Irrespective of how these chains ended up (spoiler: not good), I liked the meta of new L1s/L2s curating a set of unique dapps, or at least, ensuring all the DeFi building blocks are present on day 0. Blast, Berachain, Sonic (to some extent) were all moving in the right direction here imo. Long-term, it didn't work out for them, but it did have a part in their early success. Blast is a disaster, but at least people were bridging there to participate in experiences they couldn't get elsewhere (fantasy top and baseline being easy examples here). Berachain is down bad, but at least they had insane liquidity on day 1 thanks to all the pre-deposits + a line-up of old and new apps to play with. What's there on Monad? A 40th deployment of Uniswap, 29th of Morpho and 15th of Euler? And the yields aren't even that good! Better yet - the "leading" LST (bread and butter of any DeFi eco and imo a pretty good sign of its health) has $3.5M in deposits (apparently their competition scammed their own airdrop, so I guess that's something?). Yes, pre-deposit meta got kind of crazy and, in retrospect, starting out with 2B in TVL is probably not great for long-term health (as we saw with Berachain and, more recently, with XPL), but surely there is a good balance somewhere here. People will say "the chain is early", but it isn't. Monad had 3 years and all the tools available to make it a success, and so far, it doesn't look good. Every passing day makes me more and more bearish on the new purple chain, as I become more convinced it's bound to repeat the fate of the old purple chain. Maybe it's something to do with being purple, idk. Hopefully, the MegaETH launch isn't as disappointing as it seems that they will have both pre-deposits and some sort of app curation.