Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“You cannot build a reputation based on what you are going to do. Trust must be earned over time. The track record matters.”

William Mougayar on why Ethereum’s 10-year record matters more than competitor speed claims.

William Mougayar, an early internet pioneer and one of the first to recognise the potential of Ethereum, has been in the technology business for nearly four decades. He met Vitalik Buterin in late 2013 and has had a front-row seat to the evolution of the blockchain industry ever since. He advised the Ethereum Foundation through its early growing pains, served as chairman of the Kin Foundation during Solana’s 35-cent days, and has spent four decades watching technology waves from Hewlett-Packard to peer-to-peer protocols.

His thesis: The general-purpose L1 wars are over. Ethereum won. What remains is specialization, consolidation, and the infrastructure layer maturing into a $700B capital base.

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🎧 Jump to the best parts

(07:03) → The double-spend solution and programmable money: William traces blockchain’s lineage from 1990s Cybercash to Napster’s peer-to-peer revolution to Satoshi’s breakthrough, explaining why “if this, then that” logic with money attached changed everything.
(17:05) → The first principles of blockchain: William argues that trust, decentralisation, and credible neutrality are far more critical than speed, explaining why institutions prioritise consistency and fairness over flashy performance metrics.
(28:48) → Why Ethereum sacrificed L1 activity by design: The intentional shift to L2s wasn’t weakness—it was strategic expansion. “Ethereum is no longer just the L1. Ethereum is an ecosystem.” Why comparing Solana’s base layer to Ethereum’s base layer is intellectually dishonest.
(34:40) → Debunking Solana’s narrative: DEX volumes, app revenue, L2 value extraction, capital turnover, and speed. William systematically dismantles each with data: Ethereum does 8.4B in DEX volume vs Solana’s 5B when L2s are included. Top 10 Ethereum apps revenue: $4B; Solana: $2B.
(40:03) → A new valuation for blockchains: Why traditional metrics like P/E ratios and discounted cash flows fail to capture the value of public blockchain infrastructure, and why network effects and the flow of money are better indicators.

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We sat down with William Mougayar, author of The Business Blockchain and founder of the Ethereum Market Research Center, to cut through the noise and return to the first principles of what makes a blockchain valuable and enduring.

Why it’s important: As the Layer 1 landscape becomes increasingly competitive, narratives often diverge from fundamentals. With billions of dollars at stake, understanding the core tenets of decentralization, trust, and credible neutrality is crucial for investors, builders, instituions and enterprises. William provides a masterclass in separating hype from reality, drawing on his decades of experience in technology cycles.

Where to find

🎙️ In our conversation, we discussed:

Pre-Bitcoin digital cash and peer-to-peer technologies
What made Ethereum’s smart contracts a revolutionary leap forward
Why the “Layer 1” label is a misleading oversimplification for Ethereum
The critical importance of credible neutrality and censorship resistance
A detailed rebuttal of common anti-Ethereum arguments, particularly regarding Solana
The flaws in using “revenue” as the primary metric for valuing a blockchain
How value accrues to ETH through its role as a productive, foundational asset
The evolution of valuation models from the early internet to today’s blockchain ecosystems
What’s next for blockchain adoption, from institutional finance to consumer apps

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My biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. The “general-purpose blockchain” game is over

William makes a bold claim: the competition to be the world’s dominant, general-purpose smart contract platform has concluded. While other blockchains will exist, they will likely serve niche, specialised functions or operate as Layer 2s within the broader Ethereum ecosystem. The reason isn’t speed or cost, but something far more fundamental: earned trust.

“Ethereum has a leadership as a general-purpose blockchain. Most other blockchains, some of them will disappear. Some of them will not be as significant as we think. Some will become L2s, and many others will become specialized.”

The key differentiator is a decade-long track record of uptime, decentralisation, and credible neutrality. Institutions aren’t looking for the fastest chain; they are looking for the most reliable and fair one.

“What’s more important than speed is trust. Trust must be earned. Trust is not a promise... The fact is that Ethereum has a big advantage. They have more than 10 years of track record of never having gone down.”

This raises a question about the general-purpose blockchain being built by financial institutions, such as Stripe and Circle. Williams suggests finding the right blockchain that integrates most deeply with Ethereum’s settlement layer.

2. Speed is a feature, not a moat

The crypto industry is obsessed with transactions per second (TPS). William argues this is a red herring. While performance is important, it’s not the primary driver of value for a decentralised system. The most critical financial decisions and asset movements don’t require millisecond latency; they require unwavering security and predictability.

“Speed is a feature, but it’s not the most important feature. If you want to go for speed, you might be better off choosing a very fast database... The real power is decentralization and neutrality and programmability and enabling trustless collaboration between strangers around the world.”

Furthermore, the scalability debate is often framed incorrectly. When you view Ethereum not just as a Layer 1 but as an entire ecosystem of Layer 2s, its performance capabilities are vastly underestimated.

“When you count all of the L2s together... Ethereum as an ecosystem can average 500 transactions per second with peaks of almost 3,000.”

3. Ethereum drives institutions with neutrality

When William showed Vitalik a 2015 ecosystem diagram with the Ethereum Foundation at the centre, Vitalik told him to remove it.

That decision defined Ethereum’s DNA: no single entity should ever control the network it depends on.

“If you took the foundation away, Ethereum would still work. I would challenge some other blockchains to turn theirs off.”

For institutional allocators, that distinction matters.

Ethereum has:

No centralised validator control
No subsidised inflation masking yield
A deflationary model that strengthens during high activity

Solana, by contrast, funds staking yields via 7% annual token inflation, a short-term incentive that erodes long-term holder value.

“It’s like a drug. Once you start, it’s hard to stop.”

Institutions care about compliance, regulation, trust and robust infrastructure. Neutrality adds up to that.

4. Network velocity beats protocol revenue

William draws a sharp parallel between Web2 and Web3 valuation phases:

“We’re still in the ‘eyeballs’ phase of blockchain; people chasing vanity metrics.”

Protocol revenue alone misses where value accrues. Blockchains aren’t SaaS businesses; they’re public infrastructure. The real metrics are:

Capital velocity: how often assets move
Ecosystem dependency: how many third parties must touch the chain
Productive asset yield: staking, restaking, DeFi utilisation
Settlement dominance: where the final value accrues

“The most valuable blockchains won’t extract rent, they’ll maximize capital velocity.”

Ethereum’s $700B app capital, $80B DeFi TVL, and 80B of Tether issuance prove that network effects compound faster than any single metric can capture.

William’s bottom line: The most enduring blockchains won’t be the fastest or the most extractive. They will be the most credible neutral platforms that foster the largest, most vibrant, and most secure digital economies. They are foundations for a new financial system, and they should be valued as such.

“Blockchains are not SaaS businesses... if you only want to see them as based on their revenue then you might as well count them as a private SaaS business but they are not that.”

Take care,

Marc

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