Devin Baker

Stripe recently announced its acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin payments platform, in a landmark $1.1 billion deal. This acquisition, Stripe's largest to date, positions the fintech giant to expand its services into crypto, offering businesses streamlined access to stablecoin infrastructure for global transactions. By integrating Bridge’s banking... See more

We covered a lot of ground here, so let’s summarize our key takeaways here:

• Cryptonetworks are not companies. Income/expense/profit metrics generally do not logically apply at this level. We can try to assess the profitability of all token holders, and/or subsets of them.


• PoS issuance to stakers is not a “cost to the network,” and it isn’t even a net

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Interestingly, Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap is implicitly a gambit in this direction. ETH is sacrificing REV to its L2s rather than capturing it all to itself, in return for spreading the moneyness of ETH the asset. It’s unclear if its L2s will win out, or if they’ll continue to aggressively use and spread ETH in the future, but it’s clearly t... See more

Bitcoin is special. It was the first, and it’s still the most decentralized, credibly neutral, predictable, and reliable network. No other network can match its story, and perhaps no other will match these features.

Also, unlike most of its peers here, BTC makes no attempt to be a productive capital asset. Now, that may sound like a weakness at firs... See more

Crypto is designed to break down barriers, allowing the best money to rise to the top. We see this behavior in stablecoins, where >99% of stablecoins are US dollars. There isn’t a whole lot of organic demand for fiat currency #109. Many people are artificially restricted from holding dollars offchain, which is a major reason for the success ... See more

There exists no meaningful technical barrier between BTC vs. the field. Most other networks are obviously even technically more advanced. But we’re focused on the dollars and cents outcome here. Will any of these other assets be used in a similar manner over time as BTC, justifying valuations far in excess of their intrinsic value from producing in... See more

Aside from being productive capital assets, you have likely heard some variation of these two other buckets for assets (neither of which are necessarily mutually exclusive with each other or capital assets):

• Consumable / Transformable Asset – Sometimes also classified as commodity or utility value. Cryptoassets offer infinitely programmable, fast,

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It seems obvious that applications, not general-purpose networks, will capture the majority of cash flows generated in these systems over the long-run. This is already playing out. Apps have all of the leverage and pricing power with the end-customer. There’s still a big question though – how much MEV leakage will these apps leave around for the ch... See more