Scaling sets the ceiling on what a network can serve. How many users, agents, and transactions it can absorb before performance degrades, and whether it reaches that ceiling by centralizing (raising hardware requirements) or decentralizing (adding shards, stripping state out of validation). That choice compounds over time. A chain that scales horizontally and statelessly can grow capacity without pricing out its validators, which is the precondition for consumer and agent-scale volume. Get it wrong, and every application built on top inherits a hard limit. Get it right, and the base layer stops being the bottleneck. Four chains, four scaling bets. And the roadmaps are converging on the same destination: sub-second finality, parallel execution, statelessness, post-quantum security are on all four forward plans. The difference is what's already running.(NEAR Protocol)