Blockchains are cities

NEAR is San Francisco — built for web3 techies who believe sharding is the only way forward towards scalability in the long-term.

Networks are the wrong analogy for blockchains. Smart contract chains are more like cities.

The future will be multichain.

Avalanche is Chicago: trying to be the next Wall Street, but newer, cheaper, more aggressive. It specializes in finance and trading. 

Application-specific blockchains will remain niche.In the physical world, transportation accounts for almost half the GDP of housing. If we see anything like that in crypto, cross-chain bridges will become extremely valuable.

Ethereum will probably be the most valuable chain because that’s where the money is.

L2s matter — skyscraper technology is essential to scaling any city — but they are not the end of the story. L2s are an “and”, not an “or”.

Solana is LA. It’s big and sprawling and cheap. It is less decentralized. But some applications like games and NFTs do not need very high level of decentralization.

Ethereum is New York City; it is a happening place with the biggest DeFi protocols, the most TVL, the hottest DAOs and NFTs, but it is expensive. You scale by "building up skyscrapers" using L2 chain or "building out satellite towns" using interoperability networks that serve as highway connecting them.

Other L1s will be valuable too. But they will continue to differentiate. NYC, LA, Chicago, and Houston are enduring cities because their institutions and cultures are different from each other.