The whole idea of Public Blockchain started with Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Blockchain was created to facilitate p2p payments between two parties in a distributed and decentralized manner. The currency being used to facilitate these payments is BTC.

BTC as an internet currency was quite popular before 2014. A lot of people were using Bitcoin back in those days to accept cross-border payments. It was a better alternative to PayPal because you were saving a straight 5% on payments, which PayPal used to charge in those days.

I got my first exposure to Bitcoin in 2013, and I've seen many of my freelancer friends using Bitcoin to accept payments in those days. The use of BTC as a payment started to decline mainly after the shutdown of the popular dark web marketplace Silk Road.

We started seeing the rise of privacy-focused crypto like Dash, Zcash, Monero, Verge, etc., in that period of 3 years from 2014-17, and all of these coins were launched on their own PoW-based blockchains. They were kind of L1s but designed for a specific purpose.

We started with PoW monolithic blockchains designed to serve a specific use case. They had a native coin that was used as a currency to transact on the network, and users also needed to pay some fees in that currency to facilitate a transaction.

After the rise of privacy-focused PoW L1s, we saw the launch of the world computer - Ethereum, which allows devs to build all kinds of possible blockchain use cases on its L1 network. They provided dev tooling, frameworks, and programming languages to make decentralized apps

Ethereum also created a new way of fundraising for projects through ICOs, and it created a major demand for Ethereum L1 back in 2017-18. Ethereum L1 ended up hitting 1M daily transactions on Jan '18, and that was the first time blockchain got its first 1M daily transactions.

If you look at the early success of ETH from the past 2 cycles, the demand for the token usually came from speculative avenues like ICOs, DeFi, and NFTs. People were transacting on ETH because they were expecting a return. Now, that was not the case with Bitcoin and Monero

More people entered only for speculation post-2016, I believe, when BTC was trading around $500 and ETH was at $1. The demand shifted from utility to speculation back then. Now, you get a different audience to serve, not freelancers, but people who are here to make money.

The whole idea of creating demand for an L1 is to create speculative avenues for people to make money — it's as simple as that. In the current cycle, Solana cracked the code with memes. Memes are simple, they are universal, and people connect with them easily. Since Solana

1M daily tx was the peak of ICO speculation on ETH 7 years ago, and now Solana is doing 60M very regularly. That's 60x growth in terms of daily usage on the leading blockchain. ETH, on the other hand, is still stuck at 1M tx per day, and they're now focusing on scaling

Now the demand is moving to L2s, and these L2s are using ETH as a payment gas fee token. But the tx fees went down by 100-1000x on L2s compared to what we saw in ICOs on the ETH network. So even if we get 100M daily tx on L2s, we're going to see less demand for ETH.

What makes more sense here is having an L2 with a potential 100M daily tx, its own token as gas fees, staking features, collateral in DeFi, to actually get the right value capture, and speculative premium for traders and investors too.

On the infra side, we would be ready with high-performance altVM-based L2s on ETH, but pulling demand for the network and finding speculative value for the native token would require constant exploration of new use cases to bring speculators on board

The future of blockchains will be heading towards finding new use cases for hyper-speculation. AI agents were a great new addition there; if Base could have a token, it might rally. MegaETH is trying to crack the metaverse code, which is actually a bigger pie for the future in

There are new L1s like SUI doubling down on cracking the code of SocialFi by tokenizing social media engagement and distributing fair incentives in the creator economy. We also have an emerging side of RWA tokenization, where a massive demand could be generated from both retail

In the future, I believe some of the blockchains will settle on the use cases they've mastered, where they have managed to actually create demand for them. ETH would probably emerge as a global settlement layer for DeFi. It still has the highest share in DeFi TVL and

Solana gained major market share in DEX trading volume, has the most onchain users, and could actually create more speculative avenues like memes to retain its user base for the long future. Sui got a solid start, with a great community, solid PA, and ongoing traction. I

L2s are going to see a major demand shift, as we've seen in the past from Arbitrum to Base. It's all a matter of finding better speculative avenues, and people will move chains. Arbitrum was the top L2 then, Base is the top L2 now. Who will become the next popular L2 is

L2 networks need to get more demand. They should be able to capture market share from Solana, and they also need to figure out the right value capture for their token to actually create a sustainable feedback loop around price action.

Its not about the tech, its about how your tech would help people to make money, the nature of audience intreatcing on Blockchains has been changed, and teams should think more about cracking speculative demand codes rather than creating a ghost chain with theoretical TPS

I hope you enjoyed reading this thread. If you appreciate my work, please like, share, and repost the tweet below

mand bootstrapping is much required for new chains — and that could only arrive if there are enough reasons for a user to bridge to a new chain. With better cross chain UX moving chain without knowing about it would create more funnel to new chains if they manage to create bett

Glad you liked it bro :)