Wouldn’t this be true for other sharded blockchains as well? Clearly, #Near doesn’t have the most decentralized set of validators.

#eCash is a fork of #BCH and led by the dev team who created #BCH. It’s probably going to be a while until we see smart contracts on eCash. So far the #Avalanche protocol is used to enable 1 block finality and soon it will enable sub-3 seconds finality. It will be #Bitcoin on steroids from a technical standpoint.