1/ 🎉 Excited to share a new paper on @arxiv co-authored w @DavideCrapis & Fahad Saleh ( @CBER_Forum )! tl;dr We study Execution Tickets (ETs 👽), highlight centralization vectors due to heterogeneous MEV extraction abilities & capital costs, and quantify protocol MEV capture.

@real_philogy @Inter_Commune

A lesson for blockchains: Relying on Lindy breeds complacency. If your idea is fading, citing Lindy won’t save it. Survival isn’t proof of relevance—clinging to the past won’t stop the decline. Ideas still need upkeep to stay relevant.

If point 1 were the reason, then sure, I’d get it—that could be a valid business decision. Point 2 is where I take issue. It seems like the wrong business move. The idea that Uniswap should cater to ETH maxis is precisely the problem in ETH land. Many Ethereum applications focus on alignment while missing the bigger picture. The goal is to onboard the masses, which means meeting users where they are—and right now, they are on Solana. We in ETH land have over-indexed on CT, where the loud minority dominates, and somehow turned exclusively using ETH while shunning Solana into a religious virtue. The average user doesn’t care about these ideological battles. The average user just wants seamless interop, not abstinence.

@joao_wedson @Alphractal Why do think this happened?

apply (... if you can figure it out)

@0xargumint @sassal0x The network should have reasonable expectations on hardware. Ossifying the hardware requirements means that Ethereum won’t be competitive. As is, it’s ceding ground.

@0xargumint @sassal0x The idea that an Ethereum node can't handle this new load is outrageous. Those that can't should invest in better hardware. As a network we should be competitive.

Net-net, this is great, but this is just the start. We should be scaling mainnet automatically. I think it’s safe to assume that computers, networking, and all the core ingredients of the chain will naturally improve over time. See Moore’s Law, see Nielsen's Law, etc. We should, by default, be regularly increasing the gas limit. Skate to where the puck is going. My idea would be to have the voting mechanism work in the other direction, where people can vote to not increase the gas limit. If validators can’t keep up, they should vote to slow the gas limit increases. But the default should be increasing gas limits. Then, the incentives of core developers and validators would be to strive to improve the network to handle the growing supply of block space.

i agree with all your goals and hope we get there. i would separate eth, the asset, from ethereum, the network. your goals turn ethereum, the network, into a killer product. however, it is unclear how that translates to eth, the asset. for eth to have value, it needs to be tied at least partially to a rev story. that means mainnet needs pricing power. solana has demonstrated that its economics allow the network to capture value. in the case of ethereum, i still think that question is unclear. our current mechanism for scaling allows l2s to capture far more value than they share back to ethereum. in a world where we achieve the goals outlined in the post, i’m curious how you think about the business model. how does the eth asset accrue value?

@Benjamin918_ @2lambro @beefyfinance @pumpdotfun 1. The same apps ppl trade mentions on like Jupiter work for real use cases. 2. See the recent Securitize x Apollo announcement. Tradfi is coming to Solana

To be clear, this is not an endorsement of memecoins or an argument against Ethereum. It is an argument that memecoin volume doesn’t mean Solana can’t handle real volume—in fact, it actually shows that Solana can handle real volume profitably, and more successfully than we thought.

@based16z 🤝

@based16z i think we are talking about different things i don't care about "the product is the token" chains "the product is the chain" chains is why i am here and you need substance not just narrative for that

the whole idea that a new chain narrative alone will be strong enough to compete with solana doesn’t feel right. narratives without substance don’t allow for lasting competition. you may capture attention now, but if the product isn’t great, users will leave for the next shiny thing. the shift from ethereum to solana, i would argue, had more to do with solana actually solving a real challenge with ethereum: solana offered cheap transactions with composability. ethereum’s base layer became too expensive. its solution—l2s—fragmented the chain, and ethereum did not have a way to rein in the complexity. solana offered the speed of an l2 with none of the composability issues. solana had pmf, so the fresh narrative wasn’t baseless—it solved a pain point. as a result, people who came for the narrative stayed for the ui. the idea that a new chain can compete on narrative alone and sustain meaningful usage is hard to believe. i’m not just talking about “token go up” because, yes, the alt l1/l2 playbook can work. i’m talking about a new narrative alone—like a “fresh new zone”—leading to real, long-term valuable activity (a good proxy for this is rev), not just farming. this is all to say that to compete with solana, you also need to offer a better product. i would start with issues like spam, the inability to run a light client, poor specs and dev tools, and poorly executed versions of multi-fee markets. that said, i’m not sure if any of these advantages alone solve a user need so deeply that the product becomes sticky—they seem more like 10% improvements rather than game-changers. i won’t deny that a new competitor to solana could emerge. i just find it hard to believe that a competitor could succeed purely on vibes rather than offering a real product advantage.

@0xFunk "token" is not descriptive enough. neither was "erc20". we often use the same term for two different concepts because we conflate the data type with what is being stored

@based16z this seems like an argument for how someone can compete on the app layer

i think mev infra will mature on solana, and dev rugs are an app issue, not a blockchain issue. the mev game on a chain only becomes apparent when there is a lot of usage. then, the chain can figure out its infra to fix it. see the evolution of mev on ethereum. my point is that i don’t think another chain competing with solana can counter-position with “we have less mev” because a new alt competitor will end up being exploited for mev as well. and i definitely don’t think a chain can compete on “devs don’t rug” because that is not for the chain to decide.

As a caveat, I think Ethereum L2s are better positioned (as of now) for on-chain enterprise computation. See Base and other enterprise L2s. That said, L2s do not (at least currently) contribute a tremendous amount of fees to the L1, and Solana will have scaling solutions as well.