The Fat App Thesis: An Inflection Point in Value Accrual - Delphi Digital

Recently the term REV (Real Economic Value) was coined – representing the subset of network activity that directly compensates the protocol for providing security and state maintenance. This includes:

• Base fees collected for transaction inclusion


• MEV tips that pass through to validators or stakers


• Blob/data availability fees in the case of modular ch

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The Fat Protocol Thesis is being eroded in real time. Not by a faster L1, but by a growing recognition that value capture lives where demand is native and immediate, not abstract and structural.

Yes, we’ve scaled via rollups, but one of the few remaining use cases for Ethereum is settlement and DA. If the very few applications that actually accrue any source of value back to Ethereum are forced to leave due to constrained DA capacity, what source of value will Ethereum have left?

I see three different scenarios playing out:

1. L1s begin to optimize for apps, allowing custom orderflow control with the caveat that a small percentage accrues back to that L1. A similar approach to what Unichain and Sorella Labs is enabling.


2. L1s focus on hyperscaling and subsidize infrastructure in order to attract users. Their moat becomes cheap an

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Just as falling compute costs unlocked the internet boom, lower transaction fees will unlock new application categories and use cases. The main comparison here is that general-purpose compute and coordination layers are more akin to AWS or Linux than HTTP. Ethereum and Solana are not simply “settling” transactions, but enabling programmable state c... See more