Morning thoughts:

So right now there's $495m worth of Uniswap (UNI) tokens (implied $3.3bn Y2024) that just flooded the market overnight out of nowhere.

Can you answer the following question: Does this now mean that the cryptocurrency community as a whole is $495m richer?

"No! Zero new fiat entered the system. Nothing was raised in an ICO. The cryptocurrency economy can only grow if people send in new fiat. Various cryptoassets trading at arbitrary exchange rates with each other doesn't magically increase the total wealth. There must be inflows."

If you think like this, I think you must be confused. Markets don't work that way. I mean, you could argue that Uniswap (UNI) hasn't had proper price discovery yet and that there's not nearly enough market depth to absorb a $495m sell order. True, but that's a bit separate.

Example: the automotive industry came from "nowhere" in a sense and has a multi-trillion dollar market cap now. Tesla's $411bn valuation has nothing to do with whether people sent $411bn to purchase the Nasdaq stock or not. Daily vol = ~$2bn and is sufficient for price discovery.

And now, Tesla could in theory be flat-out purchased for $411bn in an all-cash bid. Its market cap is definitely real, even though it came out of making something where there was previously just air. An asset's valuation has nothing to do with "inflow of capital to exchanges".

So, when new tokens like Uniswap (UNI) pop up and conjures up a $0.5bn pile of wealth in our ecosystem from nowhere without any new fiat, that's by no means a "zero sum game". The space *did* get richer. The π grew. There is more wealth in the system now since this happened.

I don't know why I wrote this thread but it seems like many struggle with these concepts immensely? Also happy to learn if there's fundamentally wrong with my line of reasoning, I never took any formal studies in any of this, I'm just a computer science engineer.