Substrate 2017-2023 = the attention era
Outside of the core-technical development Polkadot, Kusama and the Substrate ecosystem have been for the most part status games reliant on resolutely Web2 marketing, growth hacking and influencer tactics to bootstrap token valuations and treasuries to stratospheric levels.
$50m equivalent of KSM and DOT have been spent without ecosystem proponents or voters naive to the essential drivers of network value accrual.
With no way to assess or benchmark progress the winners of this era are lead by populist agendas.
People are busy, but ineffective, burned out and disenfranchaised pitted against each other in zero sum games, looking for someone to blame.
Substrate 2024–> ??? = the impact era
With the introduction of agile coretime we now have a more useful metric with which to assess the relative adoption (read demand) for the essential resource that Kusama and Polkadot sell.
This proposes a periodic, sale-based method for assigning Polkadot Coretime, the analogue of “block space” within the Polkadot Network. The method takes into account the need for long-term capital expenditure planning for teams building on Polkadot, yet also provides a means to allow Polkadot to capture long-term value in the resource which it sells. It supports the possibility of building rich and dynamic secondary markets to optimize resource allocation and largely avoids the need for parameterization.
People are currently concerned at the pricing structure of Coretime - this is ultimately irrelevant, what matters is coretime revenues.
Coinmarketcap = the current crypto leaderboard
Coinmarketcap is the de-facto crypto-leaderboard, it is has the most attention of any crypto-related website - this is the reason Binance bought them.
Although there is some move towards assessing relative worth, Coinmarketcap doesn’t focus attention on what will likely become one of the most watched metrics of the next decade of crypto.
Coremarketcap = the new crypto-leaderboard
When you divide marketcap (the total value of all tokens in circulation) by revenues you arrive at a valuation multiple similar to how companies are priced.
As networks are forced to become meaningfully productive, it will be this multiple, that allows investors to assess fair value of the projects they invest in.
The ecosystem in pole-position for this era, is the group who designs the new game.
The primary focus of all ecosystem participants in this new game is to coordinate to maximise coretime revenues - by any means necessary.
This is the meta-point that relates to How overvalued is Polkadot (DOT)? and why Kusama is the dark horse.
Coretime collectives
As alluded to in Rethinking incentives with coretime bounties, collectives and recoupable loans the open question is how the ecosystem, especially those not at parity/w3f can reorganise talent, resources and capital in pursuit of generating direct coretime revenues.
How these teams are resourced, structured and rewarded is the subject of other ongoing work.