The Rise of Layer 2s Spells End for Altcoins

Speaking of prominent institutional investors, watch Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, and ask yourself whether this is a man fit to protect his company's shareholders:

https://youtu.be/Cg10yYZjK94?t=1h26m40s

  "Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy”

Another remarkable clip from earlier in the same Michael Saylor interview:

https://youtu.be/Cg10yYZjK94?t=1h10m

This is the guy who mainstreamed Bitcoin investment, and he seems confused and delusional. He doesn't understand the technology and talks about it in mystical terms with wide eyes

Background from Wikipedia:

  On MicroStrategy's quarterly earnings conference call in July 2020, Saylor announced his intention for MicroStrategy to explore purchasing Bitcoin, gold, or other alternative assets instead of holding cash. The following month, MicroStrategy used $250 million from its cash stockpile to purchase 21,454 Bitcoin.

  MicroStrategy later added $175 million of Bitcoin to its holdings in September 2020 and another $50 million in early December 2020. On December 11, 2020, MicroStrategy announced that it had sold $650 million in convertible senior notes, taking on debt to increase its Bitcoin holdings to over $1 billion worth. On December 21, 2020 MicroStrategy announced their total holdings include 70,470 bitcoins purchased for $1.125 billion at an average price of $15,964 per bitcoin. Saylor, who controls 70% of MicroStrategy's shares, dismissed concerns by observers that the move is turning MicroStrategy into a Bitcoin investment firm or exchange-traded fund (ETF).

This is a shockingly misleading account of the current distributed asset landscape.

Two trends completely disprove the article's thesis:

First, almost all L2 projects of note are being built on Ethereum.

The use of Ethereum as the common trust root of disparate scalability projects drives the market to standardize around the Ethereum Virtual Machine for smart contract programs, and Ethereum Mainnet for high-value settlement.

Indeed we even see competing L1s create EVM-compatible environments to increase compatibility with the wider digital economy, and applications like MetaMask.

Second, almost all third party crypto-assets, as opposed to tokens that are native to their own blockchain like BTC/BCH/XRP, are now Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens. The standardization of digital assets around Ethereum's token software interface, and the Ethereum blockchain, massively increases the probability that Ethereum will remain the primary settlement network for value exchange in the digital economy.

I want a coin I can use to buy burritos. If that coin also obfuscates the fact that I bought a burrito, all the better.