Ethereum’s Survival Strategy: Scaling L1, Killing L2s, and Betting on Memecoins?
Can it reclaim dominance in a world ruled by memecoins and faster chains?
Up next
All episodesCan Story Protocol Tokenize the $70 Trillion IP Market? | Jason Zhao
Ethereum’s Biggest Mistake (and How to Fix It) | Sam Kazemian
Crypto's New Normal: Cycles Broken, Memes in Power, and the Cost of Going Mainstream
66% of Wall Street is Already in DeFi | Paradigm’s 2025 Survey with Dan Robinson & Justin Slaughter
Ethereum at the Crossroads: Why Layer 1 is Back in Focus
Ethereum’s Strategic Pivot: The Plan to Restore Dominance | Ansgar, Dankrad & Mike Ippolito
Ethereum’s Strategic Reboot: Why Layer 1 is Back in Style?
This Changes Everything: ChatGPT's Memory Update Just Blew Our Minds
Inside the episode
Ethereum is entering its "grow-up or die" era. After years of drifting in a sea of Layer 2s, Ethereum is pivoting back to its Layer 1 roots—an intentional move that could either restore the network's dominance or further fragment its ecosystem.
In the latest Bankless roundtable, David Hoffman sits down with Jon Charbonneau, Bread, and Andy8052 to unpack Ethereum’s strategy shift, why long-tail L2s are being abandoned, and what on-chain culture looks like in a world ruled by meme coins and perpetual Degen energy.
The Layer 1 Renaissance
Ethereum’s new tagline—“Scale the L1. Scale blobs. Improve UX.”—is more than a catchy slogan. It’s a cultural signal. As Jon Charbonneau points out, it’s a clear prioritization of Layer 1 scaling over Layer 2 dreams. The Ethereum Foundation is no longer content being just the base layer for others to innovate on; it wants to reclaim DeFi activity and value flow directly on mainnet.
This has consequences. The long tail of L2s—the clones with no meaningful differentiation—are now on notice. As Bread puts it, “Some of these teams are going to have to shut down… you're going to die off if you weren’t meaningfully different from mainnet.” The survival filter is sharpening.
Even Andy, ever the fun-maxi, shrugs: if L1 scaling kills your L2, your L2 was probably already dead.
ETH’s Identity Crisis
But it’s not just about infrastructure. The group explores a deeper identity crisis around ETH the asset. Is ETH money? Is it digital oil? Should it be the center of value accrual or just the utility token for a great tech stack?
Bread argues ETH needs to earn the right to be money by being useful and fee-generating first—then we can tell the “blue money cult” story. Jon counters that winning on tech and usage is the only way to even have a shot at ETH becoming sovereign money. Trying to beat Bitcoin with an economics-based narrative is a losing game.
David aptly sums it up as a “Rorschach test”—everyone projects onto ETH what they want it to be, depending on their bias.
The Meme Coin Canon
The discussion shifts to culture—and culture right now is memecoins. Solana, Pump.fun, snipers, shitter tokens, degens who don’t sleep. Andy, once an Ethereum loyalist, now runs most of his activity through Solana. Why? Because it’s where the fun is. And fun equals demand.
As Bread puts it: “You buy ETH on Base because you want to ape 10k into a shitter protocol. That’s demand. That’s moneyness.”
ETH once held this spot—during ICOs, DeFi, NFTs. But it ceded cultural momentum. And it’s unclear if it can win it back without radically improving its UX and infrastructure for on-chain degen activity.
Hype’s EVM Gambit
HyperLiquid’s attempt to bolt an EVM onto its perps platform is also dissected. It’s not performant yet—just 1/30th of Base’s throughput—but its tight integration with a thriving exchange and a war chest of tokens to incentivize users could make it a real contender.
Still, Jon is skeptical: “It’s tough to build a general purpose EVM chain that’s truly differentiated right now.”
The Gorilla in the Arena
The episode ends with the now-viral hypothetical: can 100 men beat one gorilla? The crew gamifies the problem (coordination, willingness to die, vision teams), ultimately concluding that yes, humans win—if they accept casualties.
It’s a cheeky analogy, but the metaphor holds for Ethereum. To survive, the chain must stop being afraid to take risks, make hard calls, and face down existential threats with intent.
Final Thoughts
Ethereum’s return to Layer 1 is not just technical. It’s philosophical. It’s cultural. It’s existential. It’s trying to reclaim its role—not just as a settlement layer, but as the center of on-chain life.
Will ETH become the reserve asset again? Or will it fade into commoditized irrelevance as users chase fun and frictionless UX elsewhere?
As always in crypto: the builders build, the memers meme, and the markets will decide.
Transcript
Welcome Bankless Nation to a differently styled podcast on the Bankless Feed. I want to welcome three guests onto this podcast as we discuss, deliberate, debate, and dissect the topics that we all find interesting. First up, some people are wary of society's trend towards gambling and financialization. But where some see moral hazard, this man sees opportunity. By day, he's on the couch scrolling crypto Twitter, and by night, well, he's still there. the only person on crypto Twitter actually having any fun. Andy 8052, it's good to see you. Happy to be here. Thanks for
having me. Also, sometimes on the day I am playing golf. That that is He sometimes plays golf. He sometimes plays golf. Bringing up the middle. If you haven't seen his ass, you're not in the right circles. The person that did the impossible somehow not having a single hater on Twitter. The pinkcoated educator with glutenous glutes. The mega ass of Mega ETH. ZeroX bread guy. Welcome back. Thanks for having me. that intro. I actually thought you were going to go to John and I just had missed his ass picture. So, you know, maybe sometime in the future. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're the only one with an ass on Twitter right now. And then bringing up
the rear, the crypto's chief lowercase R researcher, the man who will write a 90page research paper over the weekend because it was fun. We've all read his long AF research papers only to conclude that nothing's real and we should all buy Bitcoin. John Charbano, how you doing? Great to be back on. How's it going? Pretty excited for this episode, guys. So, the topics that we've got lined up for this week, the Ethereum pivot has a tagline, but what about ETH? Is ETH coming along for that? We want to talk about the death of Longtail layer 2s. We're going to talk about a little bit of what Andy's doing in the trenches. And then we're going to finish
off with one gorilla versus 100 men, a crucial question to this era of crypto Twitter. And I think actually this is just gone out onto the internet broadly. Uh first off, uh honored to have you guys here. Uh I think everyone has been a podcaster in of their own right separately. and bring in these uh three podcasts to the table just to kind of go through uh the weekly the weekly meta. Uh so let's start here. I'm going to start sharing my screen to a tweet that HB tweeted out which uh coincidentally was something that my partner Ryan Sean Adams also identified when we uh talked
to the two recent executive directors co-eds of the EF. This idea of the Ethereum pivot tagline, the tagline for the Ethereum pivot, scale the layer one, scale blobs, improve UX. Three easy to remember ideas. Seems like it lands a punch. Uh and then H finishes off with his tweet here. If they can pull this off and buy back some credibility. This may be the beginning of the ETH revival. Let's see. Now, I think this uh topic was the uh the subject between um John and Brett and I last week when Andy, you were a bit sick. Missed you having you
back then. Uh, so maybe we can just pick off where that episode left. Uh, John, I'll throw throw this one to you. How do you feel about this tagline for ETH? On the scale of possible taglines, how do you feel about this one? I love it. I mean, I I'll give it a 10 out of 10. Um, and and I do agree with Steve's tweet there. Like, if they can pull this off um and actually get back credibility on this, like this would be a meaningful turn for me both for Ethereum and for ETH as the asset like most likely to me. Uh the the one thing that I saw like as interesting on it too is I don't know if I'm reading too much into this, but the
ordering of it was it was scale the L1 before scale blobs, which was just an interesting note. Um and that like that is a nuance that I'm sure a lot of people would fight over if that like actually is the listed priorities. Um I that that would actually be my preference is actually to focus more on scaling the layer one. Um but that was one of the things that I picked off as like really liking in there. Um and then throwing in the improve UX is yeah like obviously Ethereum should be doing more of that. It's great. Some people miss the blobs entirely, right? Like I I saw ox ngmi famously the creator of DeFi llama. He's like so this
is rugging the rollup road map, right? Like he like they missed that nuance of saying that uh yeah like that goes towards like no one on the L1 uses blobs, right? The the blobs are stored in the consensus layer. You literally can't even submit a transaction that utilizes blobs on mainet with a wallet cuz the wallets don't support it. So like it's it's not a an L1 user thing. It cannot be an L1 user thing today. Uh so that is explicitly for for roll-ups. I personally think it should be dep prioritized, but I think it's good to have some directional stuff there for for L2s. I don't I just I just don't see it as like a a great value accreative
thing, but it's good to have that signal there for for everyone. Yeah. And some people were responding to that tweet from Zerox NGMI saying, "Look, Ethereum detractors, Ethereum haters will find a way to always just be negative about Ethereum." It's like, oh, like we're going to scale blobs, but even the Ethereum haters will find a way to say like, oh, now now Ethereum is doing the thing that everyone asked it to, but now it's also rugging layer 2s. And so there's some frustration out of the Ethereum community saying like there's no way to win. There's no way to win here. There's never any way to win in crypto. Isn't he a neat guy? Like he's
got a zero X at the start of his name. Yeah, I think so does Mert though. That's fair. Yeah, I feel like the DeFi Llama guys kind of uh they fairly will talk [ __ ] about anything which I I respect. Yeah, they're pretty neutral. Yeah. Yeah. But like I think it's worth talking about because like you know you mentioned the long tale of L2s and how that might actually look, right? Like that was the when we say this move to
scale the L1 like that is kind of rugging the L2s because like yeah you're going to take you're going to take users away from some L2s right you're going to be the place to go to for highv value DeFi you know it's going to be uh habitable for for some applications and we talked about that it's like yeah like like some of those L2s probably shouldn't exist right like that's actually going to happen if if you weren't meaningfully different from mainet it's like tough cookie right you're like you're probably going to die And Ethereum will acrew more value because of that, right? Because it actually has direct users interacting on the thing. Acrewing fees, you know, we
don't like to value things based on fees, but like you're going to need that if you're going to try to to be a smart contract platform. I I believe that like even for the SCOP component of it. Um so yeah, like this probably is going to lead to some L2s uh withering from the vine, but it's necessary. I actually did some numbers today and saw that there's several L2s, I think four right now, that are all actually at a net loss purely on onchain profit. So like the the cost it takes to post down to L1 uh versus how much they're generating in fees from user activity, they're
negative. Tao's all the way down to 5 million in the negative, right? So it's like uh that's a crazy figure, right? And it's like some of these teams are going to have to shut down at some point if they lose even more activity to to a stronger mainet. Yeah. I mean the my feeling on it is like if mainet doing this means you have to shut down you were going to have to shut down anyways and this is just like accelerating that process like probably your L2 is dead regardless and so like yeah I guess it sucks but it's not their fault. Yeah. I
think as soon as there became like some mania about launching layer 2s there there became this like thing where like oh what do we do next? Let's launch a layer 2. as soon as that like meta happened, this outcome was also destined to happen because if you were just launching a layer 2 because that's what is in the meta, that means you're not launching, you're not launching it for a real purpose. You're doing it just for to like pump the token. And so as soon as that meta set in then there was ultimately going to be like a reckoning for layer 2s because we just had too many layer 2 hit the market. Y the thing
that I haven't seen, have you guys seen this at all of has anyone from a major L2 that is undoubtedly successful and like you feel pretty good that they're going to have a spot even with ETH L1 scaling? I haven't seen like anyone important from those types of places coming out and saying, "Hey, like we really don't like this that you're competing with us." Like I I haven't seen any of that. And that like that's kind of the test to me is like the people who should feel secure, they all seem fine with it. Like yeah, if you're the last L2 and you can't get users, you like should shut down probably. Alex from ZK Sync has been pounding the drum.
I saw uh my tweet that said like, "Yeah, like you were going to die, you're going to die anyways." Like I got a like from Jesse on that. So, he kind of he kind of was signaling some of that. Um yeah, I I would say anyone that's that's firmly in the like we're trying something new, novel, different camp has been in favor of it. The question is like I know like we had talked last week that you know the the vision for Ethereum was like okay you're going to have a thousand million jillion L2s. Um what do you still see that future if Ethereum is trying to take a more dominant position
within the ecosystem and actually own some use cases? Do you still think hey we're going to get enough of these L2s that come out that actually will acrue value in the same way or we expect more direct uh value because a portion of that the longtail is actually just going to live on L1. I know I asked this question to um Andrew from conduit uh and also Georgios about like hey how many L2s do you think that they are there there will be in the future and their answer was there will be an amount of layer 2s that correlates to the demand for compute um and I think there is uh and like the idea is you could
spin up an ephemeral layer 2 a layer 2 that you know spins up and then goes away in a week if there's a momentary demand for compute from some for some reason some game existed some game popped up something um but what's been happening like over the last two years during like the layer 2 mania where everyone was launching layer 2 is like they tried to frontr run future demand that actually ended up not being there and so if there's going to be a million layer 2s it's going to be responsive to demand it's going to be a reaction to demand not trying to like supply net new block space uh into the market and John
what were you going to say I was going to say yeah I I don't think that like ETH L1 doing any scaling is ever going to shift whatever the long run outcome is of like how many chains are we going to need um because I I mean today I don't think that we actually need a lot of chains. It is just people with experimenting with different flavors of serving mostly the same kind of handful of use cases. The world where you end up with a lot of chains in the long run is where you like you actually need them for different applications and yeah, you're spinning them up, you know, taking them down quickly. They're like very very high scale. It's that's just a completely different thing than what
Ethereum L1 is like actually trying to do here and is ever going to do. And so like it's never going to encroach on that market if it ever exists. It's just that the practical reality today is the long tale of chains today isn't serving these like unique highcale use cases. They're they're just like another EVM blockchain with like 1second block times that does the same stuff like that. That's all the stuff that gets cannibalized. It's just that the longtail today isn't actually really justified. Um if you have a justifiable long tail of chains in the future, then like ETH1 can't compete with that. Like it never will. Yeah. And it's like we already have fast L1 chains that exist
and that hasn't totally made every other L1 chain that could ever exist obsolete. I think I I'd love to be a fly on the wall inside of optimism. Uh because I've always thought the optimism business model as a chain, you know, building the super chain, building interrop inside of the super chain, taking a 10% rake of all of the fees of every superchain chain was is actually the business model that Ethere that people wanted Ethereum to be itself. And optimism in the chain model was kind of just like running
interception on like what Ethereum was trying to be, but it was using, you know, uh like more central coordination, more centralized coordination around the optimism superchain in order to achieve the Ethereum vision for itself inside of its more siloed siloed gate. And so like while optimism, you know, the optimism mainet has never been really elevated and prioritized by the optimism product, they've always tried to be like the super chain and like you know base is part of the super chain, world chain is part of the super chain and these are literally the biggest layer 2s out there. Uh but I would like I it would be
interesting to see like discussions from the optimism side of things because to me they've built a microcosm of the larger Ethereum system and out out of the weakness of the layer 1 uh is why like there was so much demand for that and like even arbitrum and and ZKY all were all trying to like race for that same vision of a unified network of chains that Ethereum couldn't produce because it didn't figure out interop and it didn't have the layer one scale. Uh John, what's your take on that? I still don't think this is going to
change any of that. Uh like the the services and level of tech that they need to build there are still a different gap from what Ethereum is going to be doing here. I mean like part of it particularly for optimism is literally like it's it's shared governance and management of a bridge contract. I like I mean you could you can argue that the native role of stuff will like eventually encroach on like some of that but I think that's just like a better product and it's years away and it is sort of different. Um, and then a lot of the more like opinionated technical linder up, I mean, if any of these chains do end up going
into like some form of whether like shared sequencing, shared building, whatever, I mean, like Ethereum isn't going to be competing on that. Um, it really is just trying to take back that, you know, hey, we should be able to service like general use cases here um, of like a typical good chain. And I I don't view that as mostly encroaching on what they're kind of doing there. Mhm. This was actually kind of my I had I had a debate with um Alex again ZK Sync back in the day because like it's always always the the bickering on timeline is about value acrruel, right? So it's like having that discussion with him is like oh cool we can handle the compute of the entire world like yeah cool but does
value go back to Ethereum, right? Like that's what anyone cares about and then he like he would talk about oh how this actually drives value to the the single token ZK sync and does stuff. I was like yeah but like where how does that get back to Ethereum? How does Ethereum gain in that world? which is kind of frustrating for me as someone that like and maybe just everyone broadly. It's like you see so much goodwill energy going into all of this stuff and people are like, "Oh yeah, man. We're we're building, we're doing the mission, we're executing, we're creating this interoperable world that can that can like onboarding the world to this quote unquote Ethereum stuff, but it's like if it doesn't drive value back to ETH
token, like you're just not going to have people that are excited, happy, or okay with the outcome." Like, I'm sorry. like that like and I know like the last few weeks has been a lot of like trying to make sure there's a clear delineation between ETH the asset and ETH the technology and the culture and the ethos and stuff. Um I think you you really got to marry those two things and th those interop stacks which have a central token at the hub of all those things right that like that's the counterveilling forces that's like these people have incentive to drive value to their token which kind of guides their
decisions away from driving value directly to Ethereum the asset and that has always been the critique of going down this road map is you just in insert a bunch of incentives between these teams the manh hours they're putting in and then ETH the asset going up. Yeah. It's like death by a thousand cuts kind of of small little tokens carving out a billion dollars of market cap over and over and over again that could theoretically be a cruel to ETH or you know speculation in ETH which is why I I'm continuing to push that like if I'm
I'm joining John's camp here like we we just need to accept that these are all separate chains like we need you I'm almost getting rid I'm going to try to get rid of the L1 L2 conversation because like whenever you just view them all as separate chains with their own incentives with their own motivations and like Ethereum the the team the researchers everyone they can only defend as far as Ethereum the actual chain goes right like that's the the end of their domain you like you can only do so much to that point then from there it's just like people are going to do their own thing to drive value to their own pockets and do their because like on
a long enough time horizon that's just how this stuff tends to trend so it's like yeah make sure that you're in a dominant position within your sphere try to provide some services stuff if this is the long-term tail but like don't prioritize that stuff for giving yourself the value again to the properties that you have like centers resistance livveness all that stuff. Yeah, totally. And I think like even talking about why L2s became so popular and kind of that like fad phase of like, oh, we're going to launch an L2 is, you know, if it was as easy to launch a layer 1 as it was to launch an L2 using
some of these like roll up as a service things, they probably would have been L1's. they probably wouldn't have been L2s, but it was just like the easiest way to do things and they had like some amount of value alignment, you know, BS that they could say. And so, like I I totally agree. They're just their own chain with their own incentives trying to, you know, make their company or their token valuable and the L2 just at the point in time where they launched it was probably the path of least resistance. You may have already heard about Infinex. Infinex has, in my opinion, the nicest crosschain swap and
bridge feature that you will find anywhere. It is called Switch Swap and Bridge, and we're going to show you what it looks like. First, we're going to log into my Infinex account with a pass key. Now, there's no seed phrases in Infinex. This is a one-click setup with biometric pass keys, but in addition to that, my Infinex account is fully non-custodial. So, bam, I just logged in. It was two clicks, and I'm already into my Infinex account. So, let's go make a switch. I'm going to go switch my USDC that is on base and I'm going to buy Barachchain which is a completely different chain. Uh so we're going to switch this. I'm
going to press that button and then Infinex is going to execute this order, this crosschain order for me. And now it is done. But actually I'm not really feeling bearish anymore. So I'm going to go from Barra uh to Penguins. I'm going to buy a Penguin on Salana. So I'm going from the Barra chain to Salana. See, no transaction signing, no gas to worry about. You just switch across whatever chain that you want with Infinex. That was so easy. Go check out Infinex and try your first switch today. In the wild west of DeFi, stability and innovation are everything, which is why you should check out FRA Finance, the protocol revolutionizing stable coins, DeFi, and
Rolex. The core of FRA Finance is FRAUSD, which is backed by Black Rockck's institutional biddra designed FRAUSD for best-in-class yields across DeFi, T bills, and carry trade returns allinone. Just head to fra.com, then stake it to earn some of the best yields in DeFi. Want even more? Bridge your FRA USD over to the Fractal layer 2 for the same yield plus Fractal points and explore Fractal's diverse layer 2 ecosystem with protocols like Curve, Convex, and more. All rewarding early adopters. FRA isn't just a protocol. It's a digital nation powered by the FXS
token and governed by its global community. Acquire FXS through frack.com or your go-to deck. Stake it and help shape FRA Nation's future. Ready to join the forefront of DeFi? Visit fra.com now to start earning with FRAUSD and staked FRAUSD. And for Banklist listeners, you can use fra.com/r/bankless when bridging to FRAL for exclusive Fraal perks and boosted rewards. Imagine a world where your day-to-day banking runs on a blockchain. That's exactly what Mantle is building. Powered by a $4 billion treasury and poised to become the largest sustainable
onchain financial hub. As part of their 2025 expansion, Mantle is introducing three new core innovation pillars that bridge traditional finance with decentralized technology. First is their enhanced index fund aiming for $1 billion in AUM by Q1. It provides optimized exposure to Bitcoin, ETH, Salana, and USC complete with built-in yield opportunities. Next, Mantle Banking promises to revolutionize global value transfer through seamless blockchain powered banking services, bridging crypto into your daily life. Finally, Mantle X blends AI with DeFi to deliver an intelligent, user-friendly
experience for everyone. And the best part is that this is all in addition to their already launched products like Mantle Network, ME, and FBTC. Ready to step into the future of finance? Follow Mantle on X at Mantle official and join the onchain revolution today. When it comes to the conversation of ETH value acrruel, I think anyone can kind of it's a little bit of a roar jock test. Uh, and I think we actually have three interesting different perspectives uh here on the table today. Like John, I'll put in the uh like technical rationalism
camp. Uh Andy, I'll I'll put in the trader camp where if he's having fun and making money on a particular chain, he's bullish on that particular chain. Doesn't really like stay on the on the left curve side of that bell curve. You don't have to think about it too hard. If having fun, then bullish on the layer one. Uh bread, I don't know exactly where where bread falls uh on this. maybe somewhere a little bit closer to John. Um, but then there's also the camp that uh we've seen uh from Sam Casmanian and also Ryan Sean Adams of people just saying, "Hey, just talk about the asset in a reserve asset uh global reserve
asset context and like meme that into existence." And I'm seeing a little bit of just like the blind man feeling the elephant. Like everyone's kind of seeing this one shape. And now, you know, depending on what your bias is, what your interpretation is. You have a different explanation as to like why ETH is the way that it is and not the way that it's not. Um Brad, what do you think about this? Uh I'm accepting of So, I listened to Sam's podcast on you had to the day. It was great. Um I agree that if you aim to achieve higher um
valuations like in the realm of a Bitcoin or beyond even where Ethereum is today, you have to have people that buy into this like sovereign money like ownership digital oil. Like you have to have that belief. But I do not think the path to get there is just to be like Bitcoin's a special special snowflake. You like they've done it. They have the hard cap. They have this story that they can tell. A smart contract platform cannot do that. I think you need you need fees to generate like the basil level of like bullishness for a chain and then if you maintain the properties or display properties that are even more
powerful than that again censorship resistance maximum decentralization all this stuff you allow like a subset of the community to dream higher and tell the story of oh you guys are looking at fees but look at all this other stuff we can do right like all nation states are willing to participate on this chain because we've shown that we've defended against tornado cash right like we've shown that it's incredibly neutral for all of time and can stand up against other nation states Right? It's all this stuff. So you let like you need the basil level of activity and excitement and fees generated to like get like just like a again a basil level of uh
valuation for the thing and then you let others dream bigger by displaying the moneyiness properties which is a byproduct of being useful. I don't think it is something you can just like straight up say oh we're money don't worry about it and then like everyone's just going to come to come because you have rational people step in and go what are you talking about like you guys were making a bunch of fees you're not making a bunch of fees and then like you get in the argument about that stuff. So I think yeah that's my general position. You need a blend of the two. I think path dependency is matters. So you think you're saying like a we need a strong layer one with strong layer one fundamental value acrruel. Something that would appease the John Sharpos of
the world and then we can take that to the Ryan Sean Adams of the world and say hey here's the foundation that you have to leverage to turn this into what Ryan is calling like the blue money cult basically. Yeah. Because like you John was pointing out you can't do the DCF on these things and come to a rational valuation. You just can't, right? Like uh so but you need that to a degree for people like him to build some investor confidence so people can actually do the DCF stuff, right? Oh, do hey there's yield coming. There's like all this stuff I can do and like you guys aren't seeing the the bigger picture because it's yes this much on DCF but also did
you know these properties? Do you see what's coming down the the pipe with Russia wants to do an exchange with China and they can only do it on Ethereum layer 1 because it's the only thing that's credibly neutral. They're going to buy this thing because they have to do it here. So like let these people tell the story on top of the the actual DCF stuff. I just I think you need the blend. Yeah. So I I think you actually need to focus less on the economics if you want ETH to have a shot at the at like winning as the sovereign money kind of thing. So I like I I I agreed with a lot of what Sam had talked about in there of uh that kind of the
focus on stuff like the burn over the past few years and the ultrasound money thing was the wrong focus. I mean like I have very openly said like I think that that that was the wrong focus. I mean that was for a mix of reasons. I think that the burn is less important than you know just capturing the valley in the first place. Um, but but then also like so so much of the argument of why ETH is better money than Bitcoin that most Ethereum people try to harp on is all economics based. And I think that fundamentally you cannot win that argument. I I do not think that and like I I saw this in uh like Ryan's latest
post to of like digital gold plus yield. Like I I think you can say these things if you want. Um I I don't think that anything economic based can ever be the core pitch of like why ETH is better money than Bitcoin. I think that is game that you will you will just always lose. If you are going to have any shot at ETH uh like actually being able to flip Bitcoin or or any or any other asset that like is actually trying to take this shot at non-s sovereign money. I think you need to win it in just a totally differentiated way. And what that very simply looks like to me is
that you just are the winning tech platform. like everything is built on Ethereum and naturally like you are the most like you are the obvious just like censorship resistant programmable asset at the center of that ecosystem. Um and then you hope that that puts you in a good position because I I I don't think that like ETH will ever be able to like stand in an argument against Bitcoin and say like you know pitch black rockck like hey because of these qualities let's burn whatever we have economics like this is better than Bitcoin. They don't care like they just want the predictability this is digital gold like that's fine that wins this bucket. Um
the the only shot that I think that you have at winning is being really really differentiated of like this is the usable programmable money and like everything is built on us. And then the the other half of it is I think that it is still entirely Bitcoin's game to lose. Um like if Bitcoin just manages to figure out rollup scaling and like manages to deal with just like the quantum risk in a few years as like in like some manageable way and like figures out the security budget. I honestly don't think there's anything that any chain can do um to compete with Bitcoin. I think that like what you need to do if you're just going to best
position yourself is like when does the tech platform get everything built on you, everyone is using your asset, like you're kind of right in the middle of that and then you kind of honestly just like hope that Bitcoin just like kind of drops the ball and then you're naturally the best positioned after that. Um, and I think that also sets you up in the best kind of like fallback scenario anyway of I think that's naturally what will maximize your cash flows anyway. Um, so I I think it ends up looking very similar like what do you actually prioritize to do this is like I think I think that it is a lot of like L1 scaling stuff that's just going to produce additional cash flows. It's just
like what what is the pitch and the prioritization that I think is going to matter more in the long run to like give you a shot at winning. I I think it's less of like Ryan's article about like we need to talk about ETH more. Um cuz that that was the main thing I disagreed with him in there is like he said in there like ETH uh isn't lagging because of tech. It's because the conviction um is like all all like sharted and mixed up that that I disagree with. Um I think it has lagged because the ecosystem itself has like fallen behind a bit on usage versus others and so that like the probability of you know how big is this Ethereum thing going to be like has
naturally shrunk. Um if I if I was like super convinced that Ethereum was actually going to win as you know this is going to be the big smart contract platform like all the rollups are going to be built on here like I I think ETH will go up. um because your your your probability of that happening I think would have to go up pretty meaningfully. Yeah, I think we're saying the same thing. Mine mine was not to like focus on the messaging being the technical stuff. I think you build for the tech platform, talk about the moneyiness, right? I think that's like that's what I have that frame in my mind like you have to build for the usefulness which brings the fees which generates that stuff but then you have to talk about yeah why
you're a better thing than than Bitcoin even though like yeah that's a hard battle to fight but um yeah I think even in the what you talk about you talk less about the economics than people do today. I think you even talk about that less too. I I think you talk about how this is the best tech platform and then we are the natural like we are the programmable asset at the core of the winning tech platform. Like I I think that is higher in the messaging than the economics are better. Like even when you're pitching Black Arc and why ETH is better money, I think the first bullet point is like we win as the tech platform like ETH is the decentralized
asset at the middle of that. Like if if ETH wins fundamentally the only way you can use Bitcoin in this onchain economy is like you're using CBBT BTC some for bridged version whatever that's like super trusted. Um I I think it's much easier to make that argument than the economics one because I just don't think anyone's going to care. I don't think you're like just ever going to win that battle to to anyone. It's always just going to be strictly worse. It's just like it's it's a different smaller thing. So like even in the investment pitch, I think it needs to be like we're the wing tech platform and that's like that's that's why we're the best money is because like this is the platform
that everything is built on top of. This is the only asset that can be the most decentralized most secure asset in this economy if this is the winning platform and the winning rails. So I think maybe John and you might agree in bread too that like maybe the price the valuation that has deflated out of ETH over the last two to three years has uh run handinhand with uh the decreasing Ethereum dominance as a smart contract platform. And so maybe the the the notion of ETH as money just disappears when Ethereum dominance as a
smart contract platform goes from like 90% just even down to like 60%. Whereas in 90% you are the dominant smart contract platform. There is no second best. But at 60% there actually is a second best. And maybe it's not really anything about Salana specifically, but the fact that there is a valid contender in a uh saturated market and then a after Salana, well then why can't there be a third and fourth and fifth? And all of a sudden the notion of a smart contract platform gets very commoditized. And so the difference between 60% dominant and 90% dominant is
the difference in monetary premium versus being just a a tech play with a DCF model. Andy, what's up? Yeah. Well, I just think like I think that's that part of it to me is what's most interesting. Um cuz like to be honest, I've never cared about the whole like ETH is money conversation. As someone who's been building on ETH for a very long time, I've always thought ETH was interesting and got into it because of the tech and like you know it has as someone who now makes most the majority of my living being a DJ onchain like I have very heavily moved my transactions
off of Ethereum mainet and like even off of L2s for the most part. Like the majority of my transactions for the last couple years have been on Salana and like if you had told me that 3 years ago I would have said that's insane. like there's just no way that could ever possibly happen. And so, kind of like you were saying, David, like the the moment there is a second best and you see that Ethereum is continually not the fastest horse when it comes to upgrading the tech and like maintaining lead and just like being cutthroat and competitive, then it's like, okay, we can extrapolate this out and there's a
lot of money to be made here for no one to come and like really really come for the king and try to be better. And then it just becomes like very very reasonable to tell yourself the story of how it continues to fall off more and more. What was the first thing that pulled you over? Was it activity? Uh yeah. Yeah. I guess this was like I guess like pretty post FTX crash, like relatively close FTX crash. I just like bought a bunch of I sold almost all of my Ethereum for Salana. Um, and then
because of that, like as Pump Fun and memes all moved over there, there just wasn't really anything happening on ETH. Like NFTTS had died off for the most part at this point. And there just like what I'm going to sit in a and do nothing. So like, yeah, sure, some of my stuff does that, but not not nearly as much as it used to. Gotcha. So you saw the black swan opportunity, figured that was probably a good buy, and then just came up with the activity after that. Yeah. It's just like that was where things continued to happen. That's where the majority of opportunities have been
over the last couple years. Yeah. This just kind of goes back to this idea that there's a pretty large cohort of people who are just chain neutral and they are just stoked about whatever layer 1 asset is giving them the opportunities to have fun casino games and and potentially make money as well. And like if that's Salana, if that's Ethereum, it doesn't really matter. But if the chain is fun, then there's some sort of like premium. I won't call it a monetary premium, but some sort of valuation premium that is associated with that that layer 1 chain. I don't know. I think that's moneyiness.