Hey, everybody. This is a Sieb from the chopping block.

And today I'm doing a little bit of a special holiday episode. It's Thanksgiving weekend.

And I recently published a piece that I got some requests to do a reading of.

So I thought it might be a nice little gesture, a little break from this market to have a little bit of a kind of deep dive article.

So this article is titled, In Defense of Exponentials.

I used to tell founders, the reaction you're going to get to your launch is not hate, it's indifference.

By default, nobody cares about your new chain. I have to stop telling them that now.

Monad launched this weekend. I've never seen so much hate about a blockchain that just launched.

I've been investing in a crypto professionally for seven plus years now.

Before 2023, almost every chain I've ever seen that launched was mostly met with enthusiasm or indifference.

But now, new chains are born into a chorus of hate.

The amount of haters I've seen for projects like Monad, Tempo, Mega-Eath, before they even hit Mainnet, is a genuinely new phenomenon. I've been trying to diagnose, why is this happening now? And what does it mean about the psychology of the market? The cure is worse than the disease. Forewarning, this is going to be the vaguest blockchain valuation post you have ever read. I don't have any fancy metrics or charts to sell you on. Instead, I'll be arguing against the zeitgeist of crypto-Twitter, which for the last couple of years I've been constantly on the opposite side of. In 2024, I felt like what I was arguing against was financial nihilism. Financial nihilism is the belief that

none of these assets matter. It's all memes at the end of the day, and everything we've built is inherently

worthless. Thankfully, that's no longer the vibe. We've broken out of that spell. But the zeitgeist now

is what I'd call financial cynicism. Okay, maybe some of this stuff has value, maybe it's not all memes, but it's grossly overvalued, and it's only a matter of time before Wall Street finds that out. Not that all these chains are worthless, but these things are all maybe worth one-fifth to one-tenth what they're currently trading at. Have you seen these P.E. ratios? And so you better pray like hell that Wall Street doesn't call us on our bluff,

because once they do, it's all getting wiped out.

You've got many bullish analysts now,

trying to conjure up optimistic L1 valuation models,

inflating PE ratios, gross margins, DCFs, trying to fight against this mood.

Late last year, Salana proudly embraced REV as a metric that could finally justify their valuation.

They proudly announced, we and only we, are no longer bluffing to Wall Street.

And, of course, almost immediately after RAV was embraced, it fell off a cliff,

...