Menu
Tuesday, 15th September
Chef’s Welcome
This is The Menu: the weekly briefing from the Web3 Dinner Club.
What the market is saying and how the best builders and investors are making sense of it.
In this issue:
Interoperability.
Ethereum and Base Split!
Book review: The E Myth Revisited.
DeFi’s boring but bankable phase!
Tempo Report: What does tokenised money mean for banks?
Robinhood, Crypto.com, and OG.com: Prediction markets go institutional
Signal, served weekly.
Partner Pairing
Novel Labs
The dinner club is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.
A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.
Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.
If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.
Amuse-bouche
Interoperability in crypto.
Interoperability means different blockchains, wallets, and apps can talk to each other without the user having to become a systems engineer.
It matters because:
Users hold assets and identities across many chains (Ethereum, Base, Solana, etc.); interoperability lets them move value and data without manual bridges, wrapped tokens, and constant “are you on the right network?” anxiety.
Developers can compose protocols across chains (e.g., use collateral on one chain to borrow on another), which multiplies what’s possible beyond what any single chain could do alone.
Without it, every new chain fragments liquidity, users, and developer effort, turning crypto into a collection of isolated islands instead of a single, composable financial layer
Starter
Ethereum and Base split on account abstraction
Ethereum and Base have stopped trying to agree on a single way to upgrade crypto wallets and will now each go their own way.
Instead of one shared standard, Ethereum is pushing Frame Transactions, and Base is pushing Keystore, two different technical approaches to the same goal: smarter, safer, easier‑to‑use wallets.
“Separate ways we went, putting the burden on wallets to deal with the fragmentation that ensues.”
What this actually means
Account abstraction is the upgrade that lets wallets do more than just “sign and pay”: think batched actions, sponsored fees, passkeys, and better security without you needing to understand the tech.
Ethereum wants a very flexible system that can evolve over time, support new kinds of keys, and prepare for future threats like quantum computing.
Base wants a simpler, cheaper, faster system tuned for everyday apps and payments on its network and similar chains.
Both are trying to make your wallet experience better, but they’ve decided that trying to force one shared design would make each of them worse at what they care about most.
So what changes for users?
In the short term: nothing you can see.
Your wallet will still:
Let you send and receive tokens
Approve transactions
Use features like gas sponsorship or batched actions if your wallet supports them
Behind the scenes, wallet teams now have to support two different systems instead of one. That means more engineering work for them, not more complexity for you.
If wallet developers do their job well, you won’t notice any difference when moving between Ethereum and Base. The split is a back‑end problem, not a front‑end one.
The risk:
The risk isn’t that your wallet stops working. It’s that:
Some features roll out faster on one chain than the other
Wallet teams move more slowly because they’re juggling two standards
The ecosystem becomes more fragmented, making it harder to build truly universal wallet experiences
In other words, interoperability, the idea that everything just works together across chains, gets a bit harder to maintain.
W3DC:
Ethereum and Base chose different paths to smarter wallets because their priorities don’t fully align.
For users, the goal is the same: no extra steps, no extra clicks, no extra confusion.
The test now is whether wallets can hide this split so well that you never have to think about it.
Main
Book Review:
The E-Myth Revisited (for Web3 builders)
Most Web3 founders aren’t entrepreneurs; they’re technicians who got an “entrepreneurial seizure” and now run protocol‑level work inside their own heads.
Core points:
The "E‑Myth" is the belief that people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs, when in reality most are technicians who understand the work but not how to build a business that does the work.
Gerber’s key distinction: work on your business vs. work in your business, i.e., build systems, not just ship code or close.
For Web3: too many teams are all "technicians" (research, smart contracts, BD calls) and no “manager/entrepreneur” layer (processes, roles, operating rhythm).
Actionable angle: treat your protocol/studio/fund like a franchise blueprint: document SOPs, define roles, and design the org so it can scale without you in every call.
W3DC:
If Web3’s next phase is infrastructure and institutions, the winners won’t be the best technologists; they’ll be the best at building businesses that do the technical work without them.
Special
Web3 Dinner Club: 25th September (London)
A curated, seated dinner for a small group of builders working in crypto, AI, and frontier tech.
One table. No pitches. No panels. No ego contests.
Just the kind of conversation that doesn't show up in your LinkedIn feed. The relationships that move capital, talent, and ideas in Web3 don't start at conferences.
They start at a handful of dinners with the same people, repeated over time.
Seats are limited by design.
Proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.
Dessert
DeFi’s boring but bankable phase!
DeFi has entered its “infrastructure” era: less hype, more yield, and a clear push toward products that institutions can actually use.
Total value locked has stabilised in the $85–88B range after August’s peak, with Lido and Aave still dominating the landscape.
The stability matters as it signals a market that’s no longer chasing reflexive growth but is instead consolidating around a few core primitives, liquid staking, lending, and yield‑bearing stablecoins.
We are now seeing a real shift in how that yield is accessed.
Yield‑bearing stablecoin infrastructure (for example, Frgmnt on Base) is now reachable via institutional custody rails, meaning funds and family offices can earn on‑chain yield without breaking compliance or operational rules.
At the same time, Lido V3 stVaults are rolling out institutional vault products with configurable custody and permissions, effectively turning staked ETH into an asset class that can sit on a balance sheet.
W3DC:
DeFi’s next growth leg isn’t degen farms; it’s regulated wrappers around yield and staking that institutions can actually put on their balance sheets.
Digestif
Brand spice
📚 A report we’ve read:
What does tokenised money mean for banks?
Tokenisation is moving beyond experiments and into the core infrastructure of banking.
As trading, collateral, repo and settlement become increasingly digital and increasingly active around the clock, banks need forms of money that can move at the same speed as the assets they support.
The report from Tempo, Tokenised Money for Banks, examines the three main routes banks can take:
Tokenised deposits that preserve the traditional bank relationship.
Bank-issued stablecoins that create a controlled digital settlement rail.
Third-party stablecoins that offer wider market access but move the customer relationship away from the bank.
There is no single answer.
Each option creates a different trade-off between control, liquidity, interoperability, regulation and balance-sheet efficiency.
A bank serving a corporate treasury may need a different solution from one supporting a hedge fund trading on a 24/7 digital-asset venue.
W3DC:
The important question is no longer whether banks will use tokenised money. It is which form they will use, where it will move, and what it will cost them.
Robinhood, Crypto.com and OG.com prediction markets go institutional
Robinhood is doubling down on prediction markets by routing some football event contracts through OG.com's federally regulated derivatives exchange while taking equity stakes in both OG.com and its former parent, Crypto.com.
The stakes will be priced in line with Citadel Securities’ recent $400 million investment in Crypto.com at a $20 billion valuation, including $5 billion for the newly spun‑off OG.com.
From Tuesday, selected football contracts on Robinhood will be executed on OG.com’s CFTC‑regulated exchange and clearinghouse, adding a new venue alongside Robinhood’s existing partners ahead of the U.S. professional football season.
Event contracts generated a record $156 million in second‑quarter revenue for Robinhood, emerging as a key growth driver as the platform expands into sports, politics and economic events.
Robinhood is also building a dedicated hub for U.S. election contracts ahead of the November midterms, with some of those contracts potentially routed to Crypto.com and OG.com over time.
The tie‑up signals a shift from retail‑only “yes/no” betting toward a more institutional, regulated stack: a CFTC‑supervised exchange, a major retail broker, and a global crypto platform all aligned around the same products.
W3DC:
Prediction markets are one of the few on‑chain‑adjacent use cases that have found real, recurring demand and now a clearer regulatory path.
Expect more brokers, venues and liquidity providers to converge around regulated event contracts, with crypto rails increasingly used for settlement, collateral and distribution.
Until next time
Views expressed here are for informational purposes only and are not financial advice.
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