The Fat Wallet Thesis

Throughout crypto's history, there has been ongoing discourse around where value will ultimately accrue within the blockchain stack. While historically, the

Throughout crypto’s history, there has been ongoing discourse around where value will ultimately accrue within the blockchain stack. While everyone has been busy debating the merits of protocols versus applications, I believe there is a third layer within the stack that everyone is ignoring — wallets.

The “Fat Wallet” Thesis asserts that, as protocols and applications increasingly “thin-out”, more room is being freed up for whoever owns the two most valuable resources — distribution and order-flow. Moreover, as the ultimate front-end, I believe no one is better positioned to monetize this value than wallets.

In this report we aim to accomplish four things. First, we will outline three structural trends that will continue to commoditize the protocol and application layers, leaving more room for front-ends to capture value. Subsequently, we will explore the various avenues for wallets to monetize their proximity to the end-user including payment-for-order-flow (PFOF) and selling apps Distribution as a Service (DaaS). From here, we will discuss two alternative paths — horizontally integrated super-apps and cross-chain front-ends — and why they could ultimately beat wallets in the race to owning the end user. Lastly, we will highlight the specific projects that stand to benefit from the “Fat Wallet Thesis”.

Towards “Thinner” Protocols

The question of where value will ultimately accrue within the blockchain stack can be reduced to a simple framework. For each respective layer of the crypto stack, ask yourself the following question:

If a product within this layer increases its take rate, will users leave for a cheaper alternative?

Downstream of this logic, we’re able to identify where switching costs are highest and thus who has asymmetric pricing power. Similarly, we can use this framework to identify where switching costs are lowest, and therefore which layer of the stack will become increasingly commoditized with time.

Let’s start with protocols (i.e., blockchains). In 2018, Joel Monegro laid the groundwork for why protocols will disproportionately capture value. Joel’s logic was simple. Given blockchains serve as the shared infrastructure layer for apps, switching costs are much higher at the protocol layer. In other words, even if Ethereum raised its take rate back in 2018, Uniswap can’t leave for another chain because doing so would relinquish both Uniswap’s existing user base as well as Uniswap’s composability with other Ethereum-native DeFi apps. Consequently, Uniswap is forced to remain on Ethereum, and downstream of this, users must also remain on Ethereum.

Joel’s conclusion was that while applications disproportionately captured value in Web2, the opposite will be true in Web3 — the crypto stack will be composed of “thin apps” and “fat protocols”.

While Joel’s thesis has turned out to be directionally correct thus far, a lot has changed since 2018. I would argue that there are three structural trends today that are increasingly “thinning-out” the protocol layer:

The net effect of the these structural trends is that both transaction fees and MEV will continue to compress, leaving more room for value capture from other layers of the stack. Coming back to our original framework, if Arbitrum meaningfully increased their take rate on transaction fees today, I expect they would in fact lose market share to other L2s such as base or L1s such as Solana supporting the same apps. This is especially true in a world where agents are routing user intents. Taken to its logical conclusion, fees will asymptotically compress to their technical limit, perhaps rendering hardware as the strongest source of defensibility for a protocol.

This brings us to the second argument from the “fat protocol” output.