The Cost of Missed Revenue in Non-Programmable Communities

Public RPCs are a universal cost center, serving billions of requests daily with zero direct revenue capture. This creates a tragedy of the commons where infrastructure degrades under load, forcing protocols to subsidize their own private nodes.

• Missed Revenue: ~$0.5-1.0B+ in annual potential fees left on the table.
• Performance Tax: Public endpoints suffer from >1s latency and low reliability, degrading user experience.
• Centralization Risk: Forces reliance on a few centralized providers like Infura and Alchemy.

Pocket Network transforms RPC service into a programmable, incentivized marketplace. Protocols run nodes or stake POKT to earn fees for serving their own and others' traffic.

• Revenue Flip: Infrastructure becomes a profit center, generating yield from served requests.
• Performance SLA: Decentralized node network offers ~99.9% uptime and sub-300ms latency.
• Economic Alignment: 40+ chains served by a self-sustaining, protocol-owned network.

DAO treasuries holding billions in static assets (e.g., USDC, ETH) are failing their mandate. Capital sits idle or is delegated to low-yield strategies, missing revenue that could fund development.

• Opportunity Cost: $10B+ TVL earning near-0% yield while protocol needs go unmet.
• Governance Overhead: Proposals for simple treasury management take weeks, creating operational drag.
• Vulnerability: Large, static balances are prime targets for governance attacks and exploits.

Protocols like Aave and tools like Olympus Pro treat the treasury as an active, yield-generating engine. Assets are deployed via strategies (e.g., lending, LP provision, staking) to earn fees and sustain operations.

• Revenue Generation: Aave Treasury earns $50M+ annually from fee streams and staking.
• Protocol-Owned Liquidity: OHM's POL creates deep, permanent liquidity while earning swap fees.
• Automation: Programmable strategies execute based on on-chain conditions, reducing governance lag.

Most L1/L2 sequencers capture 100% of MEV value (front-running, arbitrage) without sharing revenue with the underlying application or its users. This is a direct value leak from the community to the infrastructure layer.

• Value Capture: $500M+ annually in MEV extracted with zero community redistribution.
• User Harm: Results in worse execution prices and network congestion for end-users.
• Centralization Pressure: Incentivizes sequencer centralization to maximize extractable value.

Architectures like SUAVE and app-chains like Osmosis program the MEV supply chain to redistribute value. They enable fair auction mechanisms and direct a portion of sequencer/validator profits back to users and dapps.

• Value Return: Osmosis' threshold encryption reduces harmful MEV, improving user prices.
• Transparent Auction: SUAVE creates a competitive, programmable marketplace for block space.
• Community Alignment: Turns a parasitic tax into a sustainable revenue stream for the ecosystem.

Your community's trades and liquidity are a free buffet for searchers and validators. Without programmability, you cannot internalize this value.

• Estimated annual cross-chain MEV: $1B+
• Recapturable via: Community-run searchers, shared sequencers (like Espresso), or protocol-owned liquidity pools.
• Action: Implement a fee switch or MEV-redistribution vault (e.g., Flashbots SUAVE, CowSwap solver competition).

Engagement and brand affinity have zero financial utility in a non-programmable system. You cannot tokenize attention or reward on-chain behavior.

• Missed Mechanism: Social graphs (Lens, Farcaster) with integrated DeFi primitives.
• Solution: Deploy a community points system that accrues real yield from protocol fees or acts as a governance token for a treasury.
• Example: Friend.tech's key model, but with sustainable revenue backing.

A static multisig treasury earning 0% APY is a failure of capital efficiency. It should be the community's primary revenue engine.

• Standard Yield: ~0% in a cold wallet.
• Programmable Yield: 5-20%+ APY via DeFi strategies (e.g., Aave, Compound, EigenLayer restaking).
• Action: Automate yield generation and distribution via a smart treasury (like Llama, Superfluid) to fund grants and buybacks.

Community members providing liquidity on external platforms (Uniswap, Curve) are subsidizing those protocols' tokens, not their own.

• Problem: Liquidity is exported; fees and voting power are lost.
• Solution: Build or incentivize liquidity in your own pools, or use ve-token models (inspired by Curve, Balancer) to direct emissions and fees back to the community.
• Tooling: Custom AMMs (like SushiSwap v3) or liquidity management platforms (Charm, Gamma).

If governance only consumes time and gas to manage a static system, it's a net drain. It must be linked to a revenue-generating engine.

• Current State: Snapshot votes on grants from a depleting treasury.
• Programmable State: On-chain votes that auto-execute profitable strategies (e.g., adjust fee parameters, deploy capital).
• Framework: Use DAO tooling (Aragon, DAOhaus) with integrated DeFi modules to make governance an active fund manager.

Bridging assets and composing across chains generates fees for infrastructure (LayerZero, Axelar, Wormhole) but not for your community.

• Reality: You pay the tax; they keep the revenue.
• Opportunity: Use intent-based architectures (Across, Socket) with fee sharing, or build a community-specific cross-chain messaging layer that captures value.
• Metric: Redirect ~0.1-0.5% of every cross-chain transaction back to the community treasury.