Most apps are actually not very helpful for their chains. Now that I've got the clickbait out of the way, a bit more nuance - We've been spending a fair bit of time internally discussing what matters for a chain in the short / medium / long term, especially as value drivers for a token have transitioned from "narratives" and "community" to revenue and cashflows. In the Gensler era, generating revenue or sharing it with tokenholders was bad, esp as a chain - in a best case, it was a legal liability, in a worst case, it was a valuation ceiling (ie. this protocol makes $3m in rev, therefore it is worth 30m assuming a 10x P/E). Right now, Bera doesn't capture revenue directly, though it has shared $30m+ in PoL incentives with tokenholders. Now, we're actually seeing more chains take "App-First" approaches to control their own outcomes, whether its Plasma One (Soon Tm), Hyperliquid, or Near Intents among others. Funnily enough, this was the original Bera vision, which was ultimately hampered by our ability to technically execute while getting comfortable on the legal side + pushback from the community around potentially eliminating a competitive market. There's lots of nuanced reasons for this change, beyond a maturing market and regulatory environment. One of them is the "dilution of the bid" as more tokens have been launched. Previously, one might bid Sol to get exposure to Pump, or Meteora, etc - but now you can just buy the dApp token itself. Sure, maybe you buy it with Sol, but maybe you buy it with USDC - and what does that do for Sol itself? The relationship between eco dapps and chains has also evolved a bit. Historically, eco dapps have served as the major B2B2C nodes for onboarding to a chain (and long before that, validators served as a chain's BD/demand enginge) and an adjacent thesis was that these dApps' gas consumption would drive value for the chain's token. The other angle beyond this is perhaps the mercenary nature that many app builders have to take in order to survive. Either they must possess the ability to build their own independent audience from CT, so their chain choice doesn't matter (a very rare skill) - or they have to go to where the users are, and flock to the hottest chain at the moment. You can throw grants and incentives at people, but at the end of the day they're just bandaid solutions. The real blackpill is that many apps that have gained massive adoption and see tons of usage have had negligible effects on their home chain's PA - I think the Polygon ecosystem is a pretty saddening case study of that. That isn't meant as a slight against Polygon in any way, I think they're OGs and well intentioned builders in the space who don't always get the credit they deserve (despite some narrative chasing in the past). But some of crypto's most-used apps are Polymarket and Courtyard, with the former arguably being one of the most important companies in the world right now. It's impossible to determine what the Polygon token would look like in the absence of these apps, but its also fair to make the case that their impact has not been meaningfully reflected in its price action. It's all reflexive right - PA determines if a project is "good" or "bad" in the eyes of the masses. "Good" projects attract more strong builders and distribution, and strong builders beget strong builders. So even with the most egalitarian of intentions, it's EV+ to try to create a desirable token (I know I'm stating the obvious, please don't kill me). The question that's been a bit trickier to model out is "Which apps matter and where should we spend our time?" It becomes especially relevant in the context of PoL, where the chain is helping to subsidize or enhance yields for its dApps. How do we avoid the Polygon / Polymarket scenario, where an app can take off massively, but the token itself might not see that same upside? I don't think there's a perfect answer, unsurprisingly. Some chains have taken the approach of venture investing in their app layer (we've done some of this / incubation with Build-A-Bera). There's certainly some merit to this, but imo its a messy legal pathway towards returning value to tokenholders. Others have erred towards building a lot of their own strongest apps (a la Mysten), which has definitely gotten community pushback, but has generally seemed productive. And some, like the ones I mentioned at the top of this ramble, have built their own revenue drivers (which seems like a very good baseplate idea to me, and is actively being incorporated into the Bera future ) I've been trying to distill a framework for what I believe can make an app *truly accretive* to a chain and potentially to the token over a long enough time frame. IMO apps need to fit into one or more of these categories to move the needle: 1) Native token demand driver. Relatively self explanatory. LSTs, dexes, money markets often end up in this category. 2) Fee printer. Launchpads, perp dexes, some stablecoins all fall into this category. This doesn't necessarily impact the token directly, but it serves as a form of marketing for the eco as its often downstream of a good product. 3) Majors/stables token sink. Similar to 1), but having major liquidity or unique uses for BTC, ETH etc can drive arb volumes, fee generation, and generally provide a home for "default" assets that people might borrow against in order to play in your chain's ecosystem. Still not a direct impact, beyond majors paired with the asset in LPs. 4) Brand arbitrage. Also a form of adjacent marketing - BlackRock / Nvidia / OpenAI is doing something with this team therefore they must be credible, and this may extend to the ecosystem as well. 5) God tier founder. Few and far in between but the right aligned S-Tier founder(s) can bring massive strategic value and upside to a token / ecosystem. But they've gotta be a real champion of it. This is exceedingly tough to find amongst crypto natives but quite interesting when it comes to onboarding web2 founders to crypto, esp as they bring their own networks and capital to the table. 6) Already got distribution. Also a form of marketing, but this is also pretty rare. Examples of this often look like some of the private credit or payments type applications which really don't need crypto native adoption, but do need a chain's rails. The list above is by no means exhaustive, and my perspective could totally be wrong. I felt like it is probably a contentious but interesting viewpoint to share in public, esp in a space with lots of app builders / chain contributors who might have differing perspectives. My tl;dr is kind of: - Enshrinement / owning your own outcomes and rev streams will become increasingly key - Time + token emissions are precious resources and are rarely spent well across most ecos (including us) - target audience for most of crypto is changing and that's going to cause a "Come to God" moment for many including us. Anyway, Berachain builds businesses, more soon.