If you’ve been in crypto long enough, you’re likely familiar with the “ETH-killer” meme – alt L1s claiming to overtake Ethereum as the market-dominant L1, only to fail miserably.
The irony is that indeed, no alt-L1 has come close to replicating the same network-effects as Ethereum – except maybe Solana; but that, Ethereum has in fact dug its own grave consequent of its own design. You see, as applications continue to grow, so does their demand for blockspace – and this is something that the EF is failing to recognize.
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?
There is a recursive theme that’s inherent in the value cycle of a successful protocol layer which hinges on the apps. In fact, this was one of the many ideas that gave merit to the fat protocol thesis – value would flow upstream from apps to the protocol layer.
But a chain is only as valuable as the sum total of the apps built on it.
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