Happy Friday! We've reset everyone's 5-hour and weekly rate limits.

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Many people know that Solana is actually quite centralized, both operationally and in terms of L1 design. And almost everybody knows that Solana rapidly copies Ethereum's successful products and inventions, as is everyone's right. But almost nobody realizes that Solana's culture of pursuing growth at all costs has made them exceptionally receptive to trying wacky, unproven app use cases, even if these apps seem ridiculous or are tiny for years. For example, I once had a conversation with a top Ethereum KOL where he swore all of DePIN was a scam. But Solana's willingness to pioneer this unproven sector has turned into a major strength for them. Who is to say there is no "legitimate" or even revolutionary DePIN use case just over the horizon? More importantly, we should be optimistic and eager to discover it, and not pessimistic and cynical and making excuses that shut down the conversation. I'm very sick of Ethereum's excuses. Ethereum people are super curious about the long-term evolution of the app layer, extremely attentive to the contemporary zeitgeist in the (Ethereum) app layer, and often deeply incurious and apathetic about what apps might end up being huge in 6 to 24 months. Personally, I think our lavish conference culture of a core group of people flying around the world to exotic destinations and working on their social status games is partly to blame. To borrow Paul Graham's term, Ethereum has a lot of scenesters - especially ones that are already rich and thus for whom status is often the primary thing actually being grinded. At a high level, the risk here for Ethereum and ETH is that Solana's weaknesses might be overcome by outcompeting us in actual real world growth. Especially because if even one of these wacky ideas that they are willing to try turns out to be important, maybe they could on board hundreds of millions of daily actives within a year. Who knows? We should be greatly concerned with this risk, but most Ethereum people scoff at it. It's not even on their radar. Another example of this, closer to home, is that I work on a pure software payment framework. This is based on a big idea that a single open source codebase could one day replace 95% of the world's proprietary payment software. A linux for payments. Few in Ethereum care at all about this open onchain payments vision. But you know who does care? Solana. They built Solana Pay. Ethereum's lack of app layer adventurism shows itself in our periodic hackathon finalists. As soon as a new use case shifts into Ethereum's stringent overton window, that use case quickly pops up in the next round of finalists. Ethereum's hackathons often seem to reward conformity more than anything else. Ethereum's culture of, pardon me, cowardly conformity around truly novel use cases is a phenomenon isolated to the app layer, and not the base layer. Eth base layer researchers and developers enjoy broad intellectual legitimacy whenever they propose whatever kind of crazy new construction or trade-off. I'm not sure why we see such a stark contrast between the level of curiosity in Eth's base layer vs app layer. Nobody would have expected that a lack of courage and surplus of conformity in app layer culture might be Ethereum's greatest weakness. But imo this era, it's turning out to be the case. But the future is wide open and there's plenty of time to course correct. From an investment perspective, I will be watching these details closely as the cycle continues.

🧵 On how the Solana community changed my life!