SOL criticizes ETH for having so many Layer-2s. This splits liquidity and makes it confusing for users โ and theyโre not wrong. But now SOL faces a similar problem: there are countless different stablecoins.
Stablecoins have network effects, but theyโre not winner-take-all. USDC owns DeFi, while Tether owns emerging markets. Now Tempo, Arc, USDH, and Solana all want a piece.
Who captures the next tranche of users (and the yield)? We break down Circle's perspective w/ @gordonliao โคต๏ธ
TWT token started as an experiment. The FDV got too high quickly. They burned 99% of the supply, but didn't have too many use cases for it. Now that's expanding.
oh boy.
i've actually debated @TrustlessState on this before, so i guess i'm not surprised there's a lot of people who believe what you believe.
ok, let's walk through it:
there is a market for ETH the asset, in dollars. There is a known supply of ETH (121,014,605 ETH) with a known issuance algorithm, there is a demand. Where the demand meets the supply, we get price. When demand exceeds supply (positive flows), price of ETH goes up.
i'm sure we agree so far.
there is an independent market for Ethereum blockspace with independent supply and demand.
Supply of Ethereum blockspace increases as blockspace expands. In 2024, at a gas limit of 30M the max Ethereum blockspace was 78 trillion gas per year. With there new target of 45M starting in August 2025, the max Ethereum blockspace supply is now 118 trillion gas/year.
so we increased Ethereum blockspace by 50% in 2025 so far whereas ETH asset supply only increased ~.7% over the last year.
Ethereum roadmap is aiming to increase blockspace supply by 2-3x each year for the next 3-5.
ETH supply = -1% to 1.51% per year
Ethereum blockspace supply = 2-3x per year???
So ETH and Ethereum blockspace have different supply schedules.
i'm sure we also agree on that.
well, there's also different demand - people buy Ethereum blockspace for different reasons than buying ETH and vice versa. It is true that in order to buy Ethereum blockspace you must first buy ETH, but you can do that in real time and minimum necessary. There's no reason to buy and hold ETH if all you want is Ethereum blockspace - just buy the minimum amount you need in your preferred form of SoV/money, you need not hold ETH.
People buy Ethereum blockspace to use the compute of Ethereum. People buy ETH because they expect it to increase in value. One can happen without the other.
Note this is true of all chains - including bitcoin, which has a very successful asset product (BTC) but a less successful blockspace product (Bitcoin blockspace) of late.
so to recap:
ETH and Ethereum blockspace have seperate supply schedules and demand drivers - hence they are separate markets.
do we not agree on this?
Ok, so you're claiming that as ETH goes up Ethereum blockspace is more expensive - and you can show some correlation on the charts where this is historically so.
But there's a simple reason for this correlation - when ETH price goes up blockspace demand also goes up (e.g. ppl trade more ETH using Ethereum DeFi) - but the real reason for this correlation is just blockspace demand, not ETH price.
You could well imagine an alternate world where all ETH trading activity happens on sidechains or custodial exchanges instead of Ethereum L1 and thus no Ethereum blockspace is used. We don't even have to imagine this world - we see this happening in Bitcoin right now.
Correlation is not causation, and the cause of blockspace fees increasing are Ethereum blockspace demand exceeds supply (contention) NOT ETH price going up.
Let's use a real world analog - Oil over the past 50 years has mostly been priced in dollars - we call this the petrodollar system. In order to buy oil, you kinda need dollars first.
But dollars and oil are separate assets with independent supply/demand dynamics. Just because you need dollars to buy Oil, doesn't mean if dollars increase in value then Oil increases in value.
So it is with ETH and Ethereum.
ETH is the petrodollar to Ethereum blockspace. But they are independent markets.
The most you can say is that as Ethereum blockspace increases in value to the world (as oil has) ETH the asset probably becomes a more attractive as a store of value.
Memecoins are here to stay, whether we like it or not
Two quick changes can completely remove all the grift from memecoin launches:
- Founders/Devs own 0% of the token supply, and are only funded via trading fees
- An open window of time for a public sale
Itโs only been 2 days since OpenAI revealed GPT-4o.
Users are uncovering incredible capabilities that completely change how we use and interact with AI.
The 12 most impressive use cases so far:
Just launched a new way to check your address for airdrop allocations
1. Go to https://t.co/aKjrEDTeJQ
2. Click "Check airdrops for address"
3. Input any address
4. We'll display EIGEN allocation + other airdrops
No need to sign anything with wallet or go through hoops anymore
I retired from my banking job forever at 34.
โข No mentors
โข No illegal activity
โข No severance pay
Here are the simple ideas I used to retire early:๐งต
Over the past few days I've been working with a group of whitehats, auditors, and other security leaders to try and solve the hardest part of responsible disclosure: finding the right person to talk to.