Crypto Assets Analysis: Churches, Amusement Parks, and Casinos — Three Perspectives on the Public Chain Ecosystem in 2025

Since the ICO boom in 2017, the ecosystem of public blockchain cryptocurrencies has undergone significant changes by 2025. Nowadays, in addition to Bitcoin as an asset and USD stablecoins (especially USDT) entering mainstream applications, other application scenarios and asset pricing on public blockchains are still in the early exploration stage. Against this backdrop, I want to return to the first principles of currency and examine the value of public blockchain tokens from the three basic functions of currency: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. This article will combine theory with current observations to deeply analyze how these three functions are reflected in the development of public blockchains from the perspective of a public blockchain practitioner and discuss the corresponding ecological strategies and future trends using the metaphors of 'amusement park, casino, and church.' (Background: When AI threatens human survival, we need Satoshi's design philosophy more than ever) (Background Supplement: From Satoshi Nakamoto to SBF: Who is stealing the soul of the crypto world?) *This article is framed and drafted by kowei and compiled after collaborating with GPT o3 'in-depth research.' The role of the medium of exchange: Blockchain as an 'amusement park.' The medium of exchange refers to the function of currency in exchange. For public blockchains, this is reflected in users paying transaction fees to use the blockchain, and block producers (miners/validators) earning revenue from the blocks. Here, I will use the analogy of a public blockchain as an 'amusement park' to analyze: the blockchain sells block space and transaction ordering rights. The former is like the admission ticket to the amusement park (base transaction fee), while the latter is like the fast pass for amusement rides (Maximal Extractable Value, or MEV, the additional value obtained from ordering transactions). In the economic design of modern public blockchains like Ethereum, the base transaction fee (ticket revenue) is often partially burned to reduce token circulation (for example, the EIP-1559 mechanism), while MEV revenue (fast pass fees) is increasingly shared with block validators/stakers. These two parts constitute the 'real income' of the public blockchain, with the native token of the public blockchain serving as the medium of exchange for paying these fees. It is worth noting that as blockchain scaling technology develops, the TPS (transactions per second) of public blockchains continues to rise, and the importance of base transaction fees may decrease accordingly—long-term, almost any public blockchain has the potential to exceed a throughput of over 10,000 transactions per second, except for Bitcoin. Therefore, in the future, how to effectively extract MEV will become increasingly critical. From the perspective of the 'amusement park,' to maximize park revenue, two aspects need to be focused on: first, allowing as many people as possible to get on board and play; second, allowing those willing to cut in line and enjoy privileges to pay high prices. Correspondingly, in blockchain, on one hand, it is to maintain low transaction fees to lower the entry threshold for users and expand the number of transactions; on the other hand, it is to promote more high-value activities on-chain, allowing players willing to pay to execute transactions first to contribute more MEV revenue. The former means that public blockchains need to have ample scaling capabilities and enough applications to fill high TPS—for example, developing simple on-chain games, social applications, or even digital certificates, supply chain on-chain scenarios, etc., to generate massive transactions (even if the economic value of a single transaction is not high, it can accumulate a considerable total transaction fee). The latter requires the emergence of a sufficiently diverse and active economic activity in the public blockchain ecosystem, allowing arbitrage, liquidation, and margin trading to be profitable, thus creating more situations where individuals are willing to pay high priority fees. However, from current observations, the actual useful types of smart contracts on most public blockchains do not exceed ten; it can be said that many blockchains' 'amusement facilities' are not rich enough to attract users for long-term repeated consumption. This is also the direction that public blockchain developers need to work hard towards: increasing the diversity and stickiness of applications to enhance the ceiling for MEV extraction. Strategically, different public blockchains have different trade-offs regarding the 'amusement park model.' For example, Ethereum chooses to enhance scaling through Layer 2 solutions, maintaining the decentralization and security of L1 while drawing a large number of transactions to the second layer, allowing users to enjoy low fees. This means that Ethereum L1 itself may bear a lower daily transaction volume, but through rollup settlement mechanisms, it still extracts part of the transaction fees and retains higher-value transactions and MEV opportunities in L1, especially after the introduction of Base rollup, where even the MEV of Layer 2 might be captured by Ethereum L1 validators. In contrast, the high-performance single-layer blockchain Solana is more like building a super-large directly operated amusement park, providing high TPS and low fees directly on L1 to accommodate all foot traffic. In the future, public blockchains pursuing the function of a medium of exchange need to focus on scaling, low fees, and MEV revenue, attracting a large number of users on board while ensuring that ecological participants (especially token holders or stakers) can share the dividends brought by transactional activities, making the native tokens of public blockchains more like 'shares' that increase in value due to the prosperity of the amusement park. The challenge of the unit of account: Blockchain as a 'casino.' The second function of currency is the measuring (pricing) unit, which is what people use as the basis for accounting and pricing. In the crypto world, I liken it to a public blockchain as a 'casino' that issues chips: public blockchain tokens are akin to casino chips, which can only achieve the so-called Moneyness Premium when people are willing to use these chips for pricing and trading. In the early crypto community, there was actually a popular coin-centric thinking: veteran players often used BTC or ETH to measure the returns of other assets, for example, how much a certain altcoin has risen relative to BTC/ETH. However, as the market grew and matured, the adoption rate of stablecoins (especially USD stablecoins) surged, and people's mental expectations almost completely shifted to USD-based pricing. The quotes, order books, and AMM pools of exchanges are generally priced in USD, leading to the gradual decline of the practice of pricing based on BTC/ETH. Nowadays, most cryptocurrency transactions involve stablecoins, with about 99% of stablecoin market capitalizations pegged to the dollar, effectively making crypto asset transactions priced in USD. The past notion of using Bitcoin as the 'world reserve currency' has been reversed by reality: the trend of high dollarization in the crypto market is becoming increasingly evident. This change has altered the motivations for investors to hold public blockchain tokens: besides using a small amount of tokens for transaction fees, crypto users have little reason to hold a large number of tokens of a particular public blockchain long-term, especially when that token lacks adequate 'real income' backing. Furthermore, in fact, as of now, no public blockchain has achieved long-term deflation or high cash flow returns through transaction fees + MEV revenue, leading to many public blockchain tokens lacking intrinsic purchasing motivation and performing poorly. Theoretically, a 'Fat Protocol' argument was once popular, suggesting that the tokens of the foundational protocol layer (L1) would be more valuable due to carrying a lot of application value than a single application. However, in practice, it has been found that relying solely on underlying technical status is not sufficient to provide monetary premium to tokens. For public blockchain tokens to become a unit of account that people are willing to hold and trade, there must be large applications or asset pools that can be priced using that token. In other words, some explosive new applications are needed to guide users to 'enter the casino to buy chips,' allowing massive external funds (USD) to flow into the ecosystem and settle on the tokens, enabling public blockchain tokens to obtain a premium in their pricing function. Looking back at crypto history, each round of market frenzy almost corresponds to such application scenarios: for example, during the ICO boom in 2017, people rushed to participate in project financing using ETH, which boosted the demand for the chain token ETH; during the DeFi and NFT waves of 2020–2021, users sought liquidity...