Ark Invest Analyst Compares Ethereum (ETH) to McDonald's Franchise After EIP-4844 Rent Slide

A McDonald's Map for Layer 1s

Lorenzo Valente, crypto research director at Ark Invest, published a long-form analysis on X on September 2 mapping three major layer-1 blockchains onto fast-food business models — and his sharpest point lands on Ethereum (ETH). Valente assigned each network a restaurant chain: McDonald's for Ethereum, Chipotle for Solana, In-N-Out for Hyperliquid, arguing the three carry fundamentally different business structures and should be valued separately rather than as variants of one model. Solana, in his framing, is Chipotle's fully company-owned operation: every transaction settles on the L1 itself, so base fees, priority fees and MEV tips stay inside the network and flow to stakers — at the cost of a single point of failure. Hyperliquid plays In-N-Out: a lean, venture-free team focused on one core product, an on-chain order book for perpetual futures, with most trading fees routed directly into HYPE buybacks. The Ethereum network, in this telling, is McDonald's, whose profit comes less from burgers than from franchise royalties and land rent. The chain supplies the brand — trust and decentralization — the smart contract operating system through the EVM and its developer community, and the real estate of blockspace and final settlement. Layer-2 operators such as Arbitrum and Base build and run their own infrastructure on top, much like franchisees opening restaurants, letting the L1 scale with outside capital and teams. The catch is what it collects in return: since EIP-4844, the blob fees that rollups pay have compressed toward marginal cost, so rollup activity no longer converts into meaningful L1 revenue. Valente's verdict is blunt: the network built the industry's most successful franchise system and then “forgot to charge rent,” with value migrating up the stack to L2s and applications such as Robinhood's tokenized stocks.

Rivals Build Their Own Rails

The franchise critique lands as the competitive map around Ethereum is being redrawn. Two years ago the running debate was which chain would win, with corporate L2s like Coinbase's Base and Sony's Soneium — both built on Optimism's OP Stack — as the headline story. Today the heaviest names in payments and stablecoins are no longer only renting blockspace on Ethereum or its rollups; several are building their own layer-1 rails. On September 1, 21 financial institutions — Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Mitsubishi UFJ among them — announced a plan to issue a joint stablecoin through a newly formed company, targeting a dollar-pegged launch in the first half of 2027, with euro and other G7 currencies to follow. A separate consortium, Open USD, counts more than 140 participants across finance, payments and technology, from BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard and Stripe to Google, Coinbase, Solana and Polygon — and, so far, only Spain's BBVA appears in both groups. Issuers are going direct, too: Circle, the company behind USDC, is launching its own L1, Arc, with public mainnet access set for September 16 and an announced validator set that includes DTCC, ICE, BlackRock, Mastercard, Visa and Standard Chartered; BlackRock plans to deploy its BUIDL tokenized money-market fund on the network. Stripe, together with Paradigm, is developing Tempo, a “payments blockchain” designed for multiple stablecoins and even machine-to-machine settlement by AI agents. Japanese megabanks have split as well, with MUFG in the 21-bank group and Mizuho and Sumitomo Mitsui in Open USD. A quieter track runs through Canton Network, where DTCC, Euroclear, LSEG and Societe Generale are moving government bonds, collateral and repo on-chain. Established finance, meanwhile, still moves real volume on Ethereum-linked rails — JPMorgan's Kinexys has processed $3 trillion on such infrastructure — so the network's institutional base remains deep even as rival blocs take shape. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

The Rent Question Ahead

Read together, the two threads trace one arc: Ethereum perfected the franchise model just as its largest prospective tenants stopped leasing. Valente's September 2 post on X is the primary record here, and it states the condition plainly — after EIP-4844, the L1 captured little of the rollup economy it seeded. Our reading at COINOTAG: whether Ethereum's scaling strategy evolves to reprice blob capacity, lean on settlement-layer demand from tokenized assets, or accept a thin-margin infrastructure role will determine how much of the coming on-chain finance bloc — bank-issued coins, Arc, Tempo — settles on its rails rather than beside them.