🟪 The value gap

The plumbing works, now what?

September 13, 2026

📉 The value gap

Blockworks finds that Stellar had its strongest quarter of institutional adoption to date, with tokenized RWAs doubling to $3 billion, payment volume rising 68.8% to $16.43 billion and DTCC selecting the network for tokenized securities trials. Stellar is also evolving beyond payments, with Soroban smart contracts now generating 94.4% of network fees and 82.4% of onchain trading volume. However, network adoption does not translate directly into value accrual for XLM. Fees remain minimal, are neither burned nor distributed, and circulating supply increased 2.8% during the quarter. Growth also remains concentrated, with four issuers holding 92.5% of tokenized assets, making issuer diversification and DTCC’s implementation key milestones to watch.

Rakka from Omnipair published a piece arguing that DeFi’s current shortcomings should be treated as unsolved design problems rather than fundamental limits. Drawing an analogy to physics before Einstein, he argues that problems like AMM adverse selection, lending tradeoffs, and fragmented liquidity may be the anomalies that eventually lead to entirely new financial primitives. He calls today’s builders the “Einstein generation of DeFi”: not because they have already found the breakthrough, but because they are producing the experiments, failures, and partial solutions from which the next coherent model of open finance may emerge.

Dwarkesh Patel and Jerry Han find that improvements in training data contributed far more to pretraining progress between 2019 and 2025 than changes to model architecture. At a fixed compute budget, newer datasets produced a 12x gain in compute efficiency compared with 3.7x from newer model recipes, with most of the gains occurring independently. However, model research still played a crucial role by making larger training runs stable and practical. The results come from relatively small models, so the balance may differ at the frontier. If data remains the main driver of pretraining progress, the key question is whether synthetic data can offset the finite supply of high-quality material available online.

Blockworks Research argues that MetaDAO has proven its ownership coin model but has yet to solve distribution, with launch cadence remaining below two ICOs per month. Proposed US rules could expand its addressable market by allowing qualifying projects to raise up to $5 million from retail investors, although ownership coins must avoid being classified as securities. MetaDAO is addressing its bottlenecks through permissionless launches, its Colosseum pipeline, investor scoring and a dedicated fund for smaller raises. However, increasing launch volume alone will not justify META’s valuation. The bull case depends on MetaDAO producing breakout companies that sustain secondary trading, while the base case leaves the token roughly fairly valued near $6.

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