162 Comments

Anybody know anything about TDROP? https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/thetadrop

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Thoughts about Fusion (FSN)?

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I am very bullish on this. They're doing things thats gonna change how cross chain works. I did mention this project to you about 6 months ago, specifically Chainge Finance that operates on top of the fusion blockchain.

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Yes I think you must have been the one to plant the seed in my head! Do you know people working on the project?

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Not really. DJ Qian is the founder but he's not very active on the Telegram channel. But if you ask in the channel, they do ask you to contact him directly. Check this post out. I would love to know your views on how this is different to RUNE.

https://twitter.com/FinanceChainge/status/1523928323587559424?s=20&t=b0ckIxYXiV2-j0Px12cx-w

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Ok, I'll check. Could take a little while. What is it about Chainge that you like about it?

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Any thoughts on Ultron (ULX)?

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Looks like it's only just gotten started? I'd have to dig deep, how did you hear about it?

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Oh I learned about it through a friend and it seems to be gaining lots of traction. Unsure how sustainable that is but they seem to have a great team working and building it. Let me know what you think?

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Do you have any contacts with the team or community?

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Hey Mark, yes I do.

So this is Ultron’s Telegram: https://t.me/ultron_foundation

Ultron has a more operational DeFi website called: https://ultronswap.com/

They are also partnering up with this marketing affiliate company to help market the brand, Mavie. Telegram: https://t.me/mavie_news

And the market affiliate company is selling Ultron NFTs staking hubs: https://www.backoffice.mavie.global/ambassador/UKB3MLgvRE7bMY1SY7vSc/42457

Just a disclaimer that I’ve a small investment on this altcoin through the NFT staking hub (the previous link above) as it’s more attractive than buying it directly. And that’s something I would probably recommend too but first DYOR.

It seems pretty promising to me but would love to hear your (and your community’s) thoughts on it. :)

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Thanks. I’d have to dig in more deeply. I joined the discord channel, I’ll stalk them a little bit. What does this project do that is different than what people are doing with Ethereum? It looks very similar to ETH 2.0 and L2s, based on info they put out in their documents and that They’ve shared online and in their chats. Do you know?

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They are (or claimed) more of an L1 protocol from what I learnt. At least that’s how they compare and position themselves. It’s interesting because they are looking at building an ecosystem around it.

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Thoughts about Aleph.im (ALEPH)?

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Thoughts about Pavia (PAVIA)?

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Thoughts about SKALE (SKL)?

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Thoughts about Unibright (UBT)?

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I'm confused by this token/company. What do they sell? Consulting services?

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I'm wondering the same thing. Seems like the project targets business and commerce, not sure how the UBT token accrues value. Hoping you had some insights!

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Hi, is Helium (HNT) still viable, or a dying project, perhaps to be trounced by Pollen?

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See: https://mashable.com/article/helium-lime-web3-crypto

Also more allegations around Salesforce partnership on helium Reddit.

Doesn't bode well.

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I don't know. I've heard comments from a few people who have deeper technical knowledge and experience that I do. They're not big fans but that really doesn't mean anything, good projects always have haters, they win trust over time.

What's Pollen?

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Pollen is similar to Helium in that it's a DeWi concept, but one of the key differences is that's it's a full LTE network that does more than Helium, which is primarily intended to support low-bandwidth IoT applications. Don't know a whole lot more about Pollen (other than Delphi is a big fan of it, and they'd previously been backing Helium). Helium has struggled with hardware, managing parabolic growth, spoofing of hotspot locations, and plunging revenues for hotspot owners. I know some folks here in Europe who are managing a countrywide Helium deployment. They're struggling to keep their boat from capsizing at the moment. Whether Helium itself will stabilize and move forward feels to me like an open question. They've built out a network at record speed, but need to get things under control and also prove that there's actually a market for what's being built that will allow the network to transition from proof-of-coverage rewards to data transmission rewards.

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I missed this the first time around. Great insight, thank you!!!

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Thoughts about Aleph Zero (AZERO)?

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Looks cool. Enterprise applications could do well in the next wave of speculation. What does it do?

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It's a L1 built with substrate that claims to provide transactions with near instant finality and private smart contracts via ZKPs. They also claim the privacy features can be leveraged by other blockchains via a privacy layer called Liminal.

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Ah, cool. Tokenomics?

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From https://cryptorank.io/ico/aleph-zero :

Total supply:

300,000,000

Private/Pre-sale:

100,000,000 (33.33%)

Public sale:

100,000,000 (33.33%)

And total supply increases by 30m per year, and team says transaction fees are burnt but not mentioned in their whitepaper (https://www.reddit.com/r/AlephZero/comments/so6c9u/tokenomics_question/)

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Interesting. Does it work? Do that have anything in beta?

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yea they've already launched the smartnet, which sits parallel to the testnet and mainnet. I played around with it their smart contract tutorials on their testnet and though they're not finished, so far I've had a good experience with building and deploying. I tried test transactions on their mainnet too and it's pretty fast. Liminal is still in development though so no opinions on that yet

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TAO - Bittensor? Bittensor is an open-source protocol that powers a scalable, decentralized neural network. The system is designed to incentivize the production of machine intelligence by training models within a blockchain infrastructure and rewarding performance with a custom digital currency.

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Very skeptical about AI/machine on Blockchain/crypto. Though I think Internet of things is a nice, natural fit (and a decade away). First, let’s incentivize people. Then we can move to machines.

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KASPA? Kaspa is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency which implements the GHOSTDAG protocol. Unlike traditional blockchains, GHOSTDAG does not orphan blocks created in parallel, but rather allows them to coexist and orders them in consensus...

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Sharif don’t like it—rock the KASPA!

Yeah, actually that’s a really interesting concept and definitely something I’ll look into. Any good tidbits to share?

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They kind of rose from the ashes of the LUNA crash since they were doing very well just before then. Price crashed and was around $0.40 a couple weeks after they relaunched on Cosmos (mid-July) when I started buying. I haven't read much on pre-sale but the tokens to VCs have been slowly vesting since they started on LUNA nearly a year ago, so nothing all at once. 22 million left to vest of 122 million total supply with over a year of vesting to go.

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apologies I think I replied to the wrong thread.

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Thoughts on KUJI? On Cosmos and seems like a good value accrual token profiting stakers from innovative products

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I see it's gone up a lot in the past few months, how'd it get to $200 mil market cap?

Also, do you know where I can find the pre-sale info? Looks like a lot of VCs holding tokens, it's good to know how much they have and when they can sell.

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sorry if this is a 2nd posted response. Not sure how much VCs are holding, but it's a slow vesting period from when they started on LUNA, so there are around 22 million left (of ~122M) over 1 year plus, and no inflation to the token. I think the main selling points behind the price increase are its non-inflationary rewards when you stake (of many different coins, including USDC and their new stablecoin), and different projects to be launched/ launched by the developers or other teams. Their decentralized orderbook FIN is an interesting idea imo. It was at $0.40 when they relaunched on Cosmos a couple months ago and I was glad to get a decent amount around that price. Definitely feels like a must stake coin

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Looks interesting. Yes definitely stake, still a lot of tokens left to come into the market. Already 4x off the bottom, I'll dig a little deeper. Do have any connections with the team?

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No, no connections. Just an interesting project that survived the terra debacle. Thanks for your comments

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Hi Mark. New alt. Clearpool. CPOOL. It’s a lending/borrowing platform that’s “uncollateralized” a dime formula that keeps borrowers in the game. Currently only whitelisted companies can create an LP. There are maybe six already. It’s in on the blockchain. Yields are high, team looks solid, some good VC involved. That’s all I know.

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Not a dime.. a formula

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I don't see how the CPOOL fees will generate enough demand to overcome the constant payouts. If you want to use the protocol, then by all means buy CPOOL. As an investment, it's hard to see how the CPOOL token will capture value.

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Thanks Mark. Interesting what you look for. When you say fees, do you mean fees borrowers pay?

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Looks interesting, can you tell me more?

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Finnovant Inc. is the parent company that is bringing this token as a utility token...using biometrics and the blockchain to enhance the security of user's data..in defi and apps. Not sure yet if this is a unique tech or can just anyone use this ? I am not sure yet....

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FYI this one's not for me, there's no value-capture mechanism, it's just a loyalty/reward token.

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Any thoughts on AI focused projects? FET or AGIX?

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Not very knowledgeable about FET or AGIIX but generally I'm not a fan of AI projects tho a global platform for IOT could be huge and uniquely fitted for a crypto solution.

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Any thoughts on qnt and rubric?

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Not familiar with either of them. Fill me in?

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Thoughts on SEXN (see: www.sexn.finance)?

I thought it was a joke, until I realized that their token is traded on 4 DEXs.

From an analysis perspective, I guess this would be best treated as a cross between meme tokens and play-to-earn.

As if we didn't already have enough evidence that DeFi has jumped the shark...

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HA. Makes as much sense as most crypto projects.

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https://www.centric.com/ $CNS some kind of stablecoin I think. Around since 2018. Solid team

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Yea they've been at it for a while, I'd have to dig in to say more.

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How do you dig in? I’m curious to learn some analytical techniques?

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Coingecko for project info, Telegram to learn about the community and figure out who to contact on the team. For the ones in my altcoin reports, I talk to the team, the community managers, sometimes community members or people who I know who know about the project. I also look at the white paper, vesting/unlock schedules for founders and early backers, emissions schedules. Socials and blogs to see what they're up to. I also try whatever tech they have, not to judge its merits but just to get a better sense of what juice we can squeeze from this. Then look at the problem it's trying to solve, get a sense of how big that problem is, how valuable it is.

When I had the research service, I hired a quantitative analysis expert do market analysis, too.

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Dear Mark, thank you for generously sharing your approach. Very helpful.

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Any thoughts on GRT?

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Seems legit. Too big for me ATM but I do think data layers and projects that do the "plumbing" of web3 will get a lot of attention in the coming years, more so than DeFi and transaction coins.

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Thought about BEETS? http://beets.fi

I'm interested in the Fantom ecosystem.

I couldn't really understand SPIRIT (that inSPIRIT?!). BEETS is more straightforward to use, similar to BOO.

If it gets near to the ATH again, that's a feasible 10x.

(I own FTM, BEETS, BOO and SPIRIT - but currently only buying FTM and BEETS)

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What's the difference between those projects?

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BOO = more of a "traditional" dex for Fantom

BEETS = dex + users can create pools

SPIRIT = dex + with "boosted" farms

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Saturated market but FTM platform has had its problems. Any news since this original post?

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Optimism/general thoughts?

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I like the L2s, optimism and arbitrum are the main ones I use. The OP token however doesn’t seem to have much use at this time outside of governance but I’ve read that may change in the future. May be better roi to invest in the dapps with good tokenomics. For arbitrum, I’m mainly looking at dpx and glp at this time but I have to dive into the ecosystem a bit more

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It's good you mention that. I'm wondering whether money will flow to apps and platforms built on L2s (and scalable L1s) rather than the tokens themselves. Both, I suppose. Is it too early to think about differentiating value? E.g., governance tokens can be valuable but not as investments, like medallions or club memberships. While NFTs may capture tremendous value as a single item, without that value flowing to the token people use to buy it (ETH, WAXP, etc)?

How are your experiences on optimism and arbitrum? What dapps are you looking at?

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I’ve mainly used arbitrum but experience has been good so far, minimum fees, fast. Only drawback is the wait time to bridge funds back to ethereum, I think it’s about a week.

Main dapps I’m looking at are gmx and dopex. Gmx is a decentralized prep exchange. I feel these will be big next bull run given the regional restrictions on trading. Dopex is an decentralized options protocol. It’s releasing its Atlantic options this month which allows you to take the collateral in the options contract and use it for other purposes like liquidation protection for leveraged perps. This might be a nice price catalyst for dpx and gmx.

This link has more info

https://medium.com/@tztokchad/dopex-atlantic-options-50a2d3b77aa7

Are you still bullish on ctsi? Was trying to see if I should start to dca

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Yes, very high on CTSI, the team works hard and the community gives it a lot of support. Make sure you stake your CTSI!

Missed this the first time. Does anybody else have any thoughts about CTSI?

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Thoughts about SFUND? https://seedify.fund

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Sadly I don't have much perspective on gaming/metaverse. I rely on others to fill me in (like you!!!) From the looks of the tokenomics and stated plans for $SNFT seems expensive relative to other altcoins in this market environment. At $50 million with only 35% circulating, given the narrow scope of loyalty/rewards, I'd need higher ceiling or lower price.

Happy to hear other thoughts about it.

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I wanted to diversify in gaming, just a little bit. SFUND seemed to be a more "general" way of doing it.

I don't own much of it, but what I have I'm staking for 180 days https://staking.seedify.fund (90% APY).

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That's good, at 90% APY you need to stake. I'm told ILV and YGG are also strong projects, have you heard of them?

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I have not. But just did (briefly). ILV seems to be "playable" I'm avoiding game crypto because I'm too out of context. YGG seems to be more of a platform (based on my brief search) - that aligns more with why I invested (gambled) in SFUND.

TBH I think I got influenced by some hype. I'm too out of context with gaming for making more investments.

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Thoughts about Cosmos (ATOM) and Osmosis (OSMO)?

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I like ATOM. In general the Cosmos ecosystem seems well-conceived and the bet I'm making is that the network grows and value flows to the ATOM token. We'll see. OSMO is too big to buy RN, it needs to grow into its valuation or its price needs to drop a lot.

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Thoughts about UMB? https://www.umb.network

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Seems cool. How does it compare to Chainlink?

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This post compares it with Chainlink - https://hackernoon.com/chainlink-vs-umbrella-network-vs-kylin-network-vs-dia-protocol-a-comparative-analysis

In short, more datapoints and cheaper cost.

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Interesting. At that market cap, worth a look. Do you have stats on development? Also, can you link me to the tokenomics or emission schedule?

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Sure! I would love to hear you thoughts!

stats on development:

* they are expected to integrate with Cardano in June https://medium.com/umbrella-network/umbrella-network-roadmap-jan-to-june-2022-ea87a64a322f

* they were hacked recently but are trying to improve it here https://gov.umb.network/t/proposal-for-restructuring-umbrella-2-0/156/3

tokenomics: https://medium.com/p/cd2f2e12a1d5

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Unless they die 😆 they are at least ~5x from their worst day back in 2021 and ~110x from their best day. But for this size of this crypto it may mean nothing.

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At that valuation it's worth a look. A crosschain oracle network will help the industry a lot. Do you know if it works?

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Here's a new one. Web3 focused company. Large team. Been around at least 4 years. Very active blog, CEO interviewing players in crypto space, real businesses like Etherisc. $CARD

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Cool! What does the token do?

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Thoughts about ERGO? https://ergoplatform.org

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Big fan. How'd you hear about it?

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Do you stake or do something (yield-wise) with your ERGO? (if you have any)

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It was because of Cardano. The ERGO community seems to be positive with Cardano and vice-versa. Cardano follows the Bitcoin price, but it looks like ERGO follows the Cardano price.

I follow some updates via Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ergonauts/ as well.

I bought it high, and I'm trying to reduce the cost basis. But with some caution.

There is a lot of in-progress going on with the project. But marketing seems to be weak.

They've been talking about a major exchange listing for a while now. Also, the potential for getting ETH miners once/if it moves to PoS. Ah, and the algorithmic stablecoin.

What are your thoughts?

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Hi Mark. Is the name of the possible 100x coin you mentioned in the last update already known?

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Hi. Not any altcoin in particular. I just meant now you can find a 100x for the first time in a while. Most likely a small altcoin (sub $100 mil cap, more likely sub $10 mil)

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Thoughts about Polygon MATIC?

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I like it. ETH 2.0 may make it obsolete but nobody knows when or if ETH 2.0 will happen.

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Mark, I'm curious to hear more on why you have suggested that ETH2.0 would possibly make an L2 like MATIC obsolete. Ive not near the knowledge you do but from what gleaned from what I've read, it would seem that even if and once 2.0 happens, the amount of traffic that exists would mean we will still need L2 solutions like MATIC.

Looking at the support Polygon, Immutable X (the two im most keen on) receive I feel we will end up with a sort of symbiotic relationship between them...whilst using something like Metamask to make it possible...would love to hear your thoughts!

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Once people build all the functionality of L2s on ETH they won't need L2s. People will not want to split liquidity and usage onto separate blockchains that emulate Ethereum, they'll just use and build on Ethereum.

But that assumes ETH 2.0 happens, works the way people think it will, and some L2 doesn't grow such powerful network effects that the liquidity and usage flows to the L2, not Ethereum. We'll see.

Why does the amount of traffic need L2 once ETH 2.0 comes?

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