Recently, there has been quite a lot of debate surrounding Ethereum/Base native developers, who are migrating to Solana in search of a better ecosystem for their app.
The most recent example being 0xKawz, founder of time.fun, a spin on pump.fun whereby prominent figures on Twitter (currently known as X), can commoditize their time creating a traditional bid/ask market around the exact value of each minute they spend.
The product experienced the classic burst of activity as people rush to speculate on an early launch then a rapid decline as the product failed to keep users engaged, despite being heavily promoted by the most prominent figures in both the cryptocurrency ecosystem, like Ansem, as well as to an audience outside of the ecosystem through promotion by Nikita Bier. A few days ago, the founder quite vocally announced his reasons behind the move, stating his dissatisfaction with the direction Ethereum is heading in.
This is not an uncommon phenomena for the most vocal builders on ETH or Base, or any other L2. Practically every month or two, we see these grandiose announcements of ‘sudden concerns with the ecosystem’, however there might be a simpler explanation.
Greener pastures, or falling victim to fallacy?
Continuing with the example of time.fun, a derivative spin on the core idea of pump.fun (>$146M revenue as of publishing), it’s easy to see why making the shift is an appealing proposition for founders whose products hasn’t found any noteworthy success on its genesis chain. Another example is friend.tech, a now infamous SoFi (“social finance”) app that launched on Base that were quite publicly considering solving its inherent issues by building its own chain. Both time.fun and friend.tech are well-backed by venture capital, and there is clearly no lack of motivation from the founders to keep innovating so what’s causing the ‘exodus’?
A fallacy, which is apparently quite easy to fall into for founders. For almost all examples we’ve seen of chain migrations have they stopped and pondered: “Is my idea not appealing to the market?”. A quite basic concept called product-market-fit (PMF) that you will immediately be familiar with if you listen to thirty seconds of any Y Combinator media.
Instead of reflecting & iterating, or perhaps pivoting entirely, we’ve seen a lot of examples of founders taking a large grand-stand pointing out vague issues with the ecosystem on which they chose to deploy initially, essentially writing it off completely. The thesis that their product will do better on chain X than Y might be valid, but then this begs the question: why not both Base and Solana?
Attention. The announcement of “we’re now also on Solana!” to test their thesis is not sensational enough, and it doesn’t generate enough discourse. Instead, for time.fun it was vague waffling about “tiring and identity crisis” failing to ever mention any specific point of critique. For friend.tech, founded by an X personality going by “Racer”, it was also ‘vibes’. I think it boils down to one thing: cowardice and ego. Admitting you are making a huge display of migrating your app to an ecosystem that has higher liquidity for ‘gambling-esque’ applications is extraordinarily bad optics. So instead of being brutally honest with themselves and with their following, they will keep their ego intact by using nebulous words like ‘vibes’, ‘ecosystem identity crisis’ and other explanations of similarly ambiguous nature.
So is Solana really the “greener pastures”, the promise land so-to-speak for SoFi projects? Definitively no. Product-market-fit and an absorption of pump.fun users will magically appear on a different chain, believing that it will seems to me short-sighted, it is also just short of delusional. There is no shortage of hunger for novel concepts on Base, as exemplified by World PvP which generated over $1.3M in profit in its first season.
Solana, the single-app chain
Migrating to Solana with a scorched earth policy for your genesis chain is, by every analytical measure I can think of, an incorrect move from a business perspective. Pump.fun is the main driver of liquidity to Solana, making the entire L1, unfortunately, wholly reliant on the relevance of a single killer app. Without Pump, Solana would be amongst the ranks of Sui or Aptos, for the most part a ghostchain.
The dark side of having an app like Pump being your main driver of new users is that the utlization of Pump (as is implied in the name), as a tool for continuous, predatory, value extraction has been industrialized to such a degree, that new users will the vast majority of the time have a less than desirable outcome when participating in the ecosystem. Organized groups have been formed who are making unbelievable amounts of capital everyday from farming the liquidity of those not familiar with the structures of volatile, ephemeral shitcoins (i.e. those produced by pump.fun which might have a total lifespan of 1 week, if not less) and think they’re playing an unrigged game.
The ultimate outcome of this is that, as more and more of the newcomers to crypto gets burnt by the monopolistic nature of those who prey on the unknowing through their influencers with new tickers dropping every week, retail will simply write it off as an unfair playing field, thus leading to the cycle of decay for Pump until user growth stagnates and then declines. It is my belief that on a long enough timescale, Pump is self-destructive — and then what does Solana have left to entice new users, new liquidity and new builders?
Ultimately, this is not a novel sentiment, after the celebrity hype died down for Pump, the sentiment quickly shifted from “oh my god this is great”, to “what have we done to the future of our industry?”, so I guess the question is this:
Are we seriously going to gaslight ourselves into believing gambling on pump.fun shitcoin with rigid odds is a success story for crypto just because it’s generating a lot of revenue and mindshare for a chain? Is that really the first impression we want the world to have as we slowly work towards onboarding it? It seems to me a dark, depressing future if your answer to that is “yes”.
The sad conclusion I reach for Solana is that, unless a diversification of killer apps happens, and rapidly before Pump’s decay cycle occurs, it’ll go the way of so many other chains who have had their cycle of relevance.
Let’s do a quick comparison
Base has been around for a little more than a year now since mainnet launch. In that time, it has gone on to beat milestone after milestone. It is extraordinarily easy to onboard new users, and the ecosystem rewards passion and hard work into improving every aspect of both the onboarding and the onchain experience.
Base as a chain inherits all the benefits of 10 years of development on the core, underlying protocol: Ethereum. The network effects of Base within its first year of launch has shown extraordinarily promising. Ethereum is an extremely battle-hardened versatile ecosystem. The EVM provides all of the primitives you need to build anything and there are tons of specialists who can competently audit your contracts for the EVM, which does not hold true for other primitives of onchain programmability.
The outlook for EVM-based chains has never been more bullish. The Ethereum Foundation is focused heavily on the issues that matters (such as privacy), to make Ethereum a viable option for traditional finance, governments, NGOs and other serious organizations which require the guarantees and auditability that Ethereum and the EVM provides. And ultimately, if I’m onboarding friends or family to the benefits that using onchain technology has to offer, I’m picking a cute game or a social art app on Base or Ethereum. I’m not throwing them to the wolves, straight into the “trenches”.
The fundamental idea is to onboard people with the expectation of new possibilities within finance, art, application building, social experiences, and so much more. Not to ‘get rich quick in crypto’, which seems to have been the zeitgeist since 2017. Which is why I heavily support any chain who encourages building, as opposed to financial predation.
It is my belief, that Ethereum, Base and the EVM, will come out the victor of the “chain wars”, due to several factors, which will be the focus of the next blog post, as the exact mechanisms of exactly what makes Base a uniquely good chain to have as part of the Ethereum ecosystem warrants an article of its own. However, to conclude, the dramatic ‘I’m leaving Base for X’ posts we see every so often which generates huge drama is solely due to incompetency & short-comings of the founder, not the ecosystem.
TL;DR: Skill issue.