“A winner-take-all market is a market in which a product or service which is only slightly (1%) better than the competitors gets disproportionately large (90–100%) share of or all revenues for that class of products or services.” -Wikipedia

Blockchains are not that market...

1. Blockchains don’t aggregate users based on their technical performance.

Blockchains tend to aggregate users who are holding their native asset and speculating on their future success, not technical performance.

As a result we have blockchains which don’t do anything worth billions as well as highly performant blockchains with no users.

A blockchain which performs 1% better may not have the opportunity to thrive at all.

2. Blockchains don’t provide a uniform good or service.

Blockchains provide a spectrum of architectures, security tradeoffs, programming languages, throughput profiles, etc.

Some people say long term one blockchain can deliver all consensus-based goods and services.

But the much more likely reality is that blockchain architectures specialize over time for different industrial use cases, and there are more dedicated blockchains.

They probably all interoperate, but, saliently, have distinct assets which capture their value.

3. Blockchains and protocols have diminished network effects and switching costs.

The force that keeps the monopoly in a winner-take-all market is network effect. But blockchains and protocols don’t really have them.

Just like we can move a billion dollars of liquidity from one AMM to another, we’ll soon be able to switch chains pretty easily too.

When switching costs are low, a winner-take-all field becomes harder to maintain.

Long story short, there *could* be a winner in the blockchain game on a *very* long time frame. But probably not.

In the mean time, there are plenty of technologies, networks, assets, and innovations to bet on.