The market really looks bewildered; the screen is filled with zoo MEME coins bouncing around, while the truly solid infrastructure projects are declining steadily, which is increasingly frustrating to watch. I directly withdrew my large positions from those overly congested, exorbitantly gas-costly L2s; I was thoroughly disgusted by the high friction costs!
The night before yesterday, I hurriedly wanted to transfer 100,000 USDT to supplement the margin of another protocol, casually opened Tron to prepare for the transfer, and saw the wallet prompt that the energy was insufficient and that several TRX would be deducted. At that moment, I was really broken! The long-term fatigue of being cut by this monopolistic infrastructure was fully amplified. We shout on Twitter every day that Web3 should go mainstream, yet even the most basic money transfer still feels like being taxed in the old era—it's too ridiculous.
At that time, I was so angry that I switched routers and specifically went to test the stablecoin-specific channel that was hyped by foreign media. After going through the entire process, it completely refreshed my understanding of public chain competition—it was so disruptive!
I didn't look at the boring TPS data from the official sources; I directly used real money to run high-frequency concurrent transactions on the chain. Once the funds crossed the chain, the difference in experience was stark! Now, the Ethereum ecosystem is trying to deal with gas fees, creating a bunch of ERC4337 account abstraction patches, making signature authorization complicated to the point of explosion.
But this payment-focused network is different; the underlying mechanism directly hardcodes the Paymaster payment system. When I transfer a large amount of stablecoins, at the moment I click to confirm, there are no gas fee pop-ups, no scary slippage warnings, and the other party's wallet balance arrives almost instantly!
The feeling of seamless transfers is exactly the same as Alipay; in this circle where even buying ETH as transaction fees is considered a threshold, it's simply a dimensionality reduction strike! It hides all the complex underlying elements of blockchain, and users only see money coming in and out—it's so pure.
But after enjoying it, I realized that behind this technological utopia lies a deadly commercial logic trap! The most common pitfall for retail investors is treating good tools as good investment targets.
I was stunned at the time: large transfers don't require native tokens, so how does this network capture value? After searching through their core code on Github, I found that the scythe was all aimed at the B-end! Ordinary users can run on the highway for free, but behind them, DApp developers, cross-chain bridges, and node validators must buy a large amount of tokens to stake in the secondary market to gain accounting rights and bandwidth. Isn't this the logic of Mastercard—earning money from merchants to subsidize users?
But the most suffocating thing is that the ecosystem on this chain is terrifyingly barren! Without a hundredfold dirt dog wealth creation, retail investors won't come in; without substantial capital accumulation, institutions are unwilling to stake tokens, directly falling into a deadlock.
Reflected on the K-line, it is even more tragic; the chips are highly concentrated, and the low-priced chips from early institutions press down like a mountain, making it impossible to withstand even a tiny bit of selling pressure in the secondary market. I looked at the tokens in my wallet that were at a loss and knew clearly in my heart that this thing can't make fast money at all.
Compared to the currently popular Sui and Aptos, it doesn't have a story that attracts geek developers with a new language; it's as dull as the backend clearing systems of traditional banks. But I still kept some reserves because the wave of compliance is coming, and the market is desperately lacking a clean settlement chain with no black or gray market and top-tier capital backing it.
Once traditional financial institutions connect to this password-free, gas-free channel, the current valuation isn't even enough for a fraction. However, before this heavy cash transport vehicle starts, we can only endure a long decline and washing out—there's no other way.
