Lorenzo Valente(@LorenzoARK):A few thoughts on @santiagoroel country and taxes analogy. People love to say blockspace is commoditized and switching costs are basically zero. The numbers say otherwise. We're 10 years into this experiment and only 3-4 L1s actually matter. Same story as AI models: everyone calls them commoditized, yet everybody uses either Chatgpt or Claude. Coming back to countries and taxes, California is the best counterexample here to Santi's argument, and probably the model ETH is going for. A 30% tax is too much, but the current take rate is almost certainly too low. Why don't people leave California despite outrageous taxes? Weather, quality of life, the AI job market. No single factor, the bundle. ETH's real moat is the assets on platform plus ETH the asset. If Ethereum had $3-5T of AOP instead of $250B, this would be a very different conversation, and Hood probably never leaves. You need to coordinate 2-3 outstanding qualities at once. Good weather alone (Portugal), not enough. Low taxes alone (Dubai), not enough. Great quality of life alone (Japan), still not enough. @HyperliquidX aggregated so much demand precisely because it coordinated three things: great UX, deep liquidity, and strong execution tech. Any one of the three alone doesn't cut it. One more thing. There's the @ethereumJoseph theory: subsidize blockspace to attract applications, then raise prices once network effects are real. The problem is that Ethereum the blockchain needs a strong ETH asset in the meantime. Hard to do that with ETH at $1,500. And for everyone saying we need thousands of Robinhood L2s: there just aren't that many Hood-like companies to go around. Robinhood has 30M accounts and ~$300B in deposits. At that scale you're not closing a Robinhood L2 every week. The math matters here.

2026.07.14 16:03

A few thoughts on @santiagoroel country and taxes analogy. People love to say blockspace is commoditized and switching costs are basically zero. The numbers say otherwise. We're 10 years into this experiment and only 3-4 L1s actually matter. Same story as AI models: everyone calls them commoditized, yet everybody uses either Chatgpt or Claude. Coming back to countries and taxes, California is the best counterexample here to Santi's argument, and probably the model ETH is going for. A 30% tax is too much, but the current take rate is almost certainly too low. Why don't people leave California despite outrageous taxes? Weather, quality of life, the AI job market. No single factor, the bundle. ETH's real moat is the assets on platform plus ETH the asset. If Ethereum had $3-5T of AOP instead of $250B, this would be a very different conversation, and Hood probably never leaves. You need to coordinate 2-3 outstanding qualities at once. Good weather alone (Portugal), not enough. Low taxes alone (Dubai), not enough. Great quality of life alone (Japan), still not enough. @HyperliquidX aggregated so much demand precisely because it coordinated three things: great UX, deep liquidity, and strong execution tech. Any one of the three alone doesn't cut it. One more thing. There's the @ethereumJoseph theory: subsidize blockspace to attract applications, then raise prices once network effects are real. The problem is that Ethereum the blockchain needs a strong ETH asset in the meantime. Hard to do that with ETH at $1,500. And for everyone saying we need thousands of Robinhood L2s: there just aren't that many Hood-like companies to go around. Robinhood has 30M accounts and ~$300B in deposits. At that scale you're not closing a Robinhood L2 every week. The math matters here.

Santiago R Santos@santiagoroel

2026.07.14 12:27

Ethereum is the federal government and instead of charging 30% tax it charges 1% and lets states and counties charge the bulk of the tax Security is the most mispriced asset in blockchain land federal states can make it hard for citizens to leave and few (ie US) can enforce worldwide tax - as a US citizen you pay the tax because they can use violence against you blockchains can’t and never will they are by design open source and easy to leave, so they will always struggle to grow GDP via taxation Users (builders and user aggregators) will always have an incentive to leave and go to a tax friendly jurisdiction once you get taxed any amount because they control the user. So Ethereum and others can’t tax too much I don’t see an easy solution to this problem other than being an integrated chain that owns the user relationship and can monetize the flow and enforce some control of who enters and leaves Robinhood can do this Stripe can do this Infra crypto-native providers can’t And if that’s the case then what’s the point of blockchains if you have a single entity that controls it. Databases all the way down. Robinhood is simply replacing citadel and monetizing the flow themselves via robinhood chain - as they should