With many public chains fading away recently, I increasingly feel that the competition among public chains has shifted direction. A couple of years ago, the focus was on who issued the most tokens, had the highest TVL, or generated the biggest trading volumes. Now, the competition is about who can bring in the most real money. In my view, AI, payments, and RWA are essentially the three main pillars of the next phase. I’ve written quite a bit about RWA this year—listing equities on-chain, treasury funds, gold tokens. In essence, it’s about taking existing assets and putting them into a blockchain wrapper. It’s convenient to buy and transfer quickly, but has anything changed about how money is lent out or to whom? Not at all. What I’m more interested in is another path: directly bringing real business financing needs onto the chain—things like accounts receivable, supply chain financing, or working capital for e-commerce merchants. These rely on actual transaction volumes and whether the money can actually be collected; storytelling alone won’t cut it. @DowProtocol, which I’ve discussed before, is one example along this path: Sellers on Amazon and Walmart have already shipped their goods, but the platforms take 14 to 28 days to settle payments—yet advertising, logistics, and the next inventory order require cash every day. Dow assesses sellers based on their real transaction history on the platform, collateralizing the payment owed by the platform. A vault on-chain provides funding, and the platform repays directly—merchants never touch that money. Vaults are now live on BNB Chain’s Lista and Sui’s Volo, with institutional vaults securing $7.93 million in initial subscriptions. The volume is still small, but finally, Web3.0 blockchain capital is connecting to the daily cash flows of Web2.0 merchants. Could this become one of the main paths forward? Let’s wait and see! 🫡 *** This is not investment advice; it is solely personal commentary and observation. All gains and losses are your own responsibility.