In this article I am going to talk about how Layer 1 Blockchains should be considered, as in my opinion they are more similar to the economy of a nation rather than the activity of a company or a large stock. Analyzing the different Layer 1s such as Ethereum, Solana or Avalanche to name a few, it can be observed that these L1s provide an infrastructure and a security layer, thereby creating an economic ecosystem to allow the establishment of different DApps, or in what in a sovereign country we would consider as companies, being able to carry out their activity in this new ecosystem.

Just as a state has its own, federal reserve controlling the nation's monetary policy, so does a blockchain. In the same way that the FED prints US dollars to stimulate the US economy with new investments to make the country grow — inflation as a consequence — a blockchain also distributes its new native coins for the same purpose as a central bank does.

A L1 blockchain — if it wants to succeed — has to have a good strategic plan based on giving out blockchain native coins to incentivise the growth of its ecosystem. These are based on different grants for development within their ecosystem and the creation of new DApps on top of the Layer 1. The same way a nation stimulates its economy by giving loans for the creation of companies through banks, a Layer 1 stimulates its "nation" by giving grants to different developers of DApps, thus forming the "companies" of this digital nation.

But here’s where blockchain nations and the Fed differ, aside from the programmability of their policies. The Fed has to rely on traditional finance — intermediaries: banks & shadow banks — to push its monetary policy out into the economy, and here is where the main problem comes in as money creation goes to big multinationals instead of small businesses, causing a huge economic imbalance in society. To sum it up very briefly, this is mainly because it is more profitable for a bank to make a $1M loan to a single multinational than to make 10 loans of $100k each to 10 different businesses. You end up with imbalances in the system that catch you by surprise later. In contrast, Proof of Stake provides blockchain economies with a mechanism for monetary policy transmission that is fairer, more efficient and more sustainable.

Proof of Stake (PoS) gives a sense of citizenship

In a Proof of Stake (PoS) system people lock their capital in the native L1 cryptocurrency in order to become a validator and validate transactions of the blockchain. Validators get rewarded in exchange for providing security and execution of the network via its own node. This means that in a PoS system people benefit from the underlying economy behind this nation through steady yield on behalf of a possible equity appreciation of the currency.  

With a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) is even way better, because anyone can delegate its own capital to a validator, meaning that one doesn’t need a minimum amount of capital to participate in a node and take profit of blockchain validations. Also in a DPoS system, one doesn’t need software to develop its own node. 

The beauty of it is that in a L1 PoS system, every citizen will have the same rewards, whatever their purchasing power is. Whether you have $100 or $1M, you will always receive the same yield on an L1 blockchain. Many people are not very aware of this or don't give it much importance, but this is an abysmal change. This is the real meaning of decentralization! In the 21st century, differences in equal opportunities still exist today. By this I mean that if you have $100 or $1M in a traditional bank, you are going to be treated differently. In the first case you will have to pay $30 a year for a credit card, if you have access to credit at all, whereas in the second case you will have exposure to very attractive financial products where most people don't have the opportunity to invest. Hence, the famous saying that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. 

By this I do not mean that the blockchain is going to lead us to communism, because luckily whoever invests more will get more rewards in yield, it is simply that the blockchain is leading us to equal opportunities for societies — in this case with yield —, because whoever you are or wherever you come from, you will always get the same opportunity as others. This is what real democracy looks like!

On the other hand, in a Proof of Work (PoW) system people don't get benefit from the blockchain's economy, as the only ones able to validate transactions of the blockchain are the miners through expensive hardware instead of people locking their capital in the native L1 cryptocurrency — and obviously not everyone can buy expensive machinery or has the place to install them in order to become a miner —. So the only thing one can expect from a PoW cryptocurrency is an equity appreciation of the coin, as steady yield doesn’t exist and people don't benefit from the economy. Apart from this, the miners are obliged to sell part of the rewards to cover the costs of their hardware activity causing sell pressure and there is also the environmental aspect.

One can compare it in another way and make the assumption that Bitcoin price — PoW system — will not go up forever (and I hope this occurs far away). So how will a person that holds Bitcoin will get benefit from when this occurs? If one instead is holding a PoS cryptocurrency, that person will still get steady yield even if the price doesn't go up since the rewards depend on the on-chain economy inside the L1 instead of the price. Proof of Stake encourages a wider democratic participation as everyone gets a piece of the pie, giving meaning to the citizens of that virtual nation.

The consideration of a L1 cryptocurrency to "stabilize" its price in the long run

An important aspect to consider is that the value of the Layer 1 cryptocurrency does not have to have a high volatility. When there are aggressively fluctuating currency values, this is usually not good for establishing economic activity within the nation.

First of all, if we have a very volatile Layer 1 cryptocurrency price, this leads to higher transaction costs in this cryptocurrency, especially with long term transactions such as lending and borrowing. It is important for a lender and borrower to have the same expectation of what the borrowing contract actually means. By this I mean, who is the misguided person that is going to borrow bitcoin in order to realize a 30-year mortgage? Obviously the price of Bitcoin is not known 30 years from now, so it is not interesting to enter into this contract. In the case of a price increase, the borrower will feel as if he has been scammed by the lender because he will have to pay multiple times what he should have paid in the first place, the same vice-versa. How do you calculate the interest rate of this operation?

Secondly, if you are a company and want to set a cost of a product, that price has to be stable over a significant period of time. In the blockchain world we can see this problem when making deals with NFTs, if we want to cite an example. A company that sells NFTs through the blockchain is interested that the value of the cryptocurrency in which it sells its NFTs is stable at least in the short term. If that currency has a 50% increase or a 50% decrease in the same month, it puts complications with the execution of the business because apart from constantly changing the price of the product, the business has to pay employees and suppliers, where these costs occur in different time frames than the sale and revenue of the product. 

A Proof-of-Stake system helps to have a stable price for the L1, as it encourages the user to stake and participate in the economic activity of the blockchain, instead of having a heavy inflow and outflow of capital to and from the ecosystem.

L1 cryptocurrencies to replace FIAT currencies?

Last but not least, L1s Cryptocurrencies will not replace FIAT currencies as these are the currencies of nation states too (Obviously!). As long as the physical economy and nation states exist, FIAT currencies will exist and it will be the public sector that will ensure that they continue to be used — by paying taxes with local currency —. That said, how this FIAT is going to be improved into CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) is a separate issue which I will not go into in this article.

If an individual physically lives in the United States, he or she has to pay in dollars as this individual is part of this society. This does not detract from the fact that the same individual may be part of new societies such as different L1s. I see that in the future, or not to say that it is already the case, an individual will be a citizen of a physical society as usual — e.g. the euro — while in parallel this same individual is a citizen of several public ledger societies — e.g. being part of the Ethereum ecosystem —. Therefore, we have that people will be dual, triple, quadruple citizens without having to give up their passport.

Layer 1 Blockchains: The New Nation States

How to outperform the future? Take a moment, sit back and picture the "Web3" age and the dawn of a new global financial era. In this article, I will outline my vision of the future of finance and blockchain technology in approximately 15 - 20 years' time. My ideas will not happen overnight; this will be an evolutionary process, but a remarkable one. It is neither black or white and there will be many nuances and angles. 

These are my key points to get ahead of this inevitable and exciting reality:

Hyper tokenization of everything and the rise of security tokens

All assets — stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. — will be tokenized. Anything with a cash flow will be tokenized. Companies, governments and non-profit organizations will all have tokens as a tool for attracting support & distributing values.

But why will things that work perfectly without a token be tokenized? The answer is simple: in the future, liquidity will be found in public blockchains. Just as in the Web2 age when everyone had to go to social media, even people that hated it, in order to access the information and to get known, in the Web3 age if any individual or organization wants to acquire capital and investment it will have to be through the blockchain. When the internet got adopted everyone needed to have a social account in order to be somebody. The same will happen for blockchains and other public ledgers where monetary liquidities will be. 

This hyper tokenization will go through stages. One of the first things that has been brought into the blockchain has been the world of gaming. Video games existed long before any kind of blockchain was created. There is nothing new to be able to buy in-game products in what today is an NFT for blockchain-based games. The big difference between a game being on the blockchain or not is that each in-game product you acquire represents digital property — able to sell it on a secondary market — and the game has access to the liquidity of the blockchain, thus creating what is known today as GameFi or Play to Earn. All of this thanks to tokenization. Therewith I mean that it is proven that the world can be tokenized little by little through various stages.

In my opinion, institutional assets are the ones that will bring the most capitalization to the blockchain, but also they will be the last ones to be tokenized, especially in the real estate sector, which is a heavily regulated space. Nowadays it is very easy to create a non-fungible token (NFT) of a house and everybody can do it, but what does it really mean? As of today, this token has no legal protection within the country’s legal system where the house is based. This means that no matter how much you hold the NFT, outside the blockchain there will still be legal papers which designate the ownership of the house. This can be a bit confusing, but what is for sure is that this NFT does not give you the right of ownership of an asset outside the blockchain considering the legal aspects. This will change? Absolutely, but all of these issues will take their time to get resolved, therefore I say that real estate among other institutional assets are going to be one of the last sectors to be tokenized as legislation is a very slow moving variable. What is certainly clear are the benefits of this tokenization: Lower barrier entries to access these cash flows by the retail investors and the introduction of more liquidity for these assets. 

Bitcoin as a failure for value measurement and exchange currency

There will be a domination of “Super Currencies” that will take the role to measure values and serve as the common side of liquidity pairs to enable conversion among different assets. In my opinion, the USD and its different stablecoin forms (USDT, USDC and various algorithmic USD stablecoins) will become these super currencies. 

The first reason is because of the high volatility inside the crypto space, a stable coin is needed in order to measure value for exchanging tokens. USD is the strongest FIAT currency of the world and it is serving the purpose right now. The second reason is that nowadays there are more than 10,000 tokens inside the various blockchains and I expect this number to increase significantly as the years go by. For these tokens to be liquid you must at least create a pair for it. Of course, one can already see that creating more than 10,000 pairs with Bitcoin is impossible, simply because Bitcoin's supply is limited to 21M BTC. So the solution is to create these pairs with a super currency that has an unlimited supply, the USD stablecoin. This super currency will be used as an intermediary asset to trade across different assets. In fact, it is already used as that.

We also have that Bitcoin has become a storage of value. The initial idea of creating Bitcoin as an exchange currency has completely failed, becoming more like digital gold and shelter from inflation. To be a medium of exchange you need the asset to have a stable price and not be as volatile as Bitcoin. Some people say that the price of Bitcoin is volatile because it is a young asset and will stabilize in the future, but I strongly disagree. At best Bitcoin will lower its volatility to the same level of volatility as a large stock, but that is still not enough for value measurement, as it still will not have a stable price. The fact that the Bitcoin will not have a stable price is because there will be no underlying economy behind it. The USD has a stable value because there is a steady demand for the currency coming from an economy with real activity. The annual amount of transactions in these economies is very predictable, increasing by 1-3% annually along with GDP. This is the fundamental demand that supports the value of the USD. 

How about Lightning Network to use Bitcoin as transactions? I still think that the transaction function can be done much better by a stablecoin on any blockchain — especially the new blockchains that are emerging — faster and less expensive. Actually, what many Bitcoin payment applications do, they simply convert your token into Bitcoin, send it to the recipient and finally change that Bitcoin back to whatever token the recipient wants. This is nonsense as you incur the risk of volatility when exchanging, especially if you make large transactions, and the cost of this slippage ends up being paid by the user. Obviously the cost is lower than a traditional money remittance house such as the typical Western Union, but if you compare it to a stablecoin transaction, there is no way Bitcoin can compete against a zero cost transaction.

State blockchains and its fiscal policies

The future of countries' currencies lies in bringing out their CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) within their own blockchains that will act just as another community token. These are not going to be found on public blockchains like the Ethereum of the time for example. Why? For the simple reason that governments will want to control every single detail of their currency and its ecosystem. These CBDCs will be used to pay public sector employees and to obtain taxes. The popularity of these national tokens will depend on how well the country’s economy is. To give you an idea, compare it to a public blockchain when it raises the total value locked (TVL) the native currency of the blockchain appreciates in price. With CBDCs it will be the same, when the TVL increases — which would be the capital inflow of the country — the national currency will appreciate and vice versa.

I also believe that governments are going to get it wrong in the way they approach these CBDCs. I mean, governments will not be able to compete against stablecoins as their CBDCs will not be used as an intermediary asset for acquiring other digital assets. At least, they should make them interoperable with other blockchains in order to have demand and exchange them with other tokens. The competitors to national currencies in the Web3 age are going to be stablecoins rather than Bitcoin, and this is what governments are unable to see.

For monetary and fiscal policies, it will be practically impossible to collect taxes through public blockchains. I visualize this tax collection will be through CBDCs and government private blockchains where the wallets will certainly be identified with an identity number and a face behind, being impossible to alter tax collection and the use of black money. Today many countries are not prepared for this scenario. 

Public blockchains and their various wallets will remain anonymous and transparent, respecting the essence of their creation, and even if someone wants to put a face behind a crypto wallet, the reality is that crypto wallets are nationless. If someone has an Ethereum wallet, it makes no sense to say that the Ethereum wallet is in the United States or the Ethereum wallet is in the European Union, as the ETHs of that person are not under the laws of any government. The blockchain technology has created this new world where there are no national borders financially speaking.

Multinational DApps become powerful players in global economy 

Large public blockchains and distributed ledger ecosystems will become important players in the global economy like the large nation states today. Having said that, one would now have to look at the major companies in these new blockchain states and here is where the big DApps come in. Large cross-chain DApps will be the new multinational companies that will benefit from the power of blockchain nations. Where they decide to invest will determine the economic fortunes of many digital ecosystems, similar to the role of the foreign direct investment (FDI) today by multinationals in physical economies.

I would also like to comment that no matter how many thousands of tokens there are, in my opinion, there will be a few projects that will take over the market and many that will not. We can take for example the era before the internet. When the internet was just starting to be implemented, most people thought that products that previously had little visibility in the pre-internet era would gain visibility thanks to the internet. This was false. Today 80% of the population only buys 20% of the products available on the internet. To prove it, just open Amazon or Netflix and see what people consume. In the Web3 age, this is going to be even more drastic in my opinion, 90% of the population will use 10% of the available DApps.

Another thing that will change is the organizations of companies, especially with the introduction of these big multinational blockchain applications. In this respect, I don't think that the future of company structure will be centralized or decentralized, it will be a hybrid organization. As far as a 100% centralized model is concerned, it has already been observed that this type of organization cannot offer the greatest of benefits to the community. Look, for example, at the typical traditional bank and see how slow the processes run and how poor the customer service is. In terms of a 100% decentralized model, a company governed by a community is like saying it is not governed. To be honest, there is a lot of nonsense with this ideology of decentralized maximalism and if we are going to be fair, who cares and uses the governance of a token? For a project to succeed, it has to be led by leaders who together with the working team of that company and in conjunction with the proposals of the community will create a hybrid model that will represent the future of these new multinationals. 

To end, we are moving towards an era where what is known as a job in the 20th century will cease to exist. Increasingly, working hours will decrease in many industrial sectors and the number of employees will be reduced thanks to robotisation. There will be no work for all. This makes me think that people in general will have more free time to devote to themselves, so I do see a large part of the middle class becoming — almost necessary — investors. For people who do not wish to become an investor and are unable to find a job or set up a business, they will have to settle for a monthly allowance that governments will be forced to distribute due to this lack of work. I understand that this pay will be obtained from the taxes paid by the robots, among others. Most governments today are not up to the challenge and many will go under. Won’t be surprised if we see faster turnover of governments and entire reconfiguration of some nations in the coming decades.

The Web3 age will also participate in building a new middle class. At the end of the 20th century, globalization created a totally different equilibrium compared to the industrial era. Every company was forced to scout the globe to find the cheapest labor or lose out to the competition. Consumers of values are no longer makers of values, the opposite of the industrial era. As a result, the middle class in the developed world has been — and still is — on the decline. Web3 will help create a new middle class of the digital age in a more decentralized fashion compared to a century ago. This time not between rich and poor like during the 20th century’s globalization, but between those who thrive in this borderless world — digital-native — and those who don’t — digital-illiterate —.

Because everything of value will become tokenized and labor hours will continually go down, it’ll make sense that all of us spend more time taking care of our capital income just like we spend time at work to earn our labor income. Screening and evaluating one’s portfolios will become an essential day-to-day task just like washing dishes. I don’t see delegating investment decisions to asset management companies in the same way that I don’t see most people delegate their wage-earning jobs to someone else. If it’s an important source of income, it becomes an essential activity. “How to Invest” will become a basic life skill that needs to be acquired and perfected in most people’s lives.

Opinion piece blog

Layer 1 Blockchains: The New Nation States

Welcome to Finance in 2040

Subscribe to the newsletter to hear about updates and events.

Opinion piece blog

Layer 1 Blockchains: The New Nation States

Welcome to Finance in 2040

Subscribe to the newsletter to hear about updates and events.

Thank you!