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Jeff Dorman

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@jdorman81

CIO @arca - digital assets investing | Former COO of Harvest Exchange | Former Lehman, Merrill, Citadel | Huge Cleveland Sports Fan | CFA charterholder
Los Angeles, CA ar.ca Joined December 2010
1.7K Following 48K Followers 11K Posts

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Jeff Dorman Verified account @jdorman81
There are a few Crypto hills that I will die on.

I've been writing about these topics, and debating people for years.

Today I'm laying them all out in one place. I will happily debate any of these topics with anyone at anytime.

A thread👇
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Jeff Dorman Verified account @jdorman81
Really well written ethereum:native thesis that once again fails to explain ANY reasons why the token is valuable. 10 years into this experiment and the most well thought out investment theses for owning an L1 token are still just a bunch of gobbledygook rationales for why the protocol is cool, and then a relative value argument vs some other asset that has no way of being valued.

An L1 token by itself has almost no value. The value comes from the DEX and the stablecoin revenues built upon it. Unfortunately for ETH and solana:So11111111111111111111111111111111111111112 and most others, they don’t capture any of those fees. Even Multicoin is giving up on SOL in favor of hyperliquid:native for this very reason. They call it “distribution, capital and data” rather than “DEX and Stablecoin fees”, but it’s the same argument. The only way to capture the value of your chain, or your DEX or your stablecoin is to have all 3 working together.
Joseph Lubin Verified account @ethereumJoseph 2d
Why ETH is the store of value for what's coming

We are almost certainly heading into a period of high inflation and extreme economic and social volatility. As inflation and risk erode the purchasing power of nation-state money and many other assets, it will matter more than ever to hold assets that keep or grow their value.

Gold and BTC are high-powered money and excellent stores of value. ETH goes further.

Not debt-based. Like gold and BTC, ETH is not debt-based or credit-based money.

Censorship resistant. Like BTC, or gold and silver held physically, ETH transactions on Ethereum L1 can't be censored. That's true for simple payments and for complex smart contract programs like DeFi, and those programs are guaranteed to execute.

Cheap to hold. Like BTC, ETH is relatively cheap to hold and store securely.

Cheap to use at any scale. Ethereum is cheap and easy to use whether a transaction moves $1 or billions. Any well-formed transaction is guaranteed to execute.

Sound, and getting sounder. ETH is disinflationary and becomes ultrasound, meaning deflationary, during periods of high network activity.

Broadly useful. ETH has many uses across the Ethereum economy, and that economy will grow by orders of magnitude as finance, and eventually every industry, moves onchain. Global adoption of the Web protocols in the '90s and '00s transformed the world economy. Ethereum is the foundation of Web3, the user-centric, decentralized web.

Collateral money. ETH works as collateral, and collateral that grows in value over time is a powerful thing.

Home of stablecoins. Ethereum hosts the bulk of stablecoin activity. Stablecoins serve as payment money and as unit-of-account money.

Despot-proof. Like BTC, ETH can't be used by a despot to financially exploit or repress citizens. Over time that should have positive geopolitical effects.

Programmable. ETH is programmable money. You can attach arbitrary logic to transactions and build an entire economy on smart-contract-based agreements and business processes (see shodai.network).

Transparent or private, and auditable either way. Money and financial instruments on Ethereum can be public or private, and in both cases selectively disclosable and auditable. Privacy tools for retail and institutional users include VPNs, mix networks, shielded and privacy pools, Railgun, stealth addresses, Kohaku, and zero-knowledge proofs in many forms, including on L2s and on private permissioned EVM networks linked through bridgeless synchronous composability.

Future-proof. By the end of 2027, or partway through 2028 at the latest, ETH will be quantum-safe and AI-safe money.

ETH is the base money of an exponentially growing ecosystem that should keep growing for decades. Its monetary premium will keep rising, because retail, corporate, and government users will all need to hold some. Part of today's premium is speculative: Ethereum dominates smart contract blockchains, but it hasn't fully hit its stride or gone mainstream yet.

Machine intelligence will supercharge every scientific and technological pursuit and grow global GDP bigger and faster than any of us can imagine. Ethereum L1 and modular Ethereum L2s will undergird most of the high-value agreements, transactions, payment flows, and complex business processes behind the coming hybrid human-machine decentralized economy.
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Jeff Dorman Verified account @jdorman81
Had a great time talking to the @therollupco crew today. Think my part starts around the 1:26:30 mark.

I promise to never to do a podcast again though if I caused the crash.
The Rollup Verified account @therollupco Nov 5
Happy Thursday, live from Tokenization Tower

We're all gonna die. Lol. What a morning, we saw US tech stocks lose $1.3 trillion in 30 minutes & the Nasdaq 100 is on track for its worst day since April 2025.

Some big liquidation event certainly just hit the tape.

Lots to cover today...

Frank Chaparro of GSR joins us in studio on capital markets after the blue wave.

Then, Jeff Dorman of Arca on the protocols with real revenue, real buybacks and real customers.

Great show today, the line-up is in:

1:30 PM ET @fintechfrank - @GSR_io
2:00 PM ET @jdorman81 - @arca

See you on the show.
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Jeff Dorman Verified account @jdorman81
The best returns have been apps that have moved up the value capture framework, not L1s. There is still no evidence that L1 tokens benefit in any way from underlying network usage. An L1 only benefits if they also own the stablecoin fees and DEX fees. An L1 by itself has little to no value. Take away the "Fat Protocol thesis", the "first mover advantage", and a bunch of desperate VC money deployed into the "next big L1" and this entire subsector of the crypto investment landscape would be 1/100th the size.

As we've always said, a token EVENTUALLY has to have buybacks to have any value, or at least a path to future buybacks. But that will never happen in meaningful size for an inflationary L1. This entire sub-sector of crypto is a smoke screen for investors. The value has always been, and will continue to be, in applications built on top of L1s.
Matt Hougan Verified account @Matt_Hougan Nov 3
People write off crypto projects that aren’t yet focused on value capture, not realizing that can change over time.

Some of the best returns of the last year have been in projects moving up the value capture framework.
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