Calcifer 🔥

Most of you wouldn’t make it past the first-round interview at a major investment bank, let alone PE or a hedge fund. You punted some crypto in a bull market, made a bag, and now think you’re a genius. You were mostly lucky What’s wrong with his argument? Oh, checks notes… JPMorgan generated $178B in net revenue and $57B in net income on $2.5T of deposits. He probably thought he was making a stronger point by dismissing my MAUs benchmarking of tech companies crypto tries to emulate on network effects to justify absurd valuations. And when that doesn’t stick, they pivot to TradFi to see if those multiples magically make crypto make sense. “Bro, crypto is growing faster. The market pays for growth, not value” On what metric? - Active users? No - TVL? Mostly stablecoins The lazy “TAM is huge” analysis collapses in the absence of monetization (and increasing infra competition). Once you actually look at protocol-level metrics, you see: - High user churn - Weak monetization - TVL growth that doesn’t translate into real economics for L1s JPMorgan monetizes its deposits. Crypto L1s? Nowhere close to monetizing near the value they’re implicitly claiming. And yes, maybe this kind of logic flies when you’re doing early-stage venture. But Ethereum at $380B or Solana at $80B isn’t early-stage and it isn’t exactly venture These are mature-stage valuations being justified with seed-stage reasoning No matter how you slice the math, valuations don’t make sense for most protocols at this point - especially L1s It’s lazy analysis, sexy but constantly evolving narratives on analogies layered on top of bag bias over and over again