最新报道：“Which number is greater? Five or one?” —Robert Baratheon, A Game of Thrones In business, distribution is critical. Often more important than what is being distributed. For example, Google always had the best algorithm for searching the internet, but the now-ubiquitous service didn’t catch on until Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to widely distribute it. As detailed in yesterday’s Acquired podcast, Google’s co-founders gambled on the company by guaranteeing AOL $100 million (money they didn’t have) in exchange for the right to show ads to AOL users. (Yes, I would listen to three hours of Acquired podcasts on the first day of the launch. What’s wrong with that?) They also actively pursued revenue-sharing deals, sometimes paying sites more than 100% of ad revenue (because Page and Brin recognized the long-term value of expanding distribution). But Google’s real coup was the “Toolbar,” which paid PC manufacturers and software providers to bundle it with their products. This expanded Google’s distribution far beyond the early Web adopters who knew to go directly to the Google.com homepage to get the best search algorithm. That’s crucial because web search is a strange business where the laws of supply and demand are inverted — the more ads Google sells, the more it can charge. This unique dynamic of “increasing returns to scale” (as Acquired’s co-hosts put it) makes web search a winner-take-all market. It also ensures that whoever gets the most users first will win that market, regardless of how good their technology is. We may soon find out if the same applies to crypto. When One Is the Biggest Number Robinhood doesn’t have the best technology in crypto — at least not yet. After announcing its new tokenized stock product yesterday, CEO Vlad Tenev said Robinhood will issue new tokens on Arbitrum, but only “for a short period of time” while it builds its own blockchain. However, it may have the best distribution. Given its brand, Robinhood’s 25.9 million account holders may represent the group of retail investors most inclined to try new crypto products. In addition to tokenized stocks, Robinhood will also offer perpetual futures and crypto staking. I’m guessing Robinhood’s technology in these categories won’t be as good as Hyperliquid and Jito’s. But like Google’s early revenue-sharing deals, Robinhood is doubling down on distribution, offering a “2% match” on any crypto customers deposit. And Robinhood’s slick, mobile-first UX may play the same role as Google’s search toolbar: a distribution shortcut that brings a complex product to the mainstream. Unlike search, crypto may not be a winner-take-all business because it doesn’t enjoy “increasing returns to scale” — anyone who’s been long altcoins lately knows that the standard laws of supply and demand still apply. The standard laws of counting, however, may not apply. As Robert Baratheon explains in Game of Thrones, one can be greater than five, just as a clenched fist is more powerful than five wagging fingers. “One army,” he says, “united behind one leader and one purpose” will defeat five armies with five leaders and five purposes. Similarly, Robinhood is betting that its unified crypto service offering will defeat the crypto industry’s growing number of individual purpose products. Crypto has been arguing this for years: Solana is the clenched fist of monolithic blockchains, while Ethereum is the wagging finger of modular blockchains. So far, this ongoing and raging debate has been fought on a technical level: parallel execution, local fee markets, decentralized sorters, and other things I don’t quite understand. Either approach could work, just as monolithic worked for Apple and modularity worked for Microsoft. Both sides could declare victory this week: Robinhood is building an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain for tokenized stock trading, and tokenized “xStocks” began trading on Solana today. So we may finally find out which blockchain approach is faster, cheaper, and more secure. But what if it’s distribution that really matters? If so, crypto could turn into a winner-take-all business. Robinhood says its aim is to “make the technical part invisible” and offer “one platform for all investing,” which sounds like a strategy to take as much of the business as possible. Notably, this ambition was announced by a CEO wearing a white pinstripe suit and silk scarf in front of a Robinhood-branded pool and the (as-yet-unbranded) Mediterranean Sea at his French seaside villa. Could anything be further from crypto’s cypherpunk roots than this? But crypto is a business now. Distribution could make Robinhood its big winner. Get news in your inbox. 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