The Romans spent about 500 years building aqueducts. Before the construction of aqueducts, residents mainly relied on local water sources: rivers, springs, and streams. In addition, residents could also obtain water from ancient cisterns and by collecting rainwater. This meant that the entire water supply was scattered across the country, hindering the development of Rome. Demand exceeded supply, and water was essential not only for basic hygiene but also for the industrial development of Rome, including mining, agriculture, and mills.
As a result, over five centuries (the middle and later periods of the empire), Rome built 11 aqueduct systems, including pipelines, tunnels, bridges, and canals. The aqueducts brought in fresh water from sources 57 miles away from the city, supplying over 1.5 million cubic meters of water per day (750 liters per person per day).
Similarly, cryptocurrency users are unable to obtain sufficient returns. Both dynamics have led to explosive growth in infrastructure. Fortunately, cryptocurrency does not need to spend too much time building its own pipeline system. Cryptocurrency is now busy building aqueducts. Integrated chains such as Ethereum mainnet, Binance Smart Chain, and Solana have absorbed most of the cryptocurrency capital through staking, both directly by validators and through their DeFi ecosystems.
Liquidity staking protocols like Lido, Rocket Pool, and Jito help unlock some of the locked capital by tokenizing staking receipts for trading, lending, or other uses in liquidity pools. These enable cryptocurrency stakers to maintain the productivity of their digital assets after contributing to the economic security of platforms such as Ethereum and Solana. According to DeFiLlama’s data, approximately $54 billion of cryptocurrency is currently locked in these liquidity staking protocols, accounting for more than half of the total locked value in DeFi.
Re-staking protocols such as EigenLayer, Karak, and the newcomer Symbiotic are researching how to direct productivity to protect other platforms rather than for trading and liquidity farming, aiming to channel liquidity to smaller-scale financial products that also need economic support to ensure their functionality.
So far, $20 billion has been locked in these cryptocurrency aqueducts, with most of it being locked by EigenLayer, which now has about a dozen actively validated services. Karak, in building its own ecosystem, has surpassed the $1 billion mark in market value, accepting collateral other than staked Ether, including wrapped Bitcoin and stablecoins.
Interest in modular blockchain solutions has waned somewhat compared to last year. Despite the interest in modularization, the scale remains small. Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, believes that the interest in modular technology has decreased and that venture capital interest in modularization is at least temporarily stable or slightly declining. However, he acknowledges that there is still interest, but capital is unlikely to continue to flow into certain parts of the technology field as some participants, such as Celestia and EigenLayer, have become more mature.
The modular technology stack allows specialized interaction and promotes organic competition. It is still very interesting, even though venture capital funding is slowing down.
