OpinionBlockchainMarketsSolana
|8 min ReadCrypto’s Exponential Bet: Why Chains Still Deserve To Be Expensive
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Alpha Briefing: Crypto’s mood has flipped from “it is all worthless memes” to “everything is wildly overvalued and about to be exposed,” just as new high-performance chains like Monad and MegaETH face unprecedented hostility before launch. This piece argues that smart contract chains are still exponential bets, closer to early Amazon than mature utilities, and that forcing them into P/E-style valuation boxes is a category error. If the exponential in open, programmable finance plays out, ETH, SOL and credible challengers are still priced on scale, not on today’s run rates.
There was a time when new L1s launched into curiosity or silence. Today they launch into a firing squad. Monad, Tempo, MegaETH and others are taking incoming before they even ship mainnet blocks. The default reaction is no longer “interesting, let us see if it works,” it is “why is this worth anything at all.”
The deeper shift is not about one chain. It is that a big slice of the market has quietly decided smart contract platforms, as a category, should not be worth hundreds of billions. If ETH at 300 billion dollars and SOL at 80 billion dollars are seen as a bluff, then the prize for winning the L1 game looks fake as well. Why cheer for a new contender if the trophy itself is believed to be imaginary.
From Financial Nihilism To Financial Cynicism
A couple of years ago the dominant mood around altcoins was pure nihilism. Nothing mattered, everything was a meme, valuation talk was cope. That spell has broken. Stablecoins, DeFi, on-chain perps and rollups are too embedded in real flows to dismiss as empty.
What replaced it is subtler. Call it financial cynicism. The new script goes like this: some of this clearly has value, but chains are trading at five to ten times what they “should” be worth. Wall Street will eventually run the numbers, look at PE ratios and revenues, and the air will come out. In that story, you can trade the stuff, but you definitely do not want to be the last one holding the bag when the smart money walks away.
That mood explains the hostility toward fresh L1s. If ETH and SOL are assumed to be terminally overvalued, then any new chain priced off a fractional chance of reaching their scale feels like a scam. The idea that a project with a 1 to 5 percent chance of becoming the next $ETH or $SOL could already be worth billions is treated as an insult rather than standard probability math.
In reality, this is how markets have always priced binary technology bets. Early-stage biotech names with a sub-10 percent chance of curing Alzheimer’s trade in the billions long before phase 3. The expected value is simple. Huge payoff times small probability. Crypto is not inventing that logic, it is importing it.
The other thing cynicism gets wrong is the witch hunt for “who is greedy.” VCs, market makers, CEXes, farmers, founders, KOLs. Everyone is accused of squeezing the sponge one cycle too far. Of course they are all greedy. So are you. Functioning markets do not require anyone to act against self-interest. If the thesis on programmable money is right, greed is not the bug, it is the fuel.
Revenue Meta And The Limits Of Linear Thinking
Part of what feeds the new cynicism is the “revenue meta.” Analysts now drag out charts of protocol earnings, L1 fee revenue, PE multiples and profit margins. They put Hyperliquid, $HYPE, Pump, Sky and other buyback-heavy tokens in one bucket and ETH or SOL in another. One group looks like exchanges with clear cash flows. The other looks messy and overhyped.
Those charts are useful. They are also incomplete. Investors always had the option to buy exchanges. Coinbase stock, BNB, centralized venues, brokerages. Yet people still chose to buy base-layer assets. They were not unaware that exchange-style entities could spit out cleaner EBITDA. They wanted a different exposure.
The real question is not whether REV or another clever metric can “justify” a valuation this quarter. It is what regime you think you are in. If you assume on-chain activity is roughly linear from here, then revenue multiples and PE logic make sense. You value ETH or SOL like a mature utility. In that world, most current market caps look stretched.
If you believe the system is still in the exponential phase, revenue meta is at best a sanity check and at worst a distraction. You do not value early Amazon by arguing about its PE in 2001. You ask whether e-commerce will eat the entire retail universe and, if so, how long you can stomach volatility.
Amazon’s Long Flat Line And Crypto’s Awkward Adolescence
Look at Amazon’s financial history. For more than two decades, revenue grew and net income hugged the zero line. The little gray bump at the end of the chart is where traditional analysts finally got the profitability they demanded.
Now look at Amazon's stock over its first ten years. Mostly sideways, violent swings, endless op-eds declaring the model unviable. If you insisted on treating Amazon like a boring linear business the whole time, you were consistently wrong. The growth curve that mattered was not quarterly earnings, it was global adoption of online shopping.
Crypto’s growth is messier and tied to macro. Cycles are sharper. Regulation bites harder because blockchains mess with the state’s core function, money. But the pattern of exponentials hiding inside noise is familiar.
On-chain TVL that used to be measured in millions now lives in the hundreds of billions. Early DEXs scraping by on single digit millions in daily volume have been replaced by venues that routinely match tens of billions. Stablecoins went from a fringe dollar wrapper that newspapers called a ponzi to a 300 billion dollar sector entangled with central banks.
If you accept that trajectory, the right question is not “does today’s fee run rate justify a 300 billion dollar ETH.” It is “what does the world look like when open, programmable settlement rails carry a material share of global financial assets, and how much of that value leaks to the base layer.”
Why General-Purpose Chains Still Have A Prize Worth Winning
The core bullish case for $ETH, $SOL and any serious challenger has never been that they resemble exchanges. It is that they are the operating systems for open finance.
Blockchains turn dollars, treasuries, equities, points and weird internet assets into a common file format. They allow every wallet, app, protocol and bot to speak the same language, twenty-four hours a day, across borders. That connectivity is not a cute niche. It is the same structural force the internet unleashed on information and commerce, now aimed at balance sheets.
If that exponential runs its course, base layers do not have to be perfectly efficient toll roads to justify large valuations. They only need to be the scarce, credibly neutral computers that an enormous volume of economic activity coordinates around. The prize is not this year’s fees, it is owning a slice of the network that everything else needs to touch.
This is why big, patient capital is still willing to sit in chains through brutal drawdowns. History has taught those allocators not to fade technologies that turn out to be infrastructure. The Uber driver and the KOL talking about “trillions” might annoy you. The more important signal is the quiet money that continues to underwrite the idea that open settlement will not remain a sideshow.
If you truly believe crypto is just another speculative corner of markets, then by all means, lean into revenue meta and treat L1s like overpriced utilities. But if you think we are still early in the curve where assets become as easy to move as files, then you have to leave room for the uncomfortable conclusion.
For genuinely exponential technologies, almost everyone who thinks they are being “conservative” ends up being wrong in the same direction. They were not bullish enough.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.