wmougayar

If your primary goal is maximizing bandwidth and minimizing latency, you’re likely building a networked database, not a blockchain.

That’s because bandwidth and latency aren’t core blockchain foundational facets. While speed and scalability do matter, they are secondary to deeper mechanism related principles that define blockchains and their applications focus.

Trying to use blockchains to replace databases means you’ll end up bloating throughput and manufacturing a bandwidth/latency problem that didn’t need to exist, chasing performance instead of prioritizing credibly neutral decentralization. And you will face brutal competition from the world’s best companies in this space: Oracle, Amazon, Red Hat and Microsoft, to name a few.

Distributed databases have long delivered faster, cheaper transaction with the help of central coordination. That’s not what blockchains are for.

It’s time to flip the outdated notion of crypto as a “risk-on” asset in light of the growing global geopolitical and economic instability. 

This outdated mindset ignores the structural evolution of crypto. In truth, the best digital assets are really “risk-off” alternatives: decentralized, censorship-resistant, globally accessible stores and rails of value that don’t rely on trust in any single nation-state or monetary authority.

During Covid, crypto attracted significant capital as both a safe haven and a source of opportunity, based on its exciting technological promises. 
No one wishes for more global unrest, but given today’s uncertain landscape, a larger crypto market cap isn’t just good for prices, it’s essential for relevance. The more capitalized crypto becomes, the more it matters on the global stage as a credible, neutral, and durable financial system.

We should embrace the new narrative and make it a reality.

I keep seeing entrepreneurs obsessed with storing data on the blockchain. E.g. storing an attestation on the blockchain is not so innovative. It’s what comes next and what you do with the data.
If we are still doing what we can do with databases, we are not doing new things on the blockchain.

There is nothing Real about Real Economic Value (REV)

Ethereum is not focused on MEV (Maximum Extractable Value), which represents an outdated and narrow way to assess blockchain activity. As a result, its REV (Real Economic Value, a derivative of MEV) is not maximized, by intent.

Instead, Ethereum has prioritized scalability, fee fairness (via the burn mechanism), and low inflation. This leads to a more predictable monetary policy, comparable to central bank models like the Federal Reserve, bringing it closer to Bitcoin’s fixed-supply philosophy. While Bitcoin’s supply continues to grow at approximately 1.5% annually, Ethereum’s is around 0.6% and is sometimes deflationary. These characteristics give ETH strong scarcity traits; an often overlooked aspect, making it a global monetary asset.

Evaluating Ethereum solely through the lens of REV is overly reductive. Ethereum is both a platform and a currency, and each component must be assessed on its own merits.

As a platform, Ethereum should be evaluated based on adoption metrics such as developer activity, app ecosystem growth (app capital), total value locked (TVL), tokenized real-world assets, stablecoin usage, NFT trading volumes, and both consumer and institutional participation.

As a monetary asset with commodity-like qualities, ETH should be assessed through its monetary characteristics: inflation rate, circulating supply, issuance model, security budget, transfer volumes, burn rate, and its role as collateral in decentralized finance.