Solana

But there’s a perception now that all the smartest people are over buying smart contract chains. Smart people know the jig is up. If not now, then soon. The only people buying here are suckers—Uber drivers, Tom Lee, and KOLs who say stuff like “trillions.” And maybe the US Treasury. But not the smart money.

This is bullshit.I don’t believe it, and... See more

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.

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

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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

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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... See more

At the end of the day, continued fiscal deficits will increase US public debts, which requires more liquidity, more monetization and more currency debasement.

Which is good news for holders of scarce assets (equities, RE, gold, BTC, crypto).

In a world where the Fed — and other central banks — are driving 5-7% annual debasement of their currencies, investors need to make more like 10-15% annual returns to outpace this loss in future purchasing power.

Interestingly, Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap is implicitly a gambit in this direction. ETH is sacrificing REV to its L2s rather than capturing it all to itself, in return for spreading the moneyness of ETH the asset. It’s unclear if its L2s will win out, or if they’ll continue to aggressively use and spread ETH in the future, but it’s clearly... See more