The money flow is the moat

Many of the best businesses in history have been built by positioning themselves “in the money flow” — facilitating the creation and transfer of value within a network and taking a cut. The more value that flows through the network, the bigger the business often grows.

Crypto is the first modern technology built natively for this. If your startup hasn’t architected your product and business to benefit from these principles, you’re missing out. And thanks to stablecoins, money and value now move at the speed of the internet — settling globally, 24/7, with end-to-end programmability. The rails are open, the unit economics are public, and the total addressable money flow is every dollar that moves anywhere in the world.

Blockchains are network businesses by design. Every transaction settles on a shared ledger. Every new participant strengthens the same substrate that the next builder uses. The network becomes more valuable to all users as more people use and build on it.

Most companies spend years manufacturing network effects on top of legacy infrastructure. Crypto founders inherit them as a starting condition.

Network tokens compound this. A well-designed token aligns users, developers, suppliers, validators, and the protocol around a single outcome — growing the network — and pays out in proportion to each participant's contribution. But the protocol’s revenue belongs to the people who use it. No partnership rebates, no side deals. Just a feedback loop between value moving through the system, and value accruing to the people who built and grew it.

This isn’t a new pattern. Crypto has just made it more accessible and scalable for startups for the first time.

Railroads didn’t make money on locomotives. They made money on every ton of grain, coal, and steel that crossed their track. Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and AT&T were all companies that were in the money flow. Google and Meta replaced print and television not because the ads were better, but because they sat at the chokepoint where attention turned into commerce, allowing them to take a clip of trillions in commercial intent. AWS sits in the flow of compute.

The pattern is consistent: Find where value moves and put yourself in the middle of it.

Financial markets make this pattern even clearer. Visa moved $15.7 trillion in payment volume in fiscal 2024 and reported $35.9 billion in net revenue. Jane Street posted $20.5 billion in net trading revenue last year — more than Citigroup or Bank of America. The top five U.S. market makers handle 87% of payment for order flow: They don’t predict markets; they sit in the flow of every order and earn more as volume grows.

The other thing these businesses have in common is network effects. Visa is more useful to more merchants as more cards exist and more useful to more cardholders as more merchants accept it. Order flow works the same way — every additional broker tightens spreads, attracts more brokers, and attracts more flow.

Money flow plus network effects is one of the most durable business structures ever built.

Bezos called it when he said, “Your margin is my opportunity.” He was talking about retail, but it’s even more applicable to traditional financial services — the largest pool of margin extraction in the world. Payments, custody, lending, foreign exchange, securitization, settlement, market making. Visa and Mastercard charge 2-3% interchange on networks designed in the 1960s. Remittance corridors charge 6-9%. Prime brokers and custodians take a clip on every securities transaction. Even after the U.S. moved to T+1 settlement in 2024, capital still sits idle overnight as a structural tax on every participant.

Each of those margins is a target. Compress costs, increase velocity, and potentially expand the entire market. Stripe and Square proved it works in payments.

Crypto founders have the opportunity to build the next version — programmable, instant, global, and natively in the money flow.

And the frontier extends well beyond financial services. Compute and GPU marketplaces. Memory chips. AI training data. Energy. Robotics. Space. Rare earth metals. Each is a category where global value can start moving in volumes that the existing rails were never designed to carry.

Each is open ground for a money-flow business built on programmable infrastructure from day one. Markets with no incumbent rails, no entrenched intermediaries, and nothing to defend.

As a founder, ask yourself:

1. Are you in the money flow today?

2. When the value of the activity on your product grows 10x, does your revenue grow with it?

3. If you’re building a new product, where in your target market is margin extraction the highest relative to the value being created?

That’s where the opportunity lives. Compress it, sit in the new flow, and let the network compound from there.

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