Base is focusing on crypto communities. Solana is focused on being an onchain NASDAQ. While they seem contradictory, I think they are closer to each other than they might appear. PS. I also have an idea for a token at the end. I personally believe the whole thesis that eventually all equities will be onchain. That's the core belief of @launchcoin. It's been trying to onboard YC founders to create their token. I bought a bunch of tokens myself. $KLED, $DUPE, $PCULE etc. None of them has worked well. I believe that the market is ultimate truth arbiter and if it tells something you should listen. The market's just been dumping Believe tokens. On the more serious end, we have Robinhood securitizing tokens onchain, offering OpenAI and SpaceX stocks in the EU. No shockwaves were sent. It was kinda dud. To my surprise, $ZORA, on the other hand, has held the floor fairly well. Memecoins work. $DEGEN token on Farcaster did extremely well. They are all community-centric. And while $ZORA represents a product, it is a social app where community reigns supreme. I think if @baseapp launches its own native token tomorrow, it'll do really well too. I think it touches on the idea purported by Balaji around Network State, which he thinks is the next iteration of Nation State. Kind of far-fetched. But it has weight. But what if they are all right in their own regard? The Internet's most amazing innovation has been the communities it has formed online based on shared interests, etc. A memecoin is fundamentally nothing but a ticker attached to a loosely defined community (in this case, something that they find funny). Also, NASDAQ onchain is just a really sound thesis. But I can't imagine someone would bank their company's trajectory on testing this out. Kind of risky. Better to go to NASDAQ instead. Why eat a meat alternative when you can just eat meat? But what is it fundamentally that makes a company's stock valuable in the first place? There's no inherent value that flows into the stock. No one is paying dividends, and even in the rare cases they do, it's mathematically irrelevant to the pricing of the stock. It's not tied to the company's revenue. I think what determines a stock's strength is its shareholders. The fact that Elon can buy back Tesla stock shows its strength. Apple makes so much revenue that at a certain price, it just eats its own stock up. And that's all there is to it. So I guess in that sense, a token will do well if the network participants are powerful (or gain strength over time), and we are obviously talking about memecoins here. Enough theories, though. What does that even look like? Imagine a network comprised of traders. These traders simply share alpha with one another. Everyone throws in their ideas, and whoever is right reaps rewards. This essentially bootstraps a community of traders that eventually accrue value. The reward is in the form of a token. That token is a memecoin. But it works by slowly releasing token emissions to the best alpha sharers. I think this model is the best of both worlds. Community-centric and accruing value to token holders. [courtesy of @y1nyang1 for inspiration]