Original title: The Money Flow Is the Moat
Original author: Jason Rosenthal, a16z crypto partner
Original translation: Peggy, BlockBeats
Editor's note: The core judgment of this article is quite straightforward: the money flow itself is the moat. Looking back at business history, many of the most powerful companies have not simply won by selling products, but by standing in the middle of the "value flow," continuously taking a cut from every shipment, payment, transaction, advertising conversion, computational power usage, or order flow. Railroads make money from the movement of goods, Visa charges fees from the payment network, Google and Meta capture attention to translate it into commercial transactions, and AWS stands at the center of computational power flow. As long as value continues to flow through the network, the network itself will continually grow stronger.
Crypto has for the first time inherently handed this model to startups. Blockchain provides open ledgers and programmable settlement, stablecoins allow money to flow globally at internet speed, and token mechanisms bind users, developers, and network growth together. For Crypto entrepreneurs, the real opportunity is not just to create a new application, but to find the channels of value in old systems that have the highest costs, lowest efficiencies, and heaviest profit extraction, compress it, reconstruct it, and stand in the new money flow.
The article emphasizes that the segments in traditional financial services with the highest profit extraction and lowest efficiency—payments, custody, lending, foreign exchange, clearing, market making, and so on—will become the entry points for crypto entrepreneurs to reconstruct: compress costs, increase speed, and redistribute value. And this "money flow business" (standing in the value circulation channel and sharing profits based on flow) will not be limited to the financial sector; it may also extend to emerging markets like the GPU market, AI training data, energy, robotics, space, and rare earths in the future.
For founders, the key question is: Does your product already stand in the value flow? When the scale of network activity grows tenfold, can your revenue grow in tandem? Opportunities are often hidden in those places where the old infrastructure has the lowest efficiency yet the highest profit extraction. Whoever can compress old costs and step into new flows has the chance to turn the money flow into their own moat.
Below is the original text:
Many of the best companies in history have been built by placing themselves in the "money flow"—they facilitate the creation and transfer of value within the network and extract a portion of the revenue from it. The more value flows through the network, these companies tend to grow larger.
Crypto is the first modern technology designed for this purpose. If your startup has not yet designed products and business models around these principles, you are missing out on opportunities. Especially after the emergence of stablecoins, funds and value can now flow at internet speed: global settlements, around-the-clock operations, with end-to-end programmability. The underlying rails are open, the unit economics are public, and the accessible money flow market nearly covers the flow of every dollar globally.
This Model
Blockchain is inherently a network-type business. Every transaction is settled on a shared ledger; every new participant reinforces the same underlying infrastructure that later users can continue to utilize. As more people use and build, the network becomes more valuable to all users.
Most companies need to spend years artificially creating network effects on top of traditional infrastructure. Meanwhile, Crypto entrepreneurs inherit this network effect from day one.
Network tokens further amplify this. A well-designed token can align users, developers, suppliers, validators, and the protocol itself to the same goal: to grow the network and distribute revenue according to each participant's contributions. Protocol revenues belong to those who truly use it. There are no partnership rebates, no private transactions, only a positive feedback loop: value flows in the system, while value also flows back to those who build and drive the system's growth.
This is not a new model. Crypto just makes it easier and on a larger scale for startups to utilize this model for the first time.
Railroads do not make money by selling locomotives, but by every ton of grain, coal, and steel that passes through their tracks. Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and AT&T are all companies that stand in the money flow. Google and Meta replaced print media and television, not because their advertising was better, but because they positioned themselves at the crucial node of "converting attention to commerce," extracting commissions from trillions of dollars in business intentions. AWS stands at the center of computational power flow.
This model is always consistent: find where value moves, and then place yourself in the middle.
The financial market makes this model clearer. Visa processed $157 trillion in payments in fiscal 2024, recording a net income of $35.9 billion. Jane Street's net trading revenue reached $20.5 billion last year, surpassing Citigroup and Bank of America. The top five market makers in the U.S. handle 87% of order flow payments: they are not predicting the market, but are standing in the middle of every order flow, earning more as transaction volume grows.
These companies have another common point: network effects. Visa is more useful to merchants because of the increasing number of cards; it is more useful to cardholders because of the increasing number of merchants that accept Visa. The same goes for order flow: adding one more broker reduces spreads, attracts more brokers, and then attracts more order flow.
The layering of money flow and network effects is one of the most enduring structures in business history.
Your Profit Is My Opportunity
Bezos once said, "Your profit is my opportunity." He was referring to retail, but this phrase applies even more to traditional financial services—the largest pool of profit extraction globally. Payments, custody, lending, foreign exchange, securitization, clearing, market making, all fall under this. Visa and Mastercard charge interchange fees of 2% to 3% on a network designed in the 1960s; cross-border remittance channels charge 6% to 9%; primary brokers and custodians take cuts from each securities transaction. Even though the U.S. has already moved to T+1 settlement in 2024, capital still sits idle overnight, becoming a structural cost that all participants must bear.
These profit margins are targets. Compress costs, increase the speed of circulation, and potentially expand the entire market. Stripe and Square have already demonstrated this in the payments space.
Crypto entrepreneurs have the opportunity to build the next version: programmable, instantaneous, global, and inherently standing in the money flow.
And this frontier extends far beyond financial services. Computational power and the GPU market, storage chips, AI training data, energy, robotics, space, rare metals—every field may experience massive flows of global value, and existing infrastructure is not designed to accommodate this scale.
Every field is an open market where money flow businesses can be built on programmable infrastructures from day one. There are no established tracks, no deep-rooted intermediaries, and no old interests to protect.
As a founder, you should ask yourself:
1. Are you already standing in the money flow today?
2. When the value of activities on your product grows tenfold, will your revenue grow accordingly?
3. If you are building a new product, where in your target market is there the highest profit extraction relative to the value created?
The opportunity is right there. Compress it, step into the new value flow, and then let the network start to compound growth from there.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
