I complain a lot about Farcaster, while I tend to have praise for Base.

Yet Farcaster is clearly valuable. While Base is mostly valueless as a network (op stack, single sequencer...). Their moat lies in their network effects, which Farcaster is a big driver of too.

Isn’t the biggest moat years of user acquisition which now means distribution is easy and cheap? Not sure a lot of CB users are even active on farcaster.

EVM. ETHFinance. Home Staker. Believer in decentralisation.

Oh you're right, I was really talking to myself too deep here. I was thinking of "moat" in terms of an useful product by my arbitrary terms. Within that frame I consider the financial part of crypto mostly useless. It's all about getting people doing actual nonspeculative things onchain.

Got it. But yeah, if you use commoditized tech there of course can't be a product moat. In the end down the road L1s and L2s will have to pick a niche. Sometimes this might be tech, sometimes this might be marketing/ brand/ distribution, sometimes this might be regional (which likely comes down to distribution, but potentially also regulation) etc. and I think that's okay.