Layer 2 Economics: Why TPS Doesn’t Equal Investment Thesis

Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base fight over transactions per second, but investors should care about value capture. Most L2s currently route profits to Ethereum via blob fees and rely on native token subsidies for sequencer revenue. To evaluate an L2 token: 1) Does sequencer revenue accrue to token holders? (rare) 2) Are incentives decreasing as usage grows? 3) Is there a moat beyond TVL (e.g., OP Stack’s ecosystem lock-in)? Metrics like daily transactions are vanity; fee revenue per active address and burn rate of incentives are sanity. Until L2s solve sustainable monetization, treat most tokens as speculative beta on Ethereum, not standalone value stores.