today still matter. Developers can still choose which networks to build on. Users can still choose which wallets to hold. Companies can still choose which infrastructure to integrate.

But that window doesn't stay open forever. Let's build highways — open to everyone, owned by no one.