I have always felt that the crypto world has a kind of extremely childish political correctness, which is that as long as you are associated with traditional Web2 giants or try to make your products as compliant and brainless as Alipay, you are violating the ancestral law of decentralization. This kind of fundamentalist purism can serve as an emotional catalyst during a bull market, but once the tide recedes and everyone is swimming naked, you will find that only real commercial cash flow can keep a project alive. Recently, while researching the infrastructure of the PayFi track, I was painfully shocked by an extremely outrageous on-chain transaction fee; a previously insignificant cross-border payment test, due to a wave of meme coin frenzy from a major player at the time, saw gas fees soar to twice the transaction principal. For us speculators engaging in on-chain games, we might just curse a bit, but if you are the CFO of Uniqlo or Starbucks, seeing such completely unpredictable transaction wear, you would definitely kick the business manager proposing to connect to Web3 out of the office. It is in this corner of business logic that I saw that chilling dimensionality reduction strike.
Setting aside those flashy technical terms, just looking at the fixed fee rate of $0.0005 written in the protocol's underlying code, this is hardly a technological innovation; it's clearly a pledge to the traditional business system. Currently, both Layer1 and Layer2 are competing on performance, with everyone eager to inflate TPS to millions per second, yet hardly anyone is willing to consider the determinacy of rates from the perspective of commercial settlement. The subnet architecture of Avalanche is indeed powerful; it allows enterprises to customize their fee logic, but it requires extremely large upfront development and node maintenance costs. This attempt to directly lock in the dollar standard at the underlying level is essentially playing the role of an assassin for a settlement channel. When I experienced their smart wallet integrated with social login, my biggest feeling was extreme boredom—yes, boredom. You don't need to understand what a mnemonic is, you don't need to check the current Gwei, just scan, use facial recognition, and complete the payment. This seamless experience that makes one feel almost unaware of the blockchain's existence is the core reason why global payment giants like Worldpay are willing to bind deeply with them.
Speaking of Worldpay and Google Cloud's entry, many people always interpret it with an extremely short-sighted mindset, thinking it is just a false prosperity bought by Mu Fang's money. But if you really look into that set of underlying on-chain contract logic that includes AI risk control, you will find this is by no means a simple rebranding. The biggest nightmare for traditional financial institutions entering Web3 is anti-money laundering and compliance auditing; the anonymity and immutability of on-chain data are a disaster for regulation. The reasoning engine built into this architecture effectively adds a real-time compliance filter at the verification layer of the chain. When a transaction involving real-world asset attributes occurs, nodes not only validate signatures but also verify the logical reasonableness of the fund's flow. This explains why those enterprise-level clients with high requirements for ESG and data privacy are willing to endure the current ecological barrenness and prefer to set up their testing environment here. What they care about is not the trifles in the hands of retail investors, but the channel pricing power when trillions of dollars' worth of traditional financial assets are migrated to the chain.
Yet this posture of aligning with traditional capital has caused an extremely awkward rupture at the community operation level. If you take a stroll through their Discord, you will find it as quiet as an academic seminar, without the fervent believers who often shout about hundredfold or thousandfold gains, nor the endless emergence of meme projects to attract liquidity. A public chain without Degen culture support is extremely disadvantaged in the current crypto world. Water that is too clear has no fish; no matter how much you refine the underlying experience for large-scale commercial adoption, if there is no initial speculative wealth effect to attract attention, that beautifully designed zero-fee network can only be an empty highway. I attempted to deploy a ticketing contract with complex profit-sharing logic in their console called the creator platform, only to find that while the UI was very geeky, the documentation was extremely rough, and when encountering errors, I couldn't even find a developer community to discuss it, ultimately having to stubbornly reverse-engineer the underlying SDK package. This attitude of being extremely flattering towards the B-side while being very indifferent towards wild developers is its most fatal Achilles' heel.
For retail investors like us seeking excess returns in the secondary market, facing such fundamentally solid yet emotionally cold assets requires a fundamental shift in operating strategy. You can't expect it to give you dizzying gains like those animal coins on Solana within a week. The current circulating supply has basically been fully released, the chip structure is extremely fragmented, and there is a lack of market-making funds that could stir up waves, leading to K-line trends that often resemble an ECG, driving people crazy. However, if you carefully analyze the token burn mechanism that is about to be initiated with the landing of enterprise applications, you will find it is trying to replicate the business closed loop of SaaS services in the Web2 era. Enterprises must continuously purchase and burn underlying assets to use the payment and AI services on this chain; this real consumption, completely independent of the bull and bear cycles in the crypto world, is the lifeblood that supports long-term value. Under such a market cap, ambushing such assets with infrastructure endgame potential is essentially betting that the day when traditional capital completely takes over Web3 will come sooner.