How to correctly value L1 assets?

Original article by Sam Kazemian, Frax Finance

Original translation: Alex Liu, Foresight News

There’s been a lot of talk about how to value different assets in Krypto, especially with the recent AI memecoin craze, but I want to talk about my approach to valuing the most important crypto assets: L1 tokens vs. “Type 2” (dapp/L2/“equity” tokens).

L1 tokens have a mysterious L1 premium that no one has systematically explained. Many people think it is a speculative Ponzi scheme, but the opposite is true. The L1 premium is a very important and fundamental property.

L1 assets (ETH, SOL, NEAR, TRX, etc.) are the sovereign scarce assets corresponding to the blockchain economy. They naturally become the most liquid assets in the chain economy. Other projects accumulate it, build products/DeFi with it, and incentivize its liquidity, making it a safe-haven asset in a crisis.

The asset will earn interest by issuing tokens of other projects to scarce asset holders through innovative methods such as liquidity + ICO + DeFi, airdrops, etc.

@DefiIgnas explained it very well:

“L1s are productive assets: you can use them to get ecosystem airdrops, stake them for rewards, and their prEiss go up as the ecosystem expands. Plus, they outperform spot prices if you count airdrops from holding ETH, SOL, NEAR, etc. In contrast, L2s are non-productive assets. You can’t use them to get native rewards, you can’t use them as Gas (except STRK, MNT, METIS, and now ZK?), and the inflation from unlocking is usually too high. Their own ecosystem protocols rarely reward holders of L2 tokens (via airdrops).”

Dapp tokens in a sovereign economy (chain) represent the actual labor/GDP performed by humans in that economy. Scarce L1 assets will harvest interest from the labor of people building the digital national economy (chain).

This is why “Type 2 tokens” (aka dapp/L2 tokens) are often compared to “equity” and valued via P/E DCF models, while fundamental analysts are still confused by the mysterious “L1 premium.” It doesn’t need to be called the “L1 premium”, but rather the asset premium of the sovereign economy.

Many people may know that I don’t like ETH KOLs, such as @justindrake , who collectively signaled to the market that the ETH asset should be viewed as a business that sells block space + blobs and needs to calculate a P/E ratio. They are turning ETH into a Type 2 token. Unfortunately, they succeeded.

L2 tokens are usually not sovereign scarce assets of their digital economies, despite having chains and vibrant builders. They belong to Type 2 and fall into the P/E DCF valuation model. In fact, some L2s dont even have tokens! For example, Base.

SOL is doing really well, but not because its TVL is up, but because people expect SOL to be burned/earned billions in some distant year in the future. ETH has had billions of dollars in earnings/burns, but its not doing any better than SOL. SOL is up because Solanas entire economy uses it in liquidity pools, memecoin transactions, DeFi, and you need it to participate in the Solana network.

People are actually working to build things and tokenize their labor (as “Type 2”, i.e. dapp/PE tokens) in order to issue interest/rewards to SOL holders/stakers/LPs, while ETH KOLs are trying to turn ETH into DCF equity tokens with no value other than cash flow generated by the Ethereum Foundation selling products.

@MustStopMurad elegantly said that the best products don’t need tokens and the best tokens don’t need products. Sovereign scarce assets (L1 tokens) are memecoins, a serious meme without pictures of cats/dogs (cats/dogs living in digital nations). Balajis discussed the concept of cyber nations at length. The power of this meme is finally starting to be understood. “Type 1” (L1) and “Type 2” (PE/Equity/Labor/L2) tokens are clearly different. Communities can transform one into another, but it’s a long process.

Bottom line: Gas + staking security is a technical signal of a social protocol built on a sovereign scarce asset, not a significant value capture feature in and of itself. People are finally realizing this, including the legendary @danrobinson .

So there is no such thing as an L1 premium, but rather a sovereign asset of a digital nation, a Type 1 token. It is arguably the most powerful and fundamentals-focused meme, no funny pictures, its real economics but with a strong meme quality. My point: there are only these two types of tokens.

Next month, @fraxfinance will release its biggest announcement to date, our 2030 Vision Roadmap. One of the biggest things we will be launching is how to turn “Type 2” L2/Governance/PE tokens into sovereign assets. I expect many “Type 2” tokens will use this as a guide.

This article is sourced from the internet: How to correctly value L1 assets?

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