Reflections on public blockchains in 2026:

Random musings about public chains in 2026:

1. This playbook—“controlling inflation + high interest rates to attract deposits + the DeFi three-piece set + the founder’s dog meme + we have our own hyperliquid + crazy OTC selling to liquid fund”—can no longer work.

2. This is not only a problem Monad and MegaETH need to face; it’s also a problem Rise, Fogo, and even N1 need to face. As for old-school public chains, it depends. Sei and Polygon feel like they’re still messing around, while most have already given up.

3. The loyalty of projects incubated from public chains on day one still looks questionable, because there are only a handful of founders in the industry who already have options like BNB Chain and Solana—even Base. Most teams deploying on a new chain are watching the public chain foundation’s money bag. And once they raise funds with endorsement, and after they get the first wave of startup users from the public chain community, founders have incentives: 1) build their own app chain to support the valuation; 2) switch to other chains to participate in competition.

4. So much so that some founders have started not to say they are part of the “xx ecosystem” anymore, and instead say that the xx chain is our “GTM Partner.”

5. That’s why ecosystem projects that are too weak are like a cripple you can’t prop up; but projects that are too strong are like Lü Bu stabbing the foster father in the back.

6. The old laissez-faire, neutral-style public chain development model has basically come to an end. The valuation model based on MEV revenue needs to be revised (here @LeePima). Now, public chains are more about carrying a kind of controllability instead of possibility—under the premise that the economic system is controllable, you build fintech.

7. After that, the public chains will be a centralized power structure: top-down dev shops and CVCs. The treasury’s main role is to do M&A—crazy vertical mergers rather than cultivating the ecosystem. That means there won’t be king makers anymore like solana (cc. @mablejiang).

8. In that sense, BNB Chain, Tempo, and Monad are moving in the same direction—only it’s a matter of south orange north citrus and resource-allocation bias.

9. The final question comes down to: at this point, what model should we use to estimate FDV and then ride the hype? And the skill sets are completely tailored to growth-management and operations-management roles for the growth model of the coin-selling-and-siphoning-around-the-loop economy—growth managers, operations managers, and so on. The tickets from the old era probably can’t get you onto the ship to the new era.