The first time I paid an absurd price for coffee inside an airport, I thought it was a scam. Later I realized people were not paying for coffee. They were paying for access to a location where attention, movement, and opportunity were already concentrated. The drink was almost secondary. The environment was the real product.

That idea came back to me while thinking about #OpenLedger - A lot of discussions around AI focus on the assets themselves. Models, datasets, applications, agents. Yet history shows that the biggest value often accumulates around the places where activity converges rather than the individual products moving through those places.

This is partly why @OpenLedger caught my interest from a different angle. Instead of viewing the ecosystem as a collection of separate tools, I started viewing it as a place where different participants may eventually gather around shared infrastructure. Contributors, builders, applications, and users all create value independently, but the network connecting them can become valuable for reasons that have little to do with any single participant.

The interesting part is that successful hubs tend to become stronger as more activity passes through them. Airports, ports, financial exchanges, and major marketplaces all followed a similar pattern. Their importance came less from what they produced themselves and more from their position within larger flows of activity.

That is why I keep an eye on $OPEN - The long term opportunity may not come from being another AI project competing for attention. It may come from becoming a place where different forms of value repeatedly intersect. History has shown that the intersections are often worth far more than the individual roads leading into them.