Nitro runs locally; the harder comparisons remain

Over the weekend, the studio's chain research group had just ruled out building its own L1, while the remaining technologies were still being compared on paper. A-Zhen was responsible for bringing one of those approaches into a local environment so the team could work with it directly.

She got the first local Nitro test node running. Instead of treating that step as a technology decision, she asked a teammate to repeat it using her setup notes. Someone pointed out that bringing a node up might be easier than debugging it later, so A-Zhen added that concern to the next round of checks.

Nitro had moved from a name in the research notes to a local example the team could examine. A working node showed that they could get started, but it did not answer questions about the costs, throughput, or maintenance a game would require. A-Zhen planned to prepare conditions for a fairer comparison.