I’m starting realize that Vitalik was miles ahead of the rest of the industry when he prophesied that highly financialized crypto products have a hard ceiling on value. Everyone is bullish HYPE rn, and there’s probably good upside potential there for traders. But how much upside realistically? Let’s say HL becomes wildly successful. It’s mcap would probably trade at some modest multiple of the NASDAQ (~$55B), for arguments sake, let’s say 3x. That would translate to a hefty $165B dollar HYPE valuation. Thats about a 4-5x price increase from its current level. And that’s on the most optimistic scenario. Or a more reasonable comparison would be to that of present day Robinhood (~$80B mcap), which is a mere 2x from HYPE’s current Val. Again, this is in a very optimistic scenario. The reason for this capped upside is that financial applications are but a small part of societal utility. The largest companies in the world sell goods and services unrelated to finance. Google - An internet and digital products conglomerate - nothing to do with finance Nvidia - chipmaker - nothing to do with finance Meta - social media monopoly - nothing to do with finance Tesla - EV maker / robotics company - nothing to do with finance SpaceX - aerospace company - nothing to do with finance EliLilly - pharma company - nothing to do with finance Apple - computer and smart phone producer - nothing to do with finance The list goes on and on and on. For crypto to level up from here, we need to begin building non-financial (or semi-financial) use cases that are enhanced by decentralization. ...