moat

a16z Crypto Operating Partner Jason Rosenthal posted on the X platform that cash flow is the moat. The best companies often establish themselves by placing themselves in the "cash flow," and cryptocurrency is the first modern technology born for this purpose. If your startup has not designed its products and business models around these principles, you will miss a great opportunity. Thanks to stablecoins, funds and value can now flow at the speed of the internet—global settlement, 24/7 uninterrupted, with end-to-end programmability.Railway companies do not make money from locomotives, but from every ton of goods that pass through the tracks; companies like Visa and Jane Street are all part of the cash flow. Cash flow combined with network effects is one of the most enduring business structures in history. There is a lot of profit margin in traditional financial services, and processes such as payments, custody, lending, foreign exchange, settlement, and market making can all be compressed. Crypto entrepreneurs have the opportunity to build the next generation of cash flow businesses that are programmable, instant, and global.This model can also be extended to computing, GPU markets, AI training data, energy, robotics, space, rare earth metals, and other fields. Founders should ask themselves: Are you in the cash flow? When the value of product activities grows tenfold, does your revenue grow accordingly? In your target market, where are the segments with the highest profit margins relative to the value created?

According to the latest in-depth report by ChainCatcher, as Chinese memes evolve from scattered emotional memes into a complete trading cycle within a segmented market, Gate is becoming one of the key platforms with the earliest and most concentrated liquidity and speculation in this round of Chinese meme trends, thanks to its systematic product layout.The report points out that Gate connects the complete path of memes from launch, trading to long-short speculation through its product matrix, including Gate Fun, Gate Alpha, spot, contracts, and ETFs, allowing efficient price discovery and liquidity amplification on the same platform. Among them, Gate Alpha, as a high-frequency on-chain asset entry, stands out for its coverage density and launch rhythm for Chinese memes. Several leading Chinese memes (such as "I'm Coming" and "Crying Horse") achieved several-fold increases after launching on Alpha, with some tokens at one point accounting for over 20% of the total market trading volume on Gate, highlighting its liquidity support capability during critical windows.ChainCatcher believes that Gate's advantage lies not merely in "rushing to list tokens" but in the continuous validation of its systemic capabilities. Faster response times, a more complete product matrix, and the ability to accommodate liquidity and trading demands at different stages enable Gate to occupy a key position in the market and gradually form a sustainable operational infrastructure closed loop.

According to a post by a16z general partner Ali Yahya, privacy will become the most important moat in the cryptocurrency space.Ali stated that due to the difficulty of migrating secret information, privacy features are sufficient to differentiate new chains from others and create an on-chain lock-in effect. When users are on a public blockchain, they can easily transact with users on other chains, but on a private blockchain, the chain chosen by the user becomes more important, as once they join a particular chain, they are less likely to risk exposing themselves by moving to another chain.Ali believes this will create a winner-takes-all dynamic, as privacy is crucial for most real-world use cases, and a few privacy chains will dominate a large portion of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb responded by stating that rating the "blockchain moat as 3/10" is simply absurd, and even Santi has never believed that blockchain "has no moat."Haseeb pointed out that Ethereum has maintained its dominance for 10 consecutive years, during which hundreds of competitors have raised over $10 billion in an attempt to capture the market. However, after enduring the challenges from all these challengers over the decade, Ethereum still remains at the top of the industry, which itself indicates the presence of a strong moat.Haseeb stated that if such achievements cannot be considered a moat, then the concept of a moat may be difficult to discuss.

Alliance DAO co-founder QwQiao posted on platform X, stating that the most objective metric for measuring a "moat" is the cost/revenue ratio; other metrics are vanity metrics. If your business has a lasting "moat" and is in a growing market, then revenue should continue to grow. Conversely, if there is no "moat," you will either lose market share or can only maintain market share through price wars. Both scenarios will lead to costs stagnating or even declining over time.QwQiao emphasized that a business lacking a moat does not mean it has no value. It simply means that it is passing value to customers rather than keeping it for itself. In fact, this is true for the vast majority of businesses in the world.

Alliance DAO co-founder QwQiao stated on social media, "The reason I find it hard to convince myself to hold L1 public chain tokens long-term is not because their price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios are high, but because they lack a moat. Without a moat, they will be commoditized and unable to capture meaningful value.Nowadays, users can easily transfer across chains. Aside from a few complex smart contracts, most application developers can quickly migrate from one chain to another. Moreover, launching a new chain is easier than ever before. The switching costs of blockchain are far less than those of infrastructure like AWS.The only way I currently see chains strengthening their moats is by verticalizing and controlling the application layer. My observation is that chains like Solana, Base, and Hyperliquid have already come to this conclusion and are actively pushing forward. Of course, emerging enterprise chains like Tempo are doing the same.There is almost no doubt about the exponential growth of the crypto industry, but the best way to express this view is to bet on the application layer."

ChainCatcher message, Su Zhu posted on platform X stating: "Unless a black swan event occurs, I believe we are in the early stages of a super liquidity story, and the team has done an excellent job in designing a community around profitable products. There have been other successful perp trading platforms in the past, but these platforms often provide relatively little value accumulation for token holders. In some cases, tokens are directly used as emissions to generate dollar fees, which are pocketed by shareholders. This amounts to invisible dumping. In other cases, even if the token successfully generates a community, the usage of the underlying product itself is minimal. This defines most of the DeFi summer situation. Cases that have both are extremely rare.While centralized exchanges (CEX) have traditionally been extractive and opaque, often operated by founders from mainland China, high liquidity spot listings are simple auctions where value accumulation directly belongs to the tokens themselves. I think it is meaningless to discuss its idea as L1 before Hyperliquid truly launches, but I believe if the team continues to execute, it will pose the first significant challenge to recent memory's tier 1 CEXs. Overall, I think services and workflows will be simplified and purified, which will greatly benefit newcomers without legacy structures.I believe solana/pump.fun has a significant moat because all new attention is first attracted here. Competing with this will be extremely difficult, as what you need are thousands of permissionless launches every day, along with shared knowledge and beliefs, some of which will even reach billions of dollars. You cannot replicate this through a few pumps here or there or even community wealth effects—you need a culture and toolkit that has been gradually built around it. pump.fun is the worst in terms of crypto nativeness throughout the cycle (no points, no tokens) and the most profitable product, which is no coincidence, as it summons the energy of the external world into cryptocurrency."