BroadChain News, April 27, 09:46 - Blockchain is essentially a monetary track, and the value of a protocol depends on its economic output. Composability and real-time verifiability enable native crypto businesses to achieve vertical integration. Tokens become an incentive alignment tool throughout the entire tech stack—if a team deliberately captures value at every layer, it can build a moat.
Vertical integration accelerates the velocity of capital circulation within the ecosystem, and if executed properly, it can even directly translate into revenue streams. Take Uber as an example: as a demand-side aggregator, it extracts about 30% of fees from each "commoditized" user. Although drivers and restaurants try to bypass the platform, they ultimately give up due to the irreplaceability of the reputation system.
In the Solana ecosystem, Jupiter demonstrates a similar logic: it aggregates order routing across multiple exchanges to provide users with the best prices. Unlike Uber, Jupiter aggregates trading venues rather than users themselves. Spotify, on the other hand, is more like a loose supply-side aggregator—in 2024, out of its $20.22 billion in revenue, $13.75 billion was paid to copyright holders, with only $0.04 of every $1 in revenue going to artists.
Web2 aggregators rely on Moore's Law to reduce the cost of smartphones (e.g., 800 million users in India alone) and network bandwidth, driving billions of users in growth. In contrast, the total addressable market (TAM) of the crypto economy is much smaller—an estimated 560 million people have been exposed to crypto, with only about 10 million active DeFi wallets last month. This is a fundamental difference between the attention economy and the transaction economy.
Three years ago, I predicted that blockchain would give rise to entirely new markets: NFT trading volume has reached approximately $10 billion, perpetual contract notional liquidation volume is about $14.6 trillion, and DEX trading volume is around $10.8 trillion. However, OpenSea's monthly trading volume has plummeted from $5 billion at that time to $70 million this month—markets emerge, evolve, and also die.