When decentralization stops growing, you have to look at what’s missing
If you’ve been following crypto for a while, you’ve probably noticed that things look a little uneven these days. Not bad. Not broken. Just… uneven. We get new chains and new layers popping up every month, yet the base that’s supposed to keep all of this “decentralized” doesn’t really look any different from a five or ten years ago.
Everyone kept building on top, but the foundation didn’t grow at the same speed. More networks, more systems, more moving parts, but roughly the same groups of people running them. And nobody seems shocked. It’s just how things settled.
This isn’t some dramatic moment where the industry “failed decentralization.” It’s much simpler. We scaled the parts that were easy to scale, and the rest stayed where they were. Then one day you wake up and realize the gap got pretty big.
If you’ve been looking at validator sets or operator lists of different chains lately, you already know the story. It's not a secret, just tells you where we are right now.
And that’s really why the conversations you see popping up nowadays make sense, people aren’t complaining, they’re just noticing the same imbalance and trying to talk through it.
What people are talking about today
Restaking came in with a clean idea. Reuse what we already have, let more systems tap into it, and save everyone time and money. And honestly, it delivered. A lot of projects wouldn’t have launched as fast without it.
But once the ecosystem started stacking more and more things on top of the same set of validators, the conversations shifted a bit. People are trying to make sense of where this all goes.
You’ll see comments everywhere now. “How many roles can one operator take on before it’s too much?” “If an AVS runs into trouble, does everyone feel it?” “Are we spreading security, or are we just spreading the same validators thinner?” “Is this decentralization, or just a different layout of the same pieces?”
It’s just the usual growing pains you hit when a good idea gets used everywhere at once.Every model, at some point, runs into the edges of what it can do.
A simple observation: validator growth didn’t keep up
If you look at how fast networks have popped up in the last couple of years, it’s honestly impressive. Rollups, new L1s, AVSs, sidechains, “modular” everything, you name it. The industry didn’t slow down on launching things.
But validators didn’t multiply in the same way. Not even close.
Most of these new systems ended up using the same small group of operators. You’ll see the same names, the same teams, the same clusters of infrastructure providers showing up everywhere. It’s not hidden. It’s right there on the dashboards if you bother to scroll through them.
And this creates a weird imbalance. So many new networks… but the base that secures them hasn’t grown at the same pace. Which means you get a lot of different chains that technically look separate, but in practice rely on the same handful of people to keep them alive.
For now, it works. No alarms are going off. But it does mean we’re hitting a practical cap on decentralization. Because you can’t claim a thousand independent networks if most of them lean on the same twenty or thirty operators behind the curtain.
And again, this isn’t anyone’s fault. Running validators on most of the chains is hard. It costs money, needs expertise. And markets naturally push toward whatever is cheapest and most stable. So the ecosystem leans on the people who already know what they’re doing.
It’s just something we need to admit if we want decentralization to actually grow again.
So what’s the alternative?
At this point, you might wonder if there’s another way to look at decentralization. Not to fix the whole industry or rewrite how blockchains work, but simply to approach the problem from a different side. That’s basically what Humanode is doing.
Most networks scale their security by tying it to money or machines. More stake, better hardware, larger operators, or now, restaking the same capital across a bunch of systems. And that’s fine. It works for what those chains are trying to do.
Humanode just doesn’t use that route. We scale through people instead. One person runs one node. That’s the whole idea.
You don’t need to put in more tokens to get more power or delegate your stake. And you don’t have to worry about which whale is going to show up next epoch. It strips out the capital layer and puts the human directly in the seat.
And no, this doesn’t make Humanode some kind of competitor to existing networks. We’re not running the same race. We just ask a different question that hasn’t really been explored at scale:
What happens if decentralization grows with the number of humans, not the amount of capital?
That’s it. A different axis to build on, because the old one seems like it’s already hitting its limits.
Why aim for 10,000 or even 1,000,000 human nodes?
The numbers sound big, but the idea behind them is pretty straightforward. If your validators are actual people, not capital positions, the network spreads out in a very different way. Capital moves fast. It piles up and clusters. A few players can take over large parts of a system without much effort. Humans don’t behave like that.
You can’t buy ten new humans because you want more control, or “delegate” yourself to someone else, or spin up twenty extra identities just because the APY looks good.
Once a node equals a real person, the whole thing starts to flatten out. The power stops bunching up in the same corners. Each validator becomes just one person in the mix, not a leveraged position. And that makes it harder for the network to drift into the usual centralization pattern we see everywhere else.
It doesn’t mean the system becomes perfect. Nothing does. But it pushes the ceiling higher. You get room to grow without everything collapsing back into a handful of operators or whales.
And yeah, reaching ten thousand or a million human nodes isn’t happening overnight. It’s a long road. But decentralization doesn’t magically appear by itself. If you don’t set a target and work toward it, you stay stuck with whatever the market gives you.
Read: True decentralization – Road to 10,000 human nodes
Where this model actually helps (beyond Humanode itself)
This whole “one human, one node” idea isn’t just for the sake of running a blockchain differently. It turns out to be useful in a bunch of places where the usual capital-based setups hit a wall.
Take governance, for example. Most systems say they want community involvement, but in practice, the people with the biggest bags end up steering things. Not because they’re bad actors, but because that’s how the rules are written. If every validator is a unique person, not a pile of tokens, the dynamic shifts. Decisions stop being about who can afford the most votes.
Read: Vortex - Humanode governance body where 1 human = 1 vote
Same story with airdrops. Everyone wants to reward real users, and somehow it still ends up being a race between bot farms and people spinning up twenty wallets. If you tie rewards to actual humans, you don’t have to guess who’s real. The system knows.
Read: Sybil-resistant airdrops
And then you have dApps that just want the basics: one human = one account. They don’t want to run KYC. They don’t want to buy expensive anti-bot services. They don’t want their platform filled with farmed accounts on day one. A human-based layer solves that without turning the whole experience into a paperwork exercise.
Check: Humanode Biomapper powering sybil-resistant dApps
There are also projects that simply don’t want their influence structure tied to capital. They want fair distribution, real users, predictable behavior, and fewer ways for things to get gamed. Human-weighted security gives them that option.
Above all, it is about a fairer financial system. If you think about it, most of the problems in today’s financial systems, both in crypto and outside of it, come from the same place: the people with more capital get more say. More influence. More protection. More access. And everyone else plays catch-up, no matter how “decentralized” the branding sounds.
When you flip the model to one human = one node, the rules change. Not because the technology is magical, but because the power stops following whoever has the deepest pockets. Every validator is just a person. Your influence doesn’t balloon because you bought more tokens, and it doesn’t disappear because someone else did.
It creates a baseline where participation is actually even. If ten thousand people run nodes, you get ten thousand equal voices. If a million people run nodes, same deal. Nobody gets to buy their way into control, and nobody gets quietly pushed out because they can’t keep up with giant staking requirements or hardware costs.
This doesn’t mean the system becomes perfectly fair or solves every economic issue.But it does remove the built-in tilt that makes both traditional finance and most proof-of-stake systems lean toward the wealthy by design. It gives you a network where being present matters more than being rich, and where collective security is literally shared by the people using it.
In a world where financial systems usually reward whoever starts with the most, “one human = one node” is at least a step toward leveling the field. Not perfect or fully utopian. Just fairer than what we have now. And none of this replaces staking or tries to. It just solves a different set of problems, the ones where “more capital” isn’t the answer, and “more humans” actually is.
And no, this doesn’t mean stake-based systems are wrong
Let’s make one thing clear so nothing gets misunderstood. None of this is a dig at stake-based networks. They’re not disappearing. They shouldn’t. Ethereum will keep doing what Ethereum does. Restaking isn’t suddenly going to vanish. Shared security isn’t going anywhere either. These models solve problems Humanode doesn’t even try to touch, and that’s fine.
Humanode isn’t meant to replace any of that. We’re not in the “our way is better” business. It’s just a different way to spread out trust.
Some chains need capital to secure themselves. Others rely on professional validators because that’s what their architecture demands. Some use restaking because it lets them launch faster without building everything from scratch. All perfectly reasonable choices.
Humanode sits next to those models, not above them. It adds one more option, a human-based one.
And honestly, having more than one approach is good for everyone. The ecosystem gets more resilient when different designs coexist instead of forcing everything into one shape. No chain or method is supposed to cover every use case.
The future isn’t a winner-takes-all situation. It’s a mix of systems doing what they’re good at, each filling the gaps the others leave open.
Summing up: if decentralization is going to grow again, it needs new inputs
At this point, most people who follow the space agree on one thing: we’ve taken the current models pretty far. Capital-based decentralization got crypto off the ground. It kept things running for more than a decade. It’s still somewhat doing its job. But it’s also showing the limits of how far it can stretch. If the goal is to push decentralization further, it probably means trying something we haven’t tried at scale yet. Not replacing the old systems or throwing them out, just adding something new into the mix so we aren’t relying on the same inputs forever.
Humanode’s approach is one of those attempts. A different angle. One human, one node, see how far it can go.
Will it solve everything? No.
Could it end up being one piece of a much bigger picture? Definitely yes.
What we do know is that sticking to the same model and expecting more decentralization out of it isn’t working anymore. You can see the ceiling right in front of you. And unless we bring in new ideas, whether it’s human-based validation or something else entirely, that ceiling isn’t moving.
Exploring alternatives is the only way it ever does.
Read more:
What Humanode is about