so what do I think about @spark @flashnet (general thoughts)? 1. General First, some of us here need to understand this: Spark/Flashnet isn’t here to save the Runes bags. And that’s okay. Runes will shine someday. They’re timeless. They live on L1. I mean, we’re still talking about them 1.5 years later even though they’re supposedly “dead.” They’ll only be dead when nobody mentions them anymore, which clearly isn’t the case (imagine a zesty “hehe” here). In comparison: OdinFun kinda had to pretend to care about Runes - and it took them quite some time to even include them. But they never provided real incentives to fill Runes LPs; in the end, they just used the ecosystem for attention, marketing, and user engagement. By contrast, @ArchNtwrk @proofofmud plan to build their marketing from day one around the Ordinals and Runes ecosystem, probably combining that with strong incentives to keep those communities engaged for the long term. Spark/Flashnet, however, aren’t dependent on Runes users like OdinFun was. They generate attention from other fronts - which is actually respectable, since they’re not exploiting the Runes communities the way OdinFun, Funkybit, Slingshot, and others did. Spark/Flashnet stand on their own feet. I still don’t like that direction personally - I’d of course prefer if they also included Runes in their narrative and maybe offered proper incentives like Arch potentially does. But they’ve decided to ignore Runes, and we have to accept that. Our best hope is probably @luminexio stepping in as a third party. As the main hub for trading, they could include incentives for Runes bridges to fill out liquidity pools (maybe even in partnership with @MEonBTC - looking at you @SirGnarlGnomie). Bridges and incentives for Runes are exactly what I’m trying to push for behind the scenes. 2. Technical Perspective Let’s see if Sparks/Flashnet gets hacked. If they don’t, that alone puts them ahead of OdinFun, lol. Just kidding. Yes, the constant downtime has been bearish - but everyone seems willing to give them “one last shot” on Monday. It’s also worth noting that, for example, Bob used ICP for OdinFun - an older and more battle-tested chain - instead of building a new protocol from scratch. I mean, even Solana (not to compare it directly to Sparks lol) and other big chains had plenty of off-days early on, so we should cut Sparks/Flashnet a bit of slack. Money, hype, and time can’t simulate the pressure of real users flooding a protocol - and they supposedly “hit over 100 million requests in an hour” (though tbh I need receipts). That kind of load forced them to scale quickly, which is now in progress. 3. Current Coins (Sooncoin and Others) Sooncoin @sooncoinspark currently has pretty strong mindshare, even beyond the BTC trenches and BTC folks who don’t usually shill. A bunch of Solana KOLs are already memeing it and getting ready to max shill. It’s just a pretty memeable, simple, and fun way to interact with the ecosystem. After all, Flashnet needs its own “OdinDog”-type runner, and Sooncoin fills that role right now. From my perspective, if the currently loudest coin (Sooncoin) fails to push higher, the whole degen side of Spark/Flashnet could fade pretty fast, tbh. Or we get a new deus-ex-machina meme that cooks everything to gazillions. I would also welcome that. We’ve also seen runners like Betacat, HODL, Dragon, etc. - though as you can see, we still lack more real memes. But also expect the Solana trenches to launch new, creative tokens on Monday and cook/crime up more activity. In comparison: OdinFun was heavily narrative-driven and controlled by Bob’s own dev-created tokens, which honestly killed creativity and hope for new coins. The same “first-is-first” narrative also hurt (imo) Sparks/Flashnet early on - but since the platform was online/offline for so long, people stopped caring about those early, cabaled, and bundled tokens. That’s actually great. With that phase dying out, there’s now much more room for new runners and profits. 4. Potential Bigger Picture At its core, Sparks is a payment and scaling solution - and even certain folks in Silicon Valley are genuinely interested. If the trenches perform well, that’s even better for both sides (the business and the degen crowd). China’s also paying close attention to Sparks right now. But let me be clear, I also wouldn't be shocked to see people to stop checking Sparktoken-tabs on Luminex after 2 weeks. It all depends if Flashnet/Spark send this one PvE runner to gazillions and getting the whole twitter timeline fomoing and interested in participating. That said, I also think Arch will be a sexy play too - especially if they manage to nail the execution, which is always the hardest part.