Recently, I’ve been seeing a bunch of PFPs/member cards talk about “brand moats.” To put it plainly, a lot of the time it’s just short-term attention dressed up in a more appealing package. If you really want something long-term, you have to answer a basic question: besides emotional value, what verifiable and transferable rights are actually left on-chain? Otherwise, once the project stops updating and the Discord goes quiet, what’s left is just a picture.

Over the past couple of days, everyone’s been putting RWA, US bond yields, and on-chain yield products side by side for comparison. But I actually care more about “who bears the cost”—nodes, oracles, liquidation, compliance boundaries… With these opaque things, no matter how expensive the membership is, it’s just a story. Anyway, when I look at membership offerings now, I first focus on whether its permissions can be used across different applications, and who will cover its ongoing costs.

That’s it for now—I’m going to go over the contract permissions and treasury transaction records of a few older PFPs again.