Ansem 🐂🀄️@blknoiz06
going to add my two cents here
i believe ppl are generally upset with base because you guys pick & choose what you want to support onchain, because you never know what is going to work and what isnt going to work so it isnt as simple as objectively determining what is positive sum beforehand
for example, base did a big push on creator coins, you even directly bought balaji's coin, but base was not as supportive of memecoins, especially the ones that were doing a lot of volume onchain and could have benefitted from exchange listings earlier, but the creator coin & memecoin charts ended up looking near identical, with most of the creator coin charts not doing nearly as well as a lot of the largest memes on base - i personally think there are some unique reasons for why they didnt work and will work in the future but thats for another post
from my pov there are two different ways to value crypto assets, one is based on the fundamentals of the underlying business, and the other is more intangible value determined by the community of users of the network and driven by attention/momentum/belief etc
hyperliquid is a great business that makes real revenues and is valued in part because of those revenues, but it also trades at a premium because of the collective belief that their users have in the network and their future plans to execute on that vision
bitcoin on the other hand, makes no revenue, but is the largest crypto asset by market cap because it trades purely on the collective belief that it is a better store of value than depreciating fiat currencies and the network grew so large that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy
ethereum is somewhere in between in that it does make real revenues but if you simply valued it purely off of those revenues as you would a tech stock it would trade 95% lower, ethereum also has some intangible value determined by the network of cypherpunks who are majority stakeholders of the network, and they believe that its value as an asset is more than what you would come to conclude on based off of purely p/e ratios
tokenization, stablecoins, perpetuals, and prediction markets have been crypto's greatest success stories to date, tokenization in particular has been so successful because it is one of the only ways to accurately put a dollar value on this intangible value of culture and attention
memecoins are denigrated by a lot of the corporate entities in crypto, but i think what a lot of people fail to realize is that the same intangible value that drove bitcoin and ethereum to be the #1 & #2 largest assets in crypto is the same intangible value that attracts retail to speculating on memecoins, doge sits at $11B and has outlasted a majority of coins over the past decade, its value is purely derived from how internet natives value culture and memetics on the internet
do i think its important to uplift and support protocols in defi/rwas/consumer etc etc? yes, but its just as important to recognize what your users are interested in trading, the best analogy i can make is that if you are a mayor of a city and you have patrons who want to go to nightclubs or go to the casino or go to bars, you would not exclude this activity because you only want people to build businesses like banks, restaurants, corner stores, bookstores etc etc. - for an L1 to thrive it needs to have a diverse ecosystem of all things, and it is clear from the data that onchain trading volumes directly positively impact the native blockchain, whether thats in bringing more attention to the chain, or increasing fee revenues, or increasing revenues of underlying infra providers, or attracting new builders to create new products - best example of this is how bonk revitalized solana at the lows & was a very core reason that trading activity came back onchain + the main reason the first set of solana mobile phones sold out
all L1s & L2s are social networks with their own ecosystems and their own culture, with permissionless networks you cannot control what people build or trade, but you can find ways to provide support across the board and contribute to ideating on how to make trends more sustainable
