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"Give the people what they want."

— The Kinks

Crypto users will go where the coins are

Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange used to stage public campaigns to be the primary exchange for high-profile companies listing shares in the US — decisions by the biggest companies often made headlines.

They do still compete, but you never hear about it anymore because investors no longer care.

It used to be obvious where you were dealing — Nasdaq required a call to a market maker who’d quote you a price and NYSE a call to the floor where you’d leave an order with a specialist.

After trading went fully electronic, you could still tell because Nasdaq tickers were four-letters long and NYSE tickers were less than four letters (the one-letter symbols were particularly sought after).

Now the tickers are all mixed up and even professionals pay little or no attention to what exchange they’re trading on (other than some quirks around the opening and closing prices).

Nor should they. Every US stock trades on multiple venues, but the SEC’s Regulation NMS (implemented in 2005) ensures the liquidity is effectively pooled: It’s impossible to buy a stock on one exchange if it’s offered cheaper on another.

(In crypto, by contrast, the same token trading on three different exchanges often trades at three different prices.)

Companies do still care where they’re listed, although not nearly as much as they used to, I think — the perceived branding value of being on Nasdaq or NYSE is much diminished. 

Exchanges, however, still care — a lot.

Nasdaq recently announced that a total of 500 companies had switched their primary exchange from NYSE to Nasdaq. Meanwhile, NYSE says $1.4 trillion of market capitalization has switched from Nasdaq to NYSE.

(At least one company is included in both tallies: Charles Schwab listed its shares on NYSE in 1987, added a Nasdaq listing in 2004, dropped the NYSE listing in 2005, and finally moved back to NYSE in 2010.)

Exchanges monetize these listing wins with trading fees, of course, but also (and more importantly), by selling data to traders, offering ancillary services to their listed companies, and licensing their brand to ETF issuers.

As the trading experience on NYSE and Nasdaq has become more alike, they’ve tried to differentiate on listing fees, listing requirements, governance rules, reputation and index opportunities.

In crypto, by contrast, blockchains mostly attempt to differentiate themselves via tech and trading experience — but I expect that will change too, because with crypto trading experience also becoming less differentiated, users now mostly just go where the coins are. 

Solana, for example, originally won converts from Ethereum by being cheaper and easier to use — traders went for the low fees and fast execution and were happy to trade whatever happened to be on offer (mostly what they could do was trade SOL, to the benefit of Solana’s valuation).

But with low fees now almost everywhere, a trader’s choice of blockchain is becoming more about where the most exciting coins are.

Layer-one blockchains, therefore, will increasingly have to compete for assets in the same way that NYSE and NASDAQ compete for listings.

The competition is already heating up.

Solana (whose North Star aspiration is to become "decentralized Nasdaq") has been winning market share because that’s where most of the fun memecoins are, but we increasingly have options, as Blockworks Research highlighted in a flashnote ($) last week: "Increasing competition and adversarial conditions on Solana may drive users to seek opportunities elsewhere." 

The note cites Base and Hyperliquid as the most likely blockchains to poach users from Solana, but mentions Monad, Abstract and MegaETH as well.

There’s also SUI, Aptos, Near, all the Ethereum L2s and some others I’m forgetting because there’s too many to remember.

That’s a lot of competition!

On Crypto Twitter, this competition plays out mostly in the form of technical debates.

But the winner, I think, will simply be the blockchain that attracts the best coins.

The tech still matters, of course, as evidenced by the recent enthusiasm for Hyperliquid (super fast, gasless trading, CLOBs instead of AMMs) — but, in the long run, the tech may only matter to the extent that it attracts asset issuance.

Hyperliquid’s biggest differentiator, for example, may be that it’s the only place to trade HYPE (the native token for Hyperliquid).

The coins on offer will, I think, outweigh a layer-one blockchain’s rate of issuance, tokenomics, value capture, decentralization and, as said, probably even the tech. 

Or, as Jon Charbonneau puts it, users are there "for a piece of valuable state."

("State" in this context being the onchain record of who owns what.) 

I imagine crypto will inevitably end up like US equities, where you don’t know which blockchain you’re trading on.

(We’re probably now at the equivalent stage of when Nasdaq was phone trading and NYSE was floor trading.)

If so, the differentiating factor for layer-one blockchains, as with stock exchanges, will be how good they are at attracting asset listings. 

That’s a tough business, especially considering that blockchains can’t sell their data or offer ancillary services like the exchanges do.  

I’m not sure the market is pricing that in: Decentralized Nasdaq is already 2.5x the valuation of actual Nasdaq.

— Byron Gilliam

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