Ben Scharfstein
@scharf
Blur v Opensea driving take rates to 0 makes me bullish on crypto. To me, one of the biggest value props of crypto is getting us closer to the efficient market and reducing rent extraction. Tokens potentially align incentives here, Opensea yet to crack (maybe doesn’t apply in this case)
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Noah Bragg 🔥
@nbragg
But how do companies make a profit in that case?
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Ben Scharfstein
@scharf
A few things: -Protocols don’t need to profit -OS has made a ton of money to this point, just because they don’t have a long term sustained profit engine, doesn’t mean they can’t profit -By doing things that are differentiated and value add. For example, their APIs are very useful and benefit from economies o
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Tom McLeod
@tmcleod
"OS has made a ton of money to this point, just because they don’t have a long term sustained profit engine, doesn’t mean they can’t profit" How do share holders profit? How many businesses destroy their main engine of profit and survive? Where is OS a Protocol?
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Ben Scharfstein
@scharf
Seaport is a protocol that Opensea builds and productizes in the same way Farcaster is a protocol that warpcaster / mmc builds. Opensea will need to find other ways to profit. I think they can! Profits are value transfer from users to companies. Less profit is good for consumers.
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Tom McLeod
@tmcleod
Profit is the free market showing the value of the arbitrage between a service and what consumers are willing to pay for it. "Good for consumers" is relative to how critical it is for specific users. I'm always team "find other profit" but if AWS stopped taking a cut of cloud services they wouldn't have a business.
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Ben Scharfstein
@scharf
What’s an example of a product you’d rather pay more for?
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Tom McLeod
@tmcleod
Any item or service that if it ceased to exist because people refused to pay the creators of it, would impact my life negatively if I lost access to it.
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Ben Scharfstein
@scharf
Yeah for sure. Has to be sustainable / worth operating.
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