Fat Protocols

On the traditional internet, the underlying protocols (like TCP/IP or HTTP) are 'thin' — open, free, and capturing essentially no economic value themselves — while the applications built on top of them (Google, Facebook, Amazon) are 'fat,' capturing huge value because they own the proprietary data, user relationships, and network effects on top of the shared, valueless plumbing. Monegro's thesis: in crypto, this inverts. Because blockchain data is shared and open rather than proprietary, applications built on top have a much weaker moat, while the base-layer protocol token itself directly captures speculative and economic value as the whole ecosystem of applications built on it succeeds.