Ethereum remains the industry standard smart contract platform
“I personally, I think Ether is, or Ethereum rather, is very well positioned to kind of take the smart contract network, I mean, market share. They're already the largest in terms of total value locked. They're the industry standard. They're the first ever. If you're launching an application or you're tokenizing assets or you want to accept tokenized assets, you want to always have the biggest network. I mean, that's like launching an app. You want to be on the iPhone, right?”
Smart contract platforms function as decentralized micro economies
“When I think of smart contract platforms like Ethereum or Solana, I think of these as decentralized micro economies. Normally, you wouldn't do competitive analysis against two economies like that. You would just look and say, okay, country A is growing, expected to grow its economy this much this year. Country B is expected to grow the economy this much. But these are micro economies.”
Annual network fees serve as crypto GDP equivalents
“And if you sum up the trailing one-year fees, that's an equivalent of GDP, right? GDP is the total output of all goods and services produced, right? And so whether you're using some sort of application for trading or lending or just I'm transferring someone some ether, whatever it be, I'm creating fees to do this. And so the sum of that is my GDP for a decentralized economy.”
Zombie protocols persist despite having no functional utility
“I published a story in Forbes a couple of years ago. It probably was my best read besides the Sandbank Refree cover, but definitely my most controversial. It was $20 billion crypto zombies. I published it in 2023 in the springtime. I did something similar to what you had. I tried to come up with a few valuation metrics, frameworks to eliminate the noise.”
Tokenization decouples network activity from speculative market cycles
“But tokenization is the interesting thing because it changes that. It's any financial institution can asset, can tokenize assets, they can put it on a smart contract platform, and that shouldn't matter about what the rest of the crypto market is doing. And so I think we're at an interesting point where as tokenization grows, and every single financial institution on the planet right now is figuring out how they can tokenize some sort of their business.”
