Saw a ton of hot takes lately about @monad $MON and “public chain moats.”
As someone who actually builds on an L2 @base and watch how @base ecosystem really builds over time... sorry to break it to you, but the whole “just build an ecosystem and they will come” fairy tale has been brutally murdered 🥲
Picture this: you pour your soul into launching a brand-new L1 or L2, pure-hearted, ready to change the world.
First question that slaps you in the face: “Where the hell are the users and money coming from?”
You go begging for partnerships. No replies.
You offer to pay KOLs to shill. They ghost you.
Congratulations, you just learned Lesson #1: nobody cares about your 1M TPS or fancy tech.
What people care about is “Will this team rug me or not?”
Solution? Raise a fat round from top-tier VCs so you can wave the “see, big boys believe in us” flag.But VCs only invest if:
- Stanford/MIT/Berkeley degree
- FAANG alumni badge
- Bonus points if you or your co-founder has a PhD in cryptography and a cool GitHub
Somehow you nail all that, find the crypto-PhD co-founder, and actually close the round. Hooray!
A few degens now follow the “raised $XXM” news, show up to farm testnet airdrops, and KOLs finally slide into your DMs asking for paid deals. Progress!Next problem: how do users actually get money onto your chain?
- If you’re an L1 with no token yet → testnet faucet or bust
- If you’re an L2 → go kiss every bridge team’s ass. Most bridges are pool-to-pool, so the only assets you get are USDT, USDC, ETH, and maybe some LSTs. That’s it. Selection smaller than a gas-station sandwich....
And even those assets arrive in homeopathic doses because everyone’s still half-convinced you’ll exit-scam tomorrow.
Oh, and those “USDT/USDC” on your chain? They’re just IOUs wrapped by the bridge.
Bridge goes hack/bankrupt → your users are permanently divorced from their money. Good luck explaining that on Twitter.
Want real native USDT/USDC? Cool, call Tether and Circle. Opening offer: 5-10 million dollars.
So now your DeFi scene is…
USDT↔USDC (wow arbitrage galore)
and ETH↔wstETH (the most exciting 0.3% yield known to man)
Liquidity still dogshit? Obviously. Real liquidity lives on exchanges. You beg exchanges to open deposits/withdrawals for your chain.
Most of them: “Sure, $500k–$2M please.”
TVL still zero?
Time to cold-DM every whale and institution, promise them 50-100% yields paid in future tokens. Classic Ponzi onboarding.
Want real DeFi protocols to deploy?
They laugh in your face unless you personally seed them with $10M–$100M liquidity. Otherwise why would they bother when there’s no depth and no users?
GameFi & NFTs? Clinically dead, stop it.
Projects that actually reach out? 99% just want your grants.
They copy-paste some trash contract, deploy it, beg for tokens, dump them, then redeploy the same thing on the next 50 chains. Rinse & repeat.
Even the honest projects won’t stay exclusive to your chain. They also want market cap, so multi-chain = obvious move.
Memecoins then? Sure, the community’s favorite cope. But you can’t just launch them yourself (regulators exist).
Hire a market-making team? Huge fixed cost.
Third-party meme teams? First few tokens might moon… as long as the whales don’t cash out on day 2. Then new buyers dry up → real buy pressure collapses → whales dump → price craters.
Bots jump in, frontrun everything, gas spikes to 1000 gwei, MM spreads widen to 10%, users get rekt by slippage, everyone turns into hit-and-run gamblers.
End game: musical chairs at Mach 10. Eventually the music stops and nobody’s left.Suppose by some miracle you hit the exchange KPI and finally list the token. New problem: who do you NOT screw over?
- VCs want 10x or they’ll short you into oblivion
- Whales who lent you TVL want their bags protected
- Grantooors want their tokens
- Market makers want their fees
- Exchange wants airdrop/staking rewards
- Community wants airdrop
- Team also wants to eat
Choose your fighter. Someone’s getting dumped on. (Spoiler: it’s usually retail.) You list! Celebration!
Exchanges open deposits/withdrawals for… your native token and maybe ETH. That’s it.
Still no native USDT/USDC (remember the 7-figure fee), so no exchange will enable U deposits to your chain. Big DeFi whales refuse to touch sketchy bridges with 10-figure money.
Normal users have to: buy your token on exchange → withdraw → swap to ETH/U on your chain → pay 2 sets of fees and slippage. Friction = death. No native stables → no RWA protocols either.
Even Chainlink says “lol pay us $5M or enjoy your janky price feeds.” And that’s when you finally realize:
Launching a general-purpose chain and “building ecosystem” is the biggest collective delusion in crypto. It’s all one giant Emperor’s New Clothes parade.
The buy pressure isn’t coming from your tech or fundamentals—it’s conspiracy theories: “I heard Sequoia is propping this up” or “CZ secretly accumulates.” Eventually every dollar that ever entered your chain quietly flows back to ETH, SOL, or Base. The Matthew Effect is real and it’s brutal.
Real moats are:
- Which assets exchanges support deposits for
- Existing liquidity pools & slippage
- Variety and composability of DeFi legos
- Spot/perp/options markets
- Ability to hedge
- User habits and muscle memory
All the stuff the winners already have in spades.
So back to the only question that matters:
Why the hell would anyone use YOUR chain?
Why would any serious protocol deploy only on YOUR chain?
Tech is basically irrelevant at this point. The only thing that moves the needle is uniqueness that actually helps trading or yield, at the consensus level.
Examples: Hyperliquid’s cancel-order priority for market makers, or Solana’s upcoming ACE (application-controlled execution).
Anyway, rant over. This is why VCs no longer bet on new L1/L2 as standalone chains, and all new L1/L2 chains are incubated by exchanges or apps.
Mic drop. Peace ✌️