If it’s not obvious by now, chains are not a great business, and none of them are financially sustainable at the moment. Gas fees simply do not create sufficient revenue to avoid losses, and most chains are reliant upon token emissions for financing. This is by design for L1s, but none are net negative emissions. Chains not reliant upon token emissions have access to other forms of financing (e.g. Base). While I’m not close to every major team, my view is that only Arbitrum and Polygon have clearly come to terms with the need to iterate on business strategy, but both are still pursuing sequencer-centric approaches. Still, every L2 and alt-L1 team needs to be having the internal conversations that Arbitrum and Polygon have been having. It’s worthwhile to step back and remember these are software protocols. The history of software protocol developers making money is… well, it’s not encouraging. Look at email protocols. Nearly every person on the planet uses them daily. They are embedded in mission-critical processes across every industry. Did the developers who wrote SMTP or POP3 or IMAP drive Lambos or own NYC mansions? No. The Googles and Yahoos and Microsofts got all those profits by using email protocols as inputs to their products. Did the guy who invented HTTP spawn a bunch of millionaires who invested in him? Maybe, but they would be from a later startup. HTTPS? Invented by Netscape, which is of course dead as a doornail. FTP, like HTTP, came out of non commercial research. No Lambos. What do these have in common? They became product standards, not products in and of themselves. Just like EVM or OP stack or <insert blockchain>. Chains need to own products built on top of their product standards because paying for sequencing or decentralized block building is a commoditized business (which is obvious when you remember the big miners compete mainly on cost structure - exactly as you would expect of a corn farm or copper mine or oil refiner). Some people correctly cite Facebook and Uber as examples of software platforms with long early history of running on financing and not profits. But those are both *products* that have competitive advantages and clear value propositions towards an identifiable market of users. Blockchains are closer to AWS or Azure in that users mainly care about costs, performance, and diversification. ...