One could suggest to rename the fat protocol thesis to the Fat Protocol Fallacy: the higher percentage protocols grab of the aggregate value, the less valuable the whole space becomes.

Joel Monegro's seminal Fat Protocols post introduced the fat protocol thesis for the blockchain industry.

While Joel had many great insights that can lead one to the thesis, and while directionally the blockchain industry may have slightly fatter protocols than the web, I think this framing led the entire space towards a fundamentally flawed direction.

There are many "protocol layer"s in life - the web has one indeed, but others are electricity, plumbing, roads, law, money, to name a few. These protocols serve the public to facilitate the economic activity of countless services, products, transactions; the "application layer". The protocols are valuable parts of our lives because they are simple, cheap and fast to access via the applications that leverage them. We use roads because it's seamless to hop on a bus or your car and drive through one. Electricity is everywhere because I can hook up any electric application to it and turn it on. Sometimes we have to "switch the blockchain" by going from ...