i read + annotated the entire 300+ page Messari 2026 thesis on a long-haul flight so you didn’t have to…
my thoughts + takeaways:
> the entire thing took me about 3hrs to cover back to back (better than expected). My 3 fav essays were “crypto money”, “tradfi x crypto”, and “decentralized Internet finance”. Covers 80% of the trends that happened this year. Honorable mentions on the crypto x AI and DePIN pieces. there’s an entire encyclopedia of the top50 chains that you can skim, although there are some interesting ones like Tron/stablechains/Solana propAMMs thrown in.
> cryptomoney was a really great piece to open, discussing monetary premiums vs. actual value/fee accrual of the chain. TLDR BTC is accepted as a macro asset, ETH somewhat but actually premiums correlate with BTC rather than stand on own 2 feet. Recurring issue for L1s is the lack of take rates in a cheap-chain world. If we say L1s are like cities, chain revs are like city tax - every other chain these days has low tax rate, disincentives activity on something like ETH with high tax rate. But low tax rate just means no chain revenue, which forces monetary premiums, which can only accrue to very few assets.
> the report itself has contradictory views on ETH. It says rightly in “cryptomoney” that ETH is 4th in chain fees, making 17% overall, and fees overall dropping (bearish take). But in “chains encyclopedia” ETH entry it says ETH is winning “all the core sectors” eg. RWAs (justifies bullish take). So why low revs even with RWA dominance? IMO it might be RWAs have low velocity of money - more like a passive vault product rather than active trading product, so doesn’t build trading volume.
> the word that popped out throughout the report but especially in the TradFi x Crypto section was “distribution”, which imo has become a bit of a buzzword. Ofc distribution matters, but only if it’s tapped in to some existing product flow/flow of funds (eg. coinbase lending allows users to coveniently access Base Morpho vaults from Coinbase UI). This isn’t always clear in the report. Eg. Discussing PYUSD rise it cites “PayPal has distribution” but doesn’t say HOW PYUSD is integrated into flow of funds/product flow to tap into distribution.
> by the same token, TradFi report seems a bit overly bullish on consortium chains just because they have “distribution”. We’ve seen this before - LVMH/other luxury brands launched a consortium chain called Aura for NFTs last cycle, but how many ppl have heard of this? Real challenge is how they integrate consortium chains with (1) real world flows and (2) the outer world of DeFi
> remain partial to the DefiBank thesis. This cycle is not just about bank coming to crypto but also how crypto goes after banks with faster global permissionless rails. Unlocking save, earn, borrow for a global audience is perhaps the killer consumer app
my thoughts + takeaways:
> the entire thing took me about 3hrs to cover back to back (better than expected). My 3 fav essays were “crypto money”, “tradfi x crypto”, and “decentralized Internet finance”. Covers 80% of the trends that happened this year. Honorable mentions on the crypto x AI and DePIN pieces. there’s an entire encyclopedia of the top50 chains that you can skim, although there are some interesting ones like Tron/stablechains/Solana propAMMs thrown in.
> cryptomoney was a really great piece to open, discussing monetary premiums vs. actual value/fee accrual of the chain. TLDR BTC is accepted as a macro asset, ETH somewhat but actually premiums correlate with BTC rather than stand on own 2 feet. Recurring issue for L1s is the lack of take rates in a cheap-chain world. If we say L1s are like cities, chain revs are like city tax - every other chain these days has low tax rate, disincentives activity on something like ETH with high tax rate. But low tax rate just means no chain revenue, which forces monetary premiums, which can only accrue to very few assets.
> the report itself has contradictory views on ETH. It says rightly in “cryptomoney” that ETH is 4th in chain fees, making 17% overall, and fees overall dropping (bearish take). But in “chains encyclopedia” ETH entry it says ETH is winning “all the core sectors” eg. RWAs (justifies bullish take). So why low revs even with RWA dominance? IMO it might be RWAs have low velocity of money - more like a passive vault product rather than active trading product, so doesn’t build trading volume.
> the word that popped out throughout the report but especially in the TradFi x Crypto section was “distribution”, which imo has become a bit of a buzzword. Ofc distribution matters, but only if it’s tapped in to some existing product flow/flow of funds (eg. coinbase lending allows users to coveniently access Base Morpho vaults from Coinbase UI). This isn’t always clear in the report. Eg. Discussing PYUSD rise it cites “PayPal has distribution” but doesn’t say HOW PYUSD is integrated into flow of funds/product flow to tap into distribution.
> by the same token, TradFi report seems a bit overly bullish on consortium chains just because they have “distribution”. We’ve seen this before - LVMH/other luxury brands launched a consortium chain called Aura for NFTs last cycle, but how many ppl have heard of this? Real challenge is how they integrate consortium chains with (1) real world flows and (2) the outer world of DeFi
> remain partial to the DefiBank thesis. This cycle is not just about bank coming to crypto but also how crypto goes after banks with faster global permissionless rails. Unlocking save, earn, borrow for a global audience is perhaps the killer consumer app
https://x.com/0xfishylosopher/status/2001671847302336692
Promises made, promises kept @0xCryptoSam
https://twitter.com/0xfishylosopher/status/2001734489060561255
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