Devin Baker

Tokens can represent the ownership of anything digital, including money, art, photos, music, text, code, game items, voting power, access, or whatever people come up with next. Using some additional building blocks, they can also represent real-world things, like physical goods, real estate, or dollars in a bank account. Anything that can be... See more

That’s the difference to me between deep tech and Vertical Integrators. A deep tech company designs a product for optimal performance, taking on the risk of unproven science or technology to do so, while a Vertical Integrator designs a system for optimal performance, taking a risk on the combination of proven technologies.

Timing the Liquidity Cycle: Long term 65-month cycle

The financial system's reliance on a "debt-refinancing loop" further highlights this cyclical dependency, where policymakers need to continually expand liquidity to prevent crises. It is a long-term swing in Global Liquidity that has been identified as having a 5-6 year period, specifically... See more

The same logic holds in accounting for operator payments from a token holder’s perspective. Even if the network’s operators are being subsidized in some external way, the payment from a token holder’s perspective is only that which they pay today. It’s important to understand these subsidies though, because they may indeed be unsustainable. For... See more

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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• The asset class pulled forward expectations too far in 2021; since then valuations have been rationalizing and are now reasonable for quality assets


• As the U.S. regulatory environment eases, alignment and value capture issues for tokens are finally turning a corner, making tokens more investible


• Growth across the cryptoeconomy is transitioning from

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As noted, financial markets today serve as giant debt refinancing mechanisms and not as the new capital raising vehicles popular in finance textbooks. Here balance sheet capacity, i.e. liquidity, is what matters, not interest rates. In a World dominated by new investment spending, interest rates serve as the cost of capital, but in a debt... See more

Long assets that perform well in a steepening yield curve environment and stay away from ones that don’t. Cyclical and industrial commodities, energy and financials benefit here, whereas long duration, speculative assets and technology should lag. This approach happens to dovetail nicely with the main street reignition idea as well. Stimulus to the... See more

Fundamentally, I consider ETH to derive most of its value from being a global, permissionless store of value, and while it is engaging to discuss the value accrual story as it relates to scaling of the ecosystem, long-term user and developer growth should take precedent over short-term focus on token mechanics. The rollup-centric roadmap makes a... See more