What's the upside for L2 tokens?

Fee sharing?

Even if they turned on fee sharing, it's not much:

Arbitrum made $19.5m in fees in a year. Optimism $18.3m.

zkSync just $1.3m and Starknet $600k.

This Price(FDV)-to-Fees ratio puts Arbitrum at 137.8x, and Optimism at 205.7x

Starknet - 4204x

In context, TSLA trades at 187x P/E ratio so Arbitrum might even look cheap.

But Tesla is an exception. S&P500 trades at ~ 29x the earnings.

This makes L2 tokens overvalued by a lot. Unless we expect their adoption and fees to pick up massively.

Maybe governance?

Hoarding tokens gives voting power to direct incentives.

But projects like @lobbyfinance make bribing cheap. Recently one user paid 5 ETH (~$10k) on Lobby to buy 19.3M ARB (~$6.5m) voting power.

I believe that most projects issue tokens for two main reasons:

- To raise capital

- To bootstrap adoption

L2s are bootstrapping adoption, like the Arbitrum DRIP proposal, which allocates 80M $ARB.

The goal is to attract sticky liquidity, outlive, and outcompete other L2s.

If we apply the Pareto principle, 80% of the liquidity will eventually concentrate in 20% of the L2s.

So, perhaps we need to wait until the L2 winners become clear and then invest in them.

This implies waiting for most L2s to naturally phase out.

Yet as more L2s launch with new tokens, the timeline for clear winners to emerge is extended.

(Except for Base... Which doesn't have a token (just a stock)).

$INK is about to launch a token with liquidity mining to inflict even more pain on the remaining L2s.

A cursed sector to invest.