🦐 vs 🌊 | ETH vs EVM

Is it the seafood or the sea that you like?

When you go fishing, is it the water that you like, the fresh fish that you get, or the overall experience - that entices you? What exactly is there that is "sticky" about the idea of fishing? I hope you are not a pervert and did not immediately think of network effects - but if you did, welcome to the club, daddy, because you are right. If you need some context or education, see some stuff from a16z - https://a16z.com/2018/12/13/network-effects-dynamics-in-practice/

Sidenotes 👾 When you look into social networks or cryptocurrencies, network effects are your main catch. "Put simply, it is a phenomenon in which a good or service gains additional value as more consumers use it." - Uber, AirBnb, Facebook, etc. If you would apply it to BTC: the more people hold it, the stronger the Store of Value SoV narrative becomes. But what about other digital assets? Take any payment currency as an example. If the exchange between currencies and people has frictions, then it's easier if we all use one currency, like we all use USD for payments. But what if there were no frictions, then you would not have that value capture there. Because person no1 and no100 using it would have the same easy onboarding, offboarding, and so on. So you likely want to have friction if you expect value appreciation and stickiness. ?

Now to the actual topic. What is sticky about ETH?

It's not the open-source code of the chain. As we have seen, many projects have attempted to fork the code of Layer 1, but none are able to get the same exposure and community as Ethereum. So it's not about code or speed here really. Surely, some make their own chains, but that is usually for the sake of fundraising. So this is not the sticky flavour we are looking for. Community 👥 is the answer. Thousands of developers, contributors, evangelists, and other people around Ethereum.

But the question is, what exactly keeps this community together?

🎰 ETH = Bagholding Ethereums. Are they all bagholders, so they are working on value capture of Ethereum by building applications? In that case, it would make sense that the more people hold ETH and the more stick around & contribute - the more Ethereum appreciates. That's how incentives would work, so seems reasonable.

👾 EVM Is it actually the friendly tools developers use? In that case, one would see the applications become less L1-focused, and the community would evolve around EVM as a code-engine source, and not the financial bagholding spirit of ETH. But then the value capture would actually be at the application layer and not the layer 1 fat protocol thesis.

Why does this matter? This comes back to the question of value capture. Do developers really care about the growing ETH price, outside of security concerns. I personally feel like this is not the case anymore. In that case, the community will keep forming around the EVM as a concept, without any strong emphasis on ETH as an asset.

PS: there will soon be changes in the channel, for better or for worse!