Last week I flew out to San Francisco. It was my second time in the city, but this time I wasn’t on vacation. Interestingly, I’ve never really experienced jet lag flying west (NYC to SF), and I think it has something to do with the longer day building up sleep pressure. By the time evening rolls around, I’m more than ready to crash, and I end up syncing with the local time pretty quickly.

It got me thinking. If you're working on a distributed team across multiple time zones (PDT, EST, GMT), there might actually be an advantage to working from the West Coast.

If you can handle the early mornings and your teammates aren’t working too late, you land in this sweet spot:

• you overlap with both East Coast and European hours
• finish your workday earlier
• and still have a decent buffer in the evening if you need work more.

Additionally, I think being on the West Coast can subtly encourage longer working hours. I can only speak for myself, but this week I've already clocked three 12-hour days and it’s only Wednesday (not sustainable).

But it made me wonder if this is part of what fuels West Coast productivity, especially in tech. With earlier start times to sync with the East Coast and Europe, and a built-in buffer in the evening, it’s easy to let the day stretch. You don’t always notice how long you’re working until you look up and realize the sun’s gone down.

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Blaine, where's the crypto content?

Honestly, I haven’t had the time to dig into all the crypto topics I wanted to cover this week. Instead, I’ve been super busy. We’ve been pushing hard at OP Labs to ship our new interoperability feature for OP Stack chains. I’ve definitely been burning the midnight oil, but I think it’ll be worth it once the world get use what we've built.

This week, I worked on a new feature that allows our teams to parallelize writing upgrade tasks: (see my code here: Stacked simulations).

The idea is simple: you no longer need to wait for one upgrade to reach mainnet before writing the next one. We make the state of the previous upgrade available to the next in the simulation pipeline, so it behaves just as it would on mainnet. This removes bottlenecks and gives our teams at OP Labs a smoother developer experience and a meaningful productivity boost.