Editor's Note: The core argument of this article is straightforward: the money flow itself is the moat. Looking back at business history, many of the most powerful companies did not simply rely on selling products to succeed; instead, they stood in the middle of a "value flow," continuously extracting a share from every shipment, payment, transaction, advertising conversion, computational power call, or order flow. Railroads made money from the movement of goods, Visa charged fees on the payment network, Google and Meta captured attention and converted it into commercial transactions, and AWS stood at the center of computational power flow. As long as value continues to flow through the network, the network itself will keep growing stronger.
Crypto has, for the first time, native to startups, handed over this model. Blockchain provides an open ledger and programmable settlement, stablecoins enable funds to flow globally at internet speed, and token mechanisms bind users, developers, and network growth together. For crypto entrepreneurs, the real opportunity is not just to build a new application but to identify the most costly, least efficient, and most profit-heavy value channel in the old system, compress it, restructure it, and step into a new money flow.
The article emphasizes that in traditional financial services, the most profit-heavy and least efficient processes—such as payments, custody, lending, foreign exchange, clearing, and market-making—will serve as entry points for crypto entrepreneurs to restructure: reducing costs, increasing speed, and reallocating value. This "money flow business" (sharing revenue based on the flow of value through channels) will not stop at the financial sector but may extend in the future to emerging markets such as the GPU market, AI training data, energy, robotics, space, and rare earth minerals.
For founders, the most critical question is: Is your product already positioned within the value flow? When network activity scales up tenfold, can your revenue grow in sync? Opportunities often lie in those areas of old infrastructure with the lowest efficiency and the highest profit extraction. Those who can compress old costs, step into new flows, have the chance to turn the money flow into their moat.
The following is the original text:
Throughout history, many of the most outstanding enterprises have been built by placing themselves within the "money flow"— facilitating the creation and transfer of value within the network and extracting a portion of the proceeds. The more value that flows through the network, the larger such companies tend to grow.
Crypto represents the first natively born modern technology for this purpose. If your startup has not yet designed its products and business models around these principles, you are missing out. Especially with the advent of stablecoins, funds and value can now flow at internet speed: settling globally, operational 24/7, and with end-to-end programmability. The underlying tracks are open, the unit economics model is public, and the accessible money flow market covers almost every dollar's movement worldwide.
This Pattern
The blockchain is inherently a network-based business. Each transaction settles on a shared ledger; each new participant reinforces the same underlying infrastructure that subsequent users can continue to build on. As more people use and build on the network, it becomes more valuable to all users.
Most companies need to spend many years artificially creating network effects on top of traditional infrastructure. However, crypto entrepreneurs inherit this network effect from the start.
Network tokens further amplify this. A well-designed token can align users, developers, suppliers, validators, and the protocol itself toward the same goal: growing the network and distributing rewards based on each participant's contribution. Protocol revenue belongs to those who actually use it. There are no partnership kickbacks, no private deals—just a positive feedback loop: value flows through the system, while value also flows back to those building and driving the system's growth.
This is not a new pattern. Crypto is just the first to make it easier for startups to use this pattern at a larger scale.
Railroad companies didn't make money by selling locomotives but by earning from every ton of grain, coal, and steel that passed through their tracks. Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and AT&T were all companies positioned in the flow of capital. Google and Meta replaced print media and television not because advertising itself was better but because they stood at a crucial point of "turning attention into business," extracting a share from trillions of dollars' worth of commercial intent. AWS sits at the center of computational power flow.
The pattern remains consistent: find where value flows and position oneself in the middle.
The financial markets make this pattern even clearer. In the 2024 fiscal year, Visa processed $15.7 trillion in payments and recorded $35.9 billion in net revenue. Jane Street's net trading income last year reached $20.5 billion, surpassing Citigroup and Bank of America. The top five market makers in the U.S. handled 87% of the payment for order flow: they are not predicting the market but standing in the middle of each order flow, earning more as trading volume grows.
These companies also share a common trait: network effects. Visa is more valuable to merchants because of the increasing card issuance; it is more valuable to cardholders because of the growing number of merchants who accept Visa. Order flow works the same way: adding a new broker lowers the spread, attracting more brokers, which then attracts more order flow.
The Money Flow Overlay Network Effect is one of the most enduring structures in business history.
Your Profit is My Opportunity
Bezos once said, "Your profit is my opportunity." He was talking about retail at the time, but this statement is even more applicable to traditional financial services—the world's largest profit pool. Payments, custody, lending, foreign exchange, securitization, settlement, and market-making, all are like this. Visa and Mastercard charge a 2% to 3% interchange fee on a network designed in the 1960s; cross-border remittance channels charge 6% to 9%; primary brokers and custodians take a cut from every securities transaction. Even when the U.S. transitions to T+1 settlement in 2024, capital will still lie idle overnight, a structural cost that all participants must bear.
These profit margins are all targets. By reducing costs, increasing the velocity of circulation, and potentially expanding the entire market. Stripe and Square have already proven this in the payment space.
Crypto entrepreneurs have the opportunity to build the next version: programmable, instant, global, and native to the money flow.
And this frontier is much more than just financial services. Computing power and GPU markets, storage chips, AI training data, energy, robotics, space, rare earth metals, every area could see large-scale global value flows, and the existing infrastructure is not designed to accommodate such scale.
Every area is an open market that can build money flow businesses on programmable infrastructure from day one. There are no existing tracks, no entrenched intermediaries, and no old interests to guard.
As a founder, you should ask yourself:
1. Are you already standing in the money flow today?
2. When the perceived value of your product increases tenfold, will your revenue increase accordingly?
3. If you are building a new product, where in your target market is the highest profit extraction relative to the value created?
The opportunity is right there. Squeeze it, step into a new value stream, and then let the network compound from there.
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