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This week we learned that Stripe and Circle are planning to fire their own L1 chains.
Members of the Ethereum community quickly questioned why businesses should not launch L2 instead.
Ethan Buchman has a brief explanation: Vertical integration is profitable.
Christian Catalini of Lightspark reflects this view in Forbes.
“…Stablecoin publishers have a strong incentive to commoditize the rails or control most of their activities by issuing multiple networks and being at the heart of interoperability across them.
Circles/Stripes are simply doing what’s best for them. However, that means that these new chains are not contributing to availability fees for Ethereum data.
The team behind Phantom Wallet faced a similar “chain alignment” question when announcing the integration of high lipid Perps.
This contrasts with the Purpsdex, built on Solanas like Drift and Jupiter.
Inference from a chain tribalism perspective is fairly standard fares in this industry. But from an outsider’s perspective, making decisions is probably a very strange mental model. Builders need to do anything that is simply the best for the business.
Phantom CEO Brandon Millman made clear in this week’s Lightspeed Podcast.
“In the world of trading and PERP, how do you get the best price for your users? If you just look at objective numbers, prices, execution, liquidity, it’s all big and big in high-volume liquid.
Put another way, Hyperliquid has processed $37.1 billion in the last 30 days. Solana’s two biggest Perp Dexes, Jupiter and Drift, handled a $52 billion pack at the same time.
This is about 7.1 times the addressable volume, and should lead to very simple business decisions.
Since talking to application developers in the industry, most people have pursued a multi-chine strategy simply because it is the best for their business.
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