The Protocol Debate: Five Visions for a Fully Non-Custodial OrcaRail
April 20, 2026 — The non-custodial roadmap we published last week describes one path: smart contracts on each chain, an OrcaRail-run keeper, an OrcaRail-run indexer, and an OrcaRail-run API. It removes custody but keeps us in the middle of almost everything else.
Several readers — rightly — asked: if the goal is to become a protocol, why stop at removing custody? What would the rail look like if OrcaRail could go dark tomorrow and payments kept flowing?
This post is a debate. Five positions argue for five different architectures. A moderator pokes at each. Nobody wins outright, but by the end we are clearer about which trade-offs we are actually making.
