Why Crypto Still Struggles to Capture the Value It Creates | Roundup

You are seeing this trend in crypto right now at the open source layer at, you know, at the credibly neutral layer of actually making certain parts of that more closed source over time to capture more and more value. And I would make the argument that Ethereum actually is still potentially the only one with the north star to be a purely open source. Quick shout out to today's sponsor, Katana. We'll hear more about Katana's 1 billion cat campaign later today, but for now, let's get into the episode. Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on bell curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

All right, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve. You got me, Miles Zave. Happy New Year. How's the time off?

Great. Great. Happy New Year. Got some sun in Florida. Are we past the Larry David deadline for saying happy new year?

I think that's Jan 3 based off of Larry David's uh evaluation. I'm actually Is the Is the rule just you can't say happy new year after a certain period of time. That feels like a Larry David rule.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. We're getting close. Miles, you had some heart attacks over the the break.

I did. I did. A vicious 20 pound terrier bite my fiance. Uh so it's it's just he's getting old. Uh so yeah, don't he was threatened. You have a new lady in your life and he was threatened. He's like, I guess my miles. That's his way of showing it. But yeah, apart from that, all good. A year is off to a great start.

You know what it certainly is. I think 2026 is going to be a good year and we we are going to speak today mostly about software. So there is a the theme to this episode is commercial open- source software. So we're going to go back like really brief history of just how software came to be as an industry because similarly to crypto it was kind of this amorphous thing that there was no IP protection around no business model around and you know it kind of grew in this way that disrupted the the profit stream of the computing industry which was very hardware oriented uh but it did give rise to open-source software which people didn't really understand how to make money on for a long time.

You have some success cases like Red Hat it's used as a tool within big web 2 competition you know the Amazon's and the Googles of the world have leveraged open source as a as a tool as it were but L1's fundamentally broke this trade-off and so we want to introduce crypto into this story and lineage lineage of software and then I would love to actually end on AI and how AI is even complicating the picture further and that'll lead into this uh kind of three-part series that the three of us are going to embark on on AI and crypto and what the intersection looks like there because even though it went through a little bit of a hype cycle earlier this year and last year or 20 in 2025 and late 2024, I think we're all convinced that there's a there there and it's very interesting. And so we're going to do a deep dive on that and maybe sift through the wreckage of some of the broken ideas and uh try to find some diamonds in the rough.

Miles, I know you've done a bunch of research on this. maybe I can just kick us off with the just to kind of set the context of the history of software in general and how it evolved and then maybe I could turn it over to you for the development of open-source software and some of the early business models but it's a really interesting history and I've talked about this on the podcast before I would highly recommend the book how the internet happened by Brian McCulla who talks about some of the early days of the internet software et now he kind of starts with the internet but the the through line in between the development of the internet and software in general is that it was largely academic and in many cases government and kind of researchfunded right so for the internet you had arponet which was part of the defense apparatus of the United States in the early days of kind of computing you know the business model was entirely about selling large computing mainframes right this was the IBM business model you'd sell a computer the size of a 18-wheeler you know to some university or government um you know government entity or something like that and the software was really an afterthought and you did have some early uh pieces of software like Unix coming out of Bell Labs but it was really pretty sleepy until I think really Microsoft was the the first massive company um that got built that showed that you actually not only could uh make money with software but that you could actually be the platform and extract and disrupt a lot of the the hardware profits and that was kind of the core platform that was super super valuable and some there's some really interesting stories of those early days of you know IBM this sounds hilarious to say now IBM just didn't think software was coarse so they licensed out Microsoft to build software the operating system as it were for a bunch of the early machines and you know Microsoft didn't actually build it themselves they they licensed DOS which was kind of this open source thing for uh for $50,000 I mean there are these crazy stories um you know that QOS license is probably the best uh the highest ROI investment in the history of business and even in those early days the business model of closed source software was a huge question mark because uh software was not legally uh intellectually protected IP. It wasn't IP so you had no protections. Anyone could just go in and copy it. Microsoft was part of the lobbying effort that uh you know branded software as um intellectual property.

However, what that did do was imagine, you know, as nerdy as crypto is, imagine the early internet enthusiasts that were building software when computers didn't even had screens. They just had these little lights, you know, that you would input your software or it would output a certain series of lights like Morse code uh that did a calculation for you. Imagine how those types of people. And so when Microsoft and some of the early software businesses pushed to do closed source and treat software as intellectual property, it led to this movement that would eventually become open-source software. So you just had people similarly this will probably rhyme with a lot of the folks that you see in crypto today which are who are highly ideologically driven and just said this there's just an ideological perspective that code and writing code should be free and that cultural idea uh that meme ended up being really really powerful and some of the early open-source uh you know tools were uh there was kind of GNU and free software so there's a guy Richard Stallman who launched the uh genu project in 1983.

And he really was kind of this software is a it's a freedom and it's a moral issue kind of guy. The issue is that there were a bunch of compilers and tools and libraries but there was no kernel. Uh that got introduced in 1991 with Linux tovaults. So he was a Finnish student um and he just had this hobby kernel called Linux. And the the the magic ended up being the combination of these tools, these libraries, these compiler, these free open- source tools with the kernel. And that gave birth to the Linux operating system. And you know, there's a whole there's a whole really interesting history here that probably doesn't bear mentioning. Um, but a lot of things happened like you might see in crypto today, right? Because Linux wasn't a for-profit entity, they had to figure out things like governance. And the other thing that ended up happening was this grassroots community of developers that contributed for free because of this ideological buyin and this um you know resonating with the message of moral freedom and things like that and Linux Linux really grew and developed and became highly used.

The question was how do how do you monetize it? And people didn't make for for some and this proceed this is kind of the origin of many of the value creation versus value capture stories that people love to talk about in web 2 and it found their way into web 3. I don't know I'm monologuing it here a lot miles I don't know if you want to like Red Hat was a super interesting development in this history and that gave birth to this investing style and this whole category of commercial open source. So, I've talked way too much already. Can you take us away with the red?

That's perfect. Perfect leadened. Um, yeah, I think there's a lot of things that rhyme between like uh this open core commercial open source software space and crypto. Um, and I think in general we're doing this uh episode. um because there are lessons we can draw from I think the earlier you know open source and like open core uh because it came earlier and there's just like a lot of things that rhyme with what we see in crypto um and so you know I think OSS was like you know kind of as you said like a push back against making you know everything proprietary and seeing these like large incumbents just you know kind of cement their advantages right.

And it really started with I think which is even older which was like the free software movement, right? So there's like an ideological movement that software should be free. And frankly it sounds a lot like the early like crypto folks. It sounds like a lot like uh the early Bitcoin core devs and community as well as Ethereum, right? Like we're talking about open access to services and those services are run on software. And so, but maybe backing up a little bit to to open core like um there was a split in the communities between these ideological folks that believe everything should be free and folks that looked at open source software and sawm this is an interesting com like commercial strategy, right? And so how this usually works is that somebody will put out some sort of open-source software product or service.

And in like a very bottoms up grassroots motion. This will become, you know, if it's good, it will quickly become loved within like developer communities, right? This is like what they're playing around with on the weekends. Uh, you build up a ton of GitHub stars. Uh word of mouth is like very very powerful within these communities. You'll see the stuff on like hacker news, right? Um and then once you have like a uh you basically use open source as like a distribution hack, right? And from there you commercialize or monetize your open source project through something that's called like an open core company. And you know crypto like analog is like this is like the development companies right associated with this is like the red hat for Linux right when the Linux foundation is maybe like the you know like token foundation that we see in crypto a lot um and it's usually centered around like adding proprietary features and reducing friction generally right so like they will offer a hosted version of the SAS uh like a SAS version or a hosted version of the open source software to reduce like DevOps headach they will think about okay what are like proprietary features that we should only include in the paid version even if we maybe make all like the source code available like some of it's going to be MIT license some of it's going to be like proprietary right um again we see that in crypto a lot and I think like the the general sort of philosophy has been um you keep like best in terms of best practices like the features that are used by individual contributors um those are most similar to your open original open source users those should be part of the open source codebase. The features that you know um buyers or managers of the software want. So this is things like role based access control or like maybe even just like usage limits like that should go into the enterprise you know SAS version that you actually pay for.

And maybe what I'll say like on the open core side is that there are like it is it's not a new category. It's been around since Red Hat. It's definitely grown a ton as a category, but there are still a lot of skeptics. And those skeptics like the conversations between like the proponents of open core companies and the skeptics of it sound a lot like what we hear in crypto where you know I think like the at some point if you're not careful you run into a a tricky trade-off space as a company that is like both the proprietary like or like the primary contributors of the open source project and the ones trying to monetize that project with a company. Um, you know, at some point you have to kind of decide like should we if we have 20 to 50 people on the team, how many people should be focused on adding features to the open source version versus the paid version, right? And what we've seen quite a bit is that you obviously like the incentives are such that you want to prioritize the paid features. Um, and so we've seen the pitfall in the past of like open source communities losing uh or open source projects losing the communities that made them successful because you know they just tried to monetize as much as possible and they basically stop investing and making the open source project like you know competitive right um or you know you relinquish your control of the open source project uh governance comes into play like the only time I've ever heard heard like software governance outside of crypto is in the open core communities.

And they don't usually have tokens, right? So, it's actually like kind of complicated. But we've seen really successful versions of this, right? Like Supabase is like a a great great example of this. So, they took, you know, they built like a database project on Postgress SQL. Um, and people love it. people like really love it and it's now like a legit competitor to you know large large companies like Google right for for database software. So, yeah, maybe I'll pause there just on like that's the open core side of how like where does open source software like touch in a commercial setting like the first one is this rise of open core companies and this is like a a really cool category frankly I find it interesting to study um recommend folks checking out like open core ventures or um OSS capital uh those are two like venture venture companies that have like uh wrote a lot about this this space and I There's a lot to learn, I think, uh, as we'll get into.

So, I think that maybe to start to parse these out into different eras. I think the Red Hat story was a really big one because it proved to investors that there was a way to so you kind of had this trade-off, right, of closed source software which was, you know, highly scalable, very monetizable, uh, and open- source where it had these superpowers where you actually had a bunch of contributors who were highly in many cases highly, highly talented contributors who would work for free and get wide adoption, but as soon as you tried to monetize it at all, you lost the core advantage. And so it actually there was a period of time in tech where it felt like both sides were going towards their extremes and stagnating. So you had the the Balmer era of Microsoft where it was just you know enterprise software and kind of but kind of boomer central and they were losing talent. They couldn't get developers or anything. At the same time you had Linux which was taking off but you couldn't monetize it. And Red Hat was this super interesting data point that even if you don't sell the software, you can sell things like stability and build a big business that they eventually sold to IBM for somewhere around the tune of $34 billion. And that that was a strong data point.

And I think since then, a couple of things have happened. We're going to end this episode on crypto and AI, which are huge developments, frankly, in this long tapestry and trajectory of open source software development. But two other things that happened were uh cloud. Cloud was a huge moment in open-source software and it made web 2 giants get far more soph sophisticated about how they leveraged open- source software as a competitive tool within their tool belt um often to neutralize the advantage of uh people that they were competing against. There's a great example here of uh Kubernetes uh being released by Google to commoditize what something that a product that Amazon was trying to release. I also think maybe we don't really need to talk about this, but I do think GitHub and this kind of era that we're entering of developers uh producing code on Amazon for like kind of status and clout and cred to leverage job offers and things like that later. Crypto, there are so many things like that that rhyme with crypto and CT. I I do think crypto is really good at anticipating the future, often unintentionally, but I think that's another thing interesting thing to call out.

I I do want to call out um I I want to go into this era of cloud and maybe we can bleed a little bit into AI here about how big corporates think about leveraging open source software as a tool and you know there are great a lot of guys like Bill Gurley analysts and VCs have talked about this and you know listening to them this and this kind of rich history it it just makes me think in crypto we're we're a little bit naive I think about open source software sometimes and we've overgeneralized and learned some of the wrong rules. here. And I one um one pretty persistent strategy that big corporates will use is they will leverage open- source to neutralize um the the a competing product or to you know to use you know investing speak like commoditize your compliment. So there was a great example when cloud was becoming a thing and you had AWS lead the way but then Google you know kind of fast followed and actually Microsoft with Azure and um there's obviously a hardware component towards building out these cloud data centers but there's a software component as well and soon everyone kind of became convinced right that there's not an enormous amount of differentiation in between the underlying cloud computer the software I is a it could be a big lockin area and if you build your business on you know AWS how easy is it to port into another cloud provider?

And Amazon anticipated frankly a lot of I mean I guess they didn't necessarily anticipate it because you already had Apple and that like um you know app store lock in but the thought process was okay if we think that we're heading towards a future where there's a low switching cost between different cloud providers. If we build an enormous amount of software like tools, libraries, whatever it is to lock it in and make it very difficult to switch. That sounds really great. That's I could think I could juice my margins. I could do what Apple was doing and juice my hardware margins or whatever it is. Um and so Google rushed to market with Kubernetes. They didn't want Amazon to be able to limit the switching costs. And so they launched Kubernetes, this open source piece of software to neutralize that layer um and to make it um you know the switching costs very easy. So, I think that's just a fascinating example of how, you know, and and of course the messaging is Google loves developers and we're doing this as a gift and it's free, but it was just a genius business strategy. I think that's fascinating. Um, as an example here.

Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, Facebook's doing kind of the same thing with Llama. Um, I haven't been as close to it. Um I wonder is it a little spicy take like is it is base a version of that and taking the EVM and that's obviously led to more sort of monetization for Coinbase taking that away from Ethereum even though Ethereum core devs are like roll up centric roadmap go do this um I think in hindsight that's like a maybe a bit of a stretch and a lot of nuance there but like yeah if you squint maybe fair I don't know if you guys agree.

Yeah, I think maybe you know it's been a great sort of historic view of open source and you know where winners have come out from open source versus closed source etc and business models there. Interestingly enough Miles you just mentioned like Llama from from Meta. Um without going too deep on the crypto and AI side uh yes on the open- source AI side what's happening today is Llama did or Meta did come out with that business strategy but ultimately actually very recently they decided to kind of dep prioritize that path because they realized that closed source models were just getting too far in front and even though they were trying to dig into the market share of um you know open AI etc it didn't make enough of an impact and so it is interesting And I think we're seeing it in blockchains today as well. You know, we have these major layer ones like Ethereum and Salana etc. which actually do align a bunch of incentives and have a lot of people contributing etc. And Miles of course you're very very close to this at Delta with regards like how do you align incentives? How do you get developers on board etc. And I think Mike you mentioned it before with regards to like switching costs. And so again taking back to what you said as well Miles around like base. So you have these open layers in crypto which are like credibly neutral like Ethereum, Salana, etc. And I would say actually that base in some sense is actually taking the open- source stack of Ethereum, you know, especially the EVM and then monetizing that on top with like their existing distribution. And so I think you see many many parallels actually in open source software that you guys just spoke about and crypto today.

And I think we're maybe halfway through that transition in crypto right now with regards to actually monetizing some of the open source software that's been created in the past. But it's still an open debate I think right now. How can you create lock in? Because it goes against crypto's fundamental values. And I'm sure we'll touch on that in this episode with regards to the business model itself of trying to monetize open source software. And creating lock in goes against the freedom and permissionless of crypto as a technology. So yeah, it's a it's an interesting space in crypto because it's one of the only technologies ever in open source software which has made it possible to actually align incentives and create a business with. But then at the same time, we're now seeing the reverse is true where you can also monetize it, centralize it, and go against crypto's ethos and still have a good business.

100%. And yeah, maybe to take like a little bit of a step back and then we'll come right back to that. save. Um I think like uh the open source communities like outside of crypto and open core has always been like very interested in crypto and vice versa of course but I think they you know I remember listening to this uh awesome podcast with Nick Carter and Joseph Jax. Uh he's the founder of OSS Capital from like I don't know 2018 2019 um on Castle Islands pod. Not to plug another pod on our pod but it's a good one. Um, and I think at the time we were looking at um some of the trade-offs of this open core strategy, right, which always ran into these like um tensions around what to try to monetize, what to, you know, keep open source and how to um, you know, relinquish governance but keep sufficient control, um, how to, I guess, not like lose that community that got you there in the first place.

And they looked at L1s in general, like because at the time it was mainly just L1's out there as potentially a breakthrough here, right? And Zave, I think you just referenced this a little bit like for the first time, um, let's say Bitcoin and Ethereum was the representation of open-source software where monetization was baked into usage like um, you have first of all like blockchains introduced verifiability and like hard guarantees to the internet. Um and so you know unlike the internet anybody could if you ran the software and you connect to the network you can verify that everybody is playing by the rules right but to do that right it has to be open source in the first place right so all of L1's are open source because that's required to fulfill this like promise right of adding guarantees to the internet but on top of that there's a single instance right of Bitcoin and Ethereum that is valuable it's one shared state network and to leverage the services provided by this network whether that's for payments or holding this like nons sovereign store of value you have to pay you have to pay the operators of the network um and I think with EIP559 with the burn associated with that right now that's actual direct value acrruel to token holders so you have a development company that puts out this blockchain they own a bunch of tokens that represent some you know stake in the chain either like direct control for like POSOS networks um or you know a say over like who can run validators or something like that right and they if there's like monetization to the token or value acral to the token baked into usage of the blockchain uh we no longer have to build like a commercially viable separate company on top of the open- source software we can just hold these tokens and if it's a great product like all of the people who built it and hold those tokens get rich. It's fantastic. So that that was like actually the primary breakthrough uh and why and why the space was like looking at crypto like oh my gosh maybe they they've actually got something really interesting here.

No, there's lots of nuances and like even within L1's where monetization is baked into usage like um we know that at the very least this is like for DOS protection so people can't just like spam the network. I was going to say the it's funny right well that and also the burn was originally introduced as a UX optimization. It was a uh you know the auction that people used to have to people forget before 1559 the auction mechanism of getting a transaction placed on Ethereum. It was crazy. You had to estimate the gas. You had no idea what I mean. So it was really a spam prevention mechanism and it was making it was the the nuance there is it was a UX feature although you didn't have to burn you didn't have to burn the base fee. You could have given it to the next there were other schemes, right? But the burn was chosen uh to prevent off-chain validator uh collaboration and uh and it ended up looking a lot like value acral. I've flip-flopped on this a lot. I've been like h I think that's overhyped. But now I I think it's very clean. And Miles, I just want to I I want to make sure that folks didn't miss that because this was the fundamental innovation of at least general purpose smart contract platforms like Ethereum.

And Bitcoin does get an enormous amount of credit. It absolutely uh should. It solved huge computer science problems, the Byzantine general problems and proof of work. Those are massive innovations that led to Ethereum. But Ethereum itself deserves an enormous amount of credit for breaking this trade-off around monetization of open source software because Bit Coin hasn't really solved that. It its design is, you know, things like fees and REV are naturally it is unoptimized for it is a big meme coin. I think it's a very compelling meme coin um just like gold is, but there's no hard productive value. That's not to say it's not real value. It's just it's valuable in the way that precious metals are valuable. Ethereum is very different and it broke this tradeoff of you have something that's open source and so you get free contribution and um and people want to use it and buy it because it's neutral. Uh, you you get that trade-off, but then you don't have the negative trade-offs of, you know, closed source of it being monetized and yada yada. You can have both through this this monetization scheme of you need to pay for usage in the native token.

For what it's worth, this is also why I'm not a big fan of people talking about Ethereum's monetary premium like it doesn't need all these. You have this beautiful beautiful mechanism, right? You solve this unbelievable challenge. The the uh the ability to generate fees should be massive here um and super exciting and I don't understand why people continue to short change Ethereum on in that regard. But that is that is the fundamental trade-off that it broke. And I think that crypto has a really bad habit of taking like overgeneralizing solutions from the early success cases of Bitcoin and Ethereum into a bunch of places where it doesn't belong. And this is where I want to go into like L2s and infrastructure which I think just had the wrong mental model. And the my favorite one on Bitcoin is the 21 million hard cap people have applied to applications. It's like you don't need that. Um, we don't need to reinvent equity financing. It's much better to not have a hard cap. But I think that people took this this idea the the breaking of the trade-off and paying in the native token as a way of monetizing open source software and they overgeneralized that to applications and additional layers of middleware and infrastructure where it didn't belong. This is where you get this whole idea of a utility token which is a broken idea and and doesn't really make any sense.

To be fair, like they broke the Owens broke the trade-off of like uh uh the value acal trade-off associated with open source software. I don't think they broke the governance trade-offs. Um cuz I the other one I mentioned is like the more you lean into like open- source, you know, ethos and decentralizing control uh and like of the open source project itself, the harder it is to be competitive, right? So, I would argue that like Bitcoin and ETH have been, you know, they had like ideological roots and they've stuck to those. Um, and it's been challenging to stay competitive with, um, I'd say like new open-source blockchain projects. Say like Hyperlid and Salon are probably the best examples of like breaking both trade-offs. um they've managed to find a community of users that like are okay with them retaining enough control to stay competitive and they've implemented you know the sort of value acrruel like baked into usage but um then yeah outside of that like there's a ton of ton of you know uh issues I I think it basically gets really hazy as to like whether or not like we um break these trade-offs outside of L1's. I would argue no, but I think everything outside of L1 still should be most of everything outside of L1's in crypto if they're part of the value prop of providing verifiable services like they should be open source. It's just monetization is not as naturally baked into them.

Remember like Zerox, like one of the oldest AMMs or Dexes in the space originally had people paying fees, you know, in that token and everybody's realized that's a really really bad idea. Or it's just like a bad product, right? Um, but yeah, Z, I know you want to jump in. So, please do.

Yeah, I I think maybe just to paint a picture here, one thing that's interesting which has been happening in crypto the last year or two especially or few years I should say is in the open- source landscape Miles you mentioned Salana and Hyperlquid as well uh coming up as you know major open source layers in crypto which is definitely true however at the same time Ethereum and actually Vitalic came out with a tweet about this you know very recently I think it was this week around the sort of northstar for Ethereum as being this incredibly neutral layer and how important that is for Ethereum and he coped some criticism for that. Salana was built as an open- source software stack that was a bit more top down. So yes, it's open source. However, there are like little colors of closed source in Salana, especially at the application layer. So when we used to work with Salana apps very early on when we were building light back in the day at Chorus one, a big criticism of the Salana ecosystem was actually how they were closed sourcing the apps. But it's never been significant enough for people to care and stop building on Salana. And so that goes to show that base layer being open source is actually theoretically more important at least the market decides that right now than the applications themselves. I also want to like point out Hyperlquid here cuz yes again it is another successful open- source layer. However, a lot of the binaries etc that they were giving to validators were not open source. And so there's a lot of hyperlquid actually that is not open source. And so I just want to like actually point out this trend which is I do think that you are seeing this trend in crypto right now at the open source layer at you know at the credibly neutral layer of actually making certain parts of that more closed source over time to capture more and more value. And I would make the argument that Ethereum actually is still potentially the only one with the north star to be a purely open- source layer. And again, we've spoken about this on the bell curve in the last few weeks, but I do think that's interesting to point out that you're now seeing a divergence between new layers trying to top down close to a certain pass and capture value versus like the Ethereum style of incredibly neutral north star.

There was a debate that went late into the night of block works last night. Uh we launched this data website and there was a debate around how should you treat the rev uh fee stream of something like Ethereum compared to the revenue of something like Hyperlid. um from a valuation perspective like one do you put them in the same bucket um like a hyperlquid and ethereum like the rev gets equally paid out to token holders and it's generated in this very different kind of holistic network rake sort of way versus the revenue stream that comes from hyperlquid is derived from the it's it's almost like having a very successful owned app on top of the ecosystem and so should you treat those the same anyway there's there's like an we're not going to go down this rabbit hole there's a deep rabbit hole there to go down.

Can I add Can I add one little like uh comment on that?

Yeah.

A little bit closer to this conversation. I'm um I've seen like L1's be really successful from a monetization standpoint while being open source uh when they have MEV and they host execution directly or they host an app directly, right? Um the you and I did a bunch of podcasts on like Celestia back in the day like modular blockchains and there was this idea of like um and maybe Ethl1 like uh for rollup fees is in the same boat of like Costco right where they're you know kind of like um not able to monetize directly.

Great business. So like yeah no that's a great like don't worry guys like we'll monetize like Costco right? We're not like because I'm building a similar like Delta is similar like that. Like we do we very purposely offer apps to control their own execution environments and you're just paying for like settlement right which is b basically like aggregated you know state updates and there's no easy way to price that because you have no you can't just be like yeah 1% of your revenue should go to the base layer because it's that's not the way like these these modular blockchains work right so maybe just as a fun like because I love nerding out on like blockchain financials I think that if you host execution directly And there's ME across a lot of apps. That's been proven to be like very monetizable. If you choose to host a blockchain with a single app, like that's been clearly monetizable. Um, and the jury is still out on I think like um any L1s that don't host like execution directly. I mean, look at Bitcoin. It's the biggest one. There's no execution really. There's nothing happening over there. So, I don't know. Sorry for the tangent, but yeah, we we have our whole story or our whole episode to do on buybacks. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but um let's I I want to get back to layer twos here specifically and I want to talk about this tra. So, okay, let's go back to our point in the narrative story here. We are very excited because historically there's been this trade-off of you get these wonderful things with open source, but you can't monetize or you get closed source and it's very difficult to build community. Amazing. L1's introduced this great trade-off where you pay for usage and you seemingly get in some cases maybe governance excluding air miles the best of both worlds. So we start to over but maybe because governance is so slow we can't move fast it's oified we start to get and fees are high on something like Ethereum we start to get these pro uh let's call them vendors uh because I think it's going