Since the ICO boom in 2017, the cryptocurrency public chain ecosystem has undergone tremendous changes by 2025. Nowadays, besides Bitcoin as an asset and the US dollar stablecoins (especially USDT) entering mainstream applications, other public chain application scenarios and asset pricing are still in the early exploration stage. Against this backdrop, I want to return to the first principles of currency and examine the value of public chain tokens from the three basic functions of money: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. This article will combine theory with current observations to deeply analyze how these three functions are reflected in the development of public chains from the perspective of a public chain practitioner, and discuss the corresponding ecological strategies and future trends using the metaphors of "amusement park, casino, and church." (Background: When AI threatens human survival, we need Nakamoto's design philosophy even more.) (Context: From Nakamoto to SBF: Who is stealing the soul of the crypto world?) *This article is framed and drafted by Kowei, organized and synthesized after collaboration with GPT-03 for in-depth research. The Role of Medium of Exchange: Blockchain as an "Amusement Park" The medium of exchange refers to the monetary function in transactions. For public chains, this is reflected in users paying transaction fees to use the blockchain, and block producers (miners/validators) earning revenue from the blocks. Here, I will use the analogy of a public chain as an "amusement park" to analyze: the blockchain sells block space and transaction ordering rights. The former is akin to an amusement park ticket (base transaction fee), while the latter is like a fast-pass ticket for rides (Maximal Extractable Value, MEV, the additional value obtained through transaction ordering). In the economic design of modern public chains like Ethereum, the base transaction fee (ticket revenue) is often partially burned to reduce token circulation (for example, the EIP-1559 mechanism), while MEV revenue (fast-pass fees) is increasingly shared with block validators/stakers. These two components constitute the "real income" of the public chain, while the native tokens of the public chain serve as the medium of exchange for paying these fees. It is worth noting that as blockchain scalability technologies develop, the TPS (transactions per second) of public chains continues to increase, which may lead to a decrease in the importance of base transaction fees—in the long term, almost any public chain has the potential to surpass a processing capacity of over ten thousand transactions per second, except for Bitcoin. Therefore, how to effectively extract MEV will become more crucial in the future public chain revenue. From the perspective of managing an "amusement park," maximizing park revenue requires efforts in two areas: one is to allow as many people as possible to enter and play, and the other is to charge a premium from those willing to cut in line and enjoy privileges. Correspondingly in blockchain, on one hand, it is to maintain low transaction fees to lower the entry threshold and expand transaction volume; on the other hand, it is to promote more high-value activities on-chain, allowing players who are willing to pay for priority execution of transactions to contribute more MEV revenue. The former means that public chains need to have ample scalability and enough applications to fill high TPS—for example, developing simple on-chain games, social applications, and even digital certificates, supply chain on-chain scenarios, etc., to generate massive transactions (even if the economic value of a single transaction is not high, it can accumulate considerable total transaction fees). The latter requires the emergence of sufficiently diverse and active economic activities within the public chain ecosystem, making arbitrage, liquidation, leveraged trading, and other activities profitable, leading to more instances of participants willing to pay high priority fees. However, current observations show that most public chains have no more than ten types of truly useful smart contracts, indicating that many chains lack rich "amusement facilities," making it difficult to attract users for long-term repeated consumption. This is also a direction that public chain developers need to work on: increasing the diversity and stickiness of applications to raise the ceiling for MEV extraction. Strategically, different public chains have different trade-offs regarding the "amusement park model." For instance, Ethereum chooses to improve scalability through Layer 2 solutions, directing a large number of transactions to the second layer while maintaining decentralization and security in L1, allowing users to enjoy low fees. This means that Ethereum L1 itself may carry a lower daily transaction volume, but it still extracts part of the transaction fees through mechanisms like Rollup settlement, retaining higher-value transactions and MEV opportunities on L1, especially after the introduction of Base rollup, where even Layer 2 MEV may be captured by Ethereum L1 validators. In contrast, the high-performance single-layer public chain Solana resembles a super-large direct-operated amusement park, directly providing high TPS and low fees on L1 to accommodate all traffic. In the future, public chains pursuing the function of a medium of exchange need to strive for scalability, low fees, and MEV revenue, attracting a large number of users while ensuring that ecological participants (especially token holders or stakers) can share the dividends brought by transaction activities, making the public chain's native token increase in value like "stocks" due to the prosperity of the park. The Challenge of Unit of Account: Blockchain as a "Casino" The second function of money is the unit of account, which refers to what people use as a basis for accounting and pricing. In the crypto world, I compare this to a public chain being a "casino" that issues chips: public chain tokens are akin to casino chips, and they can only achieve what is called Moneyness Premium when people are willing to use these chips for pricing and trading. In the early crypto community, there was actually a trend of coin-centric thinking: veteran players often used BTC or ETH to measure the returns of other assets, for example, how much a certain altcoin has risen relative to BTC/ETH. However, as the market has grown and matured, the adoption rate of stablecoins (especially US dollar stablecoins) has surged, and people's mental expectations have almost fully shifted to USD-centric. Exchange quotes, order books, and AMM pools are generally priced in USD, leading to the gradual decline of pricing practices based on BTC/ETH. Nowadays, most cryptocurrency transactions involve stablecoins, with about 99% of stablecoin market values pegged to the US dollar, meaning that cryptocurrency asset trading is essentially priced in USD. The past notion of using Bitcoin as the "world reserve currency" has been reversed by reality: the trend of extreme dollarization in the crypto market is becoming increasingly evident. This change has altered investors' motivations for holding public chain tokens: apart from using a small amount of tokens for transaction fees, crypto users have little reason to hold large amounts of a particular public chain's tokens long-term, especially when that token lacks sufficient backing of "real revenue." Moreover, in fact, as of now, no public chain has achieved long-term deflation or high cash flow returns through transaction fees + MEV revenue, leading to many public chain tokens lacking intrinsic purchasing motivation and performing poorly. Theoretically, there was once a popular argument for "Fat Protocol," which stated that tokens of foundational protocol layers (L1) would be more valuable due to the large application value they carry compared to single applications. However, in practice, it has been found that mere reliance on underlying technical status is insufficient to confer monetary premium to tokens. For public chain tokens to become widely held and traded as units of account, there must be substantial applications or asset pools that can be priced with those tokens. In other words, some explosive new applications are needed to guide users to "enter the casino to buy chips," allowing substantial off-market funds (USD) to flow into the ecosystem and settle on the tokens, thus enabling public chain tokens to gain pricing function premiums. Reviewing the history of crypto, every market frenzy has almost corresponded to such application scenarios: for example, during the ICO boom in 2017, people rushed to use ETH to participate in project financing, driving up the demand for the chain token ETH; the DeFi and NFT waves of 2020-2021 saw users seeking liquidity...

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