Claudio

ever since i was a kid i wanted to align on next steps

Folks Mobile is now Wield Money! → A new identity ahead of launch → Comment “WIELD” if you’d like to be an early tester → Get launch updates: wield.money More about the rebrand ⬇️

Genuine question bc neobanks confuse me. Most offer: - cashback higher than interchange - yield higher than the fed interest rate - no fees on wires, ach, etc - no monthly fees And yet a lot of them seem to be crushing it and raising a ton of money. I’ve seen some boast $200M+ revenue. Where is it coming from?

Who is actually accruing the value created in crypto? This started as a conversation on the @Blockworks TG group with @santiagoroel and a few others. Venture in crypto has shrunk a lot! and imo the main reason is that on-chain revenue pools have been far smaller than anticipated. From Blockworks data, total on-chain revenue was roughly $8B in 2025, so I wanted to see how much off-chain/Centralized companies are capturing from this industry by comparison. So consider the off-chain pool: public companies like coinbase, Gemini, BitGo, Bullish, plus crypto revenue from Robinhood, Galaxy etc and private players like Binance, Tether, FalconX, Anchorage, etc. The result surprised me: off-chain companies generate ~$70B roughly, consider roughly a range between 60B to 100B, 8.5x more than on-chain protocols and L1s. To put that $8B in perspective: even if you give on-chain protocols generous 70% EBITDA margins and a 30x multiple, the entire addressable market cap today is ~$168B ($8B × 70% = $5.6B EBITDA × 30x). That's the whole on-chain pie, less than a single mega-cap tech company. Do the same for centralized companies at a more realistic 40% EBITDA margin: $70B × 40% = $28B EBITDA × 30x = ~$840B of justified market cap. Even with lower margins, that's 5x the entire on-chain ecosystem. And to put even that in perspective: the entire centralized crypto industry, all of it combined, is basically worth one OpenAI or Anthropic. The breakdowns are telling too. On-chain, L1/L2 chains take almost half the pool (~49%), with launchpads/trading apps and DEXs/perps splitting most of the rest. Off-chain, it's exchanges and brokers dominating at ~66%, with stablecoin issuers second at ~19%, everything else (market making, payments, infra, asset mgmt) is single digits. Both worlds are extremely concentrated at the top of the same funnel: trading and the rails to do it. From a venture perspective, you were often better off investing early in L1s and traditional exchanges than in most tokens. It was a bit simpler than we thought. To me the common denominator: off-chain companies sit much closer to the end user than protocols and L1s. They own that relationship and monetize it well. They abstract away crypto's complexity: trade, stake, store, manage without ever touching a coldcard or metamask app and people pay up BIG for that. On-chain is clearly in a bear market, but the lesson for protocols, L1s, and on-chain primitives is to build and verticalize more. Get closer to the end user. One caveat: this is an approximation, done with Claude's help. Many of these companies don't have public earnings, so the private side (Binance, Tether, and especially "other private") is mostly an educated guess. Directionally though, the gap is hard to argue with.

You can move to Warsaw. Rent a penthouse in the city center for 1,800 dollars and have every Polish person you know tell you you're overpaying. For a penthouse. Set up a company in 3 weeks and pay 12% tax on your income. Feel guilty about it constantly because you're used to governments taking half. You'll try to find ways to give money away. It's a real problem. Hire 25 talented people for less than a 5 person team costs in London. Develop a permanent suspicion that something is wrong because business shouldn't be this straightforward. File your taxes in 20 minutes online and spend the rest of the afternoon wondering what German founders do with the 4 months of tax suffering you no longer have. Walk home at 2am eating a zapiekanka with both hands. No plan. No awareness. No keys between your fingers. Just vibes and mustard. Leave your laptop in a café and come back to find a stranger guarding it. Expect this everywhere from now on. Get your laptop stolen in Berlin 3 months later because Poland has completely destroyed your survival instincts. Get a full dental cleaning for 30 dollars. Go twice a year now because there's no financial punishment for taking care of yourself. Become the healthiest version of yourself against your will. Speak one word of Polish at a restaurant and watch the entire staff treat you like a son who just came home from war. Everybody is so friendly when you try their language that it feels unprofessional. You'll get used to it. Then you'll miss it everywhere else. Have a babcia in your building adopt you without your consent. She brings you soup weekly, calls you "that handsome foreigner," and tells you you're too skinny despite your 17 inch arms. You did not ask for this relationship but you cannot leave it. Spend your weekends browsing działka listings because a Polish friend took you to his garden plot once and now you understand. You don't even like gardening. It doesn't matter. Poland has changed you. Tell your friends in Berlin and Frankfurt what you pay for rent, taxes, food, and a gym membership. Watch them go silent. Then watch them book a flight to Warsaw "just to visit." They're not visiting. They're scouting. You know it. They know it. Poland always wins. It just takes one trip.

The "WhatsApp moment" for crypto has arrived. Last year, stablecoins settled more volume than @Visa + @Mastercard combined. The rails are here. It's now a war for distribution. I wrote about this in my latest @Forbes article ⤵️