When mining rigs and validator nodes start eating deeper into budgets, something's gotta give. Pair that with exploit after exploit—legacy protocols showing their age, consumer-grade setups getting rekt—and you're looking at a tipping point. The industry can't keep patching holes in sinking ships forever. Either we see a massive infrastructure overhaul, or projects pivot to lighter, more secure architectures. The writing's on the blockchain: old systems are bleeding money and credibility. Adoption won't scale on vulnerable foundations, no matter how much we romanticize decentralization. Hardware economics and security realities will force the evolution everyone's been talking about but nobody wants to fund.