Building for a global financial system onchain and building for global reserve asset held by central banks are incompatible goals. If Ethereum succeeds in building a thriving Internet Financial System, it will necessarily fail as apolitical money held by central banks. When people say that money is the largest market opportunity for digital assets, they mean that apolitical global reserve assets can have large valuations. Gold is neither stable nor a good medium of exchange nor the unit of account for global trade, but nations and large investors have chosen to hold nearly $10T of gold and the market cap of gold is nearly $20T. A nation can save in gold and spend that gold during a period of global conflict. The whole point of holding gold is that you can spend it to buy oil during a global war when the survival of your nation is at stake. Gold has proven spendable during large wars over a long history, and Bitcoin is attempting to convince the world that it can compete with gold in this large market. I don't believe this opportunity is available for smart contract platforms. A smart contract platform with a large financial system of RWAs cannot be an apolitical reserve asset between central banks because the country with the most RWAs controls fork choice in a conflict. Let me make this case with an example. Imagine everybody in the world is using ethereum for financial activity like payroll, payments, M&A transactions, auto leasing, mortgage payments, etc. There is a large and diverse set of validators that includes large financial institutions, businesses, governments, and many solo stakers who run ethereum nodes on laptops. There is $80T of RWA value and, in this example, ETH is an apolitical reserve asset valued at $20T. War breaks out between the US and China. The countries are evenly matched enough for there to be an uncertain outcome, and both the Yuan and USD fall by over 50%. The US notes that America and its allies represent over 80% of real financial activity on ethereum and introduces a hard fork that makes China's ETH unspendable (AmericaFork). It enforces that fork by saying only RWAs on AmericaFork are redeemable. Most financial institutions and businesses don’t think twice and start voting on AmericaFork immediately. They don't want to expose themselves to harsh legal punishment and many of them legitimately want to help their home country / ally during a high stakes conflict. The solo stakers need to decide quickly so as to not get inactivity leaked out of both forks. A few cipher punks decide to stay on original fork out of principle (and they are inactivity leaked out of AmericaFork), but most just follow the more valuable ETH between AmericaETH and OriginalETH (now called ChinaETH on all Western newspapers). I think its fairly obvious that both AmericaETH and ChinaETH drop under these circumstances but ChinaETH falls much more and probably by >>50% given the circumstances (remember 80% of financial activity is happening on AmericaFork). China's national savings have been rendered useless. Immediate knockout. The consequences of the mistake of buying ETH as national savings are as big as consequences of a mistake can ever be. This situation is obviously untenable and implies that central banks will never buy a large amount of ETH as national savings. Notice that Bitcoin does not have this specific problem because it does not have a large amount of RWAs. America cannot enforce a hard fork that renders China's BTC unspendable because AmericaFork would, in the absence of RWA value to coerce consensus, correspond to the less valuable BTC. A global pool of miners would keep adding blocks to OriginalFork because it continues to be the more valuable fork. I don't know if this will actually hold up but at least it works in theory. The most common response I hear to this argument is that ETH can still be a type of local reserve asset within ethereum. It has the lowest counterparty risk within the system and that will lead the asset to be used as collateral. That's fine. Maybe it works and maybe USD / bridged BTC take the role of collateral. I don't know but in either case this represents a much smaller market opportunity. We don't have gold at $18T to point at, and the market isn't really proven at all. Note: I did not come up with this argument and I am mostly posting this to see if I am missing anything major. I heard this a year ago and expected to hear several compelling responses but I have yet to come across a good counter. If there is no good counter, then I think its another strong point against moneyness and in favor of thinking in terms of blockchain revenue / REV.