WCA Live records panel shows global speedcubing record wave

The WCA Live records panel looked less like a leaderboard and more like a map of speedcubing’s current surge. At the top sat Jens Haber’s 12.79 continental record in 3x3x3 Blindfolded and Simon Praschl’s 1:01.04 continental record in 4x4x4 Blindfolded, but the real story was the flood of national records underneath them across almost every corner of the official program.

That spread ran deep. The panel listed national records in 3x3x3 Cube for Gabriel Pires Hopffer de Sousa of Cabo Verde and Parist Pariyakanok of Thailand, plus 2x2x2 Cube single and average marks for Ruben Renato Firmino Delgado, Ting Kah Lok and Philippe Mangen. It kept going through 4x4x4 Cube singles and averages for Gergely Novotni, Ivaylo Ivaylov Vichev, Carlo Glod, Diego Denilson Correia da Luz, Martin Vædele Egdal, Harvie Partridge and Yuki Nomura, then pushed on into 5x5, 6x6, 3x3 blindfolded, 3x3 fewest moves, 3x3 one-handed and clock. That is not a normal spike in one event; it is a broad push in depth.

That breadth matters because it shows the gains are coming from different scenes at once, not just from one powerhouse country or one glamorous discipline. The record list included countries as varied as Brunei, Luxembourg, Hungary, Bulgaria, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Japan, Indonesia and South Africa, with national marks landing across continents in the same stretch of competition. For a sport that lives on local opens and tight time limits, that kind of density usually means more serious scrambles access, better coaching, cleaner hardware setups and more cubers entering events with actual depth instead of one-off luck.

Gabriel Pires Hopffer de Sousa is a sharp example of that pattern. His WCA profile shows national records across 3x3x3 Cube, 2x2x2 Cube, 4x4x4 Cube, 3x3x3 One-Handed and Pyraminx, with a current 3x3x3 Cube single of 21.03 and a 3x3x3 One-Handed best of 1:04.99. His 21.03 national-record single came at Cabo Verde Nationals 2026, which is exactly the kind of local event that feeds this larger record wave.

Simon Praschl’s 1:01.04 in 4x4x4 Blindfolded also fits the same pattern. He had already held a European record of 1:06.08 at Blind League Dobřejovice I: Hearthborn 2026, so the latest mark is not a fluke, just the latest step in an already elite progression. WCA Live exists to show that progression in real time, and right now its records panel is doing what a good live feed should do: showing a sport getting deeper, faster and harder to keep up with, all at once.