robinhood is joining arbitrum as base is abandoning the superchain as a former arbitrum employee who has been critical in the past, let me just say: the pendulum is swinging back a trip down memory lane arbitrum was dominating optimism in 2021. OP whitelisted developers while arbitrum was open to everyone, and arb quickly became the home of defi with gmx, dopex, and others then in 2023, coinbase chose the superchain base became so successful that they monopolized developer attention, including from optimism. OP mainnet became a complete ghostchain, forcing them to pivot into only prioritizing the superchain, while their canonical L2 became neutral blockspace for governance this strategy was working for a while, with other huge names choosing the superchain (worldcoin, uniswap, kraken) but now that base has most of the assets and apps, they have zero incentive to opt into native superchain interop. so obviously, they won't. they've already announced their own security council, which directly conflicts with being in the superchain and now arbitrum, which spent two years being looked down on, has (1) a canonical chain that still has a lot of defi apps + activity and (2) has landed robinhood, who rivals coinbase in retail presence, to build their appchain using arbitrum orbit ggwp

this image is another blatant preview of financialized social media why rely on professional pollsters when income is a plaid / zktls connection away opinions will soon be backed by verifiable metadata (wealth, location, job, political status, etc) today's twitter polls are like prehistoric cave paintings, and are still (!) very valuable prediction markets pair opinions with stake. next up is pairing opinions with identity financialized social media will make opinions weightable, sortable, and actionable opinion markets are fertile fucking ground

uniswap set a toxic precedent with how they split value between token and equity their setup has the same flaw as a project launching multiple tokens: competing incentives like, at least if pump split fees between equity and token, everyone rows in the same direction. but uniswap's equity and token are directly competitive. raising frontend fees can lower volume for the protocol, and vice versa. it's a bizarre structure internal competition isn't uncommon at big companies. ipads compete with macs. but that's precisely why the profits are housed under one roof the reason for splitting is pretty simple (and not regulatory): retain employees after TGE by promising their equity has value too. but the amount of energy spent on balancing token and equity value is wasteful at best and toxic at worst (see: friendtech) there's nothing wrong with funding operations for development. it's the structure that's broken. diluting value between two assets is bad enough. but creating competing revenue streams is just value destructive

what's happening to circle shows that assets are simply vessels for belief they're not for pricing today's fundamentals. definitely not for claiming cash flows. if someone wanted pure exposure to stablecoin growth, they could just long a perp with an oracle pegged to overall stablecoin / usdc supply but no one wants an instrument that just reflects reality. markets want to speculate on future growth *today* a usdc supply perp doesn't instantly reflect the GENIUS act passing the senate, but an asset speculating on future growth does no one wants to track growth, everyone wants to front-run it shared belief is more valuable than fundamentals