The "fat protocol" thesis, a long-standing framework in crypto markets arguing that value accrues primarily to Layer 1 protocols, has been fundamentally flawed and has misled the industry for over a decade. According to @jdorman81, the core premise that infrastructure captures the majority of economic value was "flat out wrong." Instead, value consistently accrues to applications built on top of these protocols rather than the base-layer networks themselves. This critique challenges one of crypto's most influential investment narratives, suggesting that capital allocation strategies focused heavily on L1 tokens may have systematically mispriced where actual value generation occurs in the ecosystem.