Apple's AppStore fees can be seen as rent-seeking and the same can be said about all incumbent-run platforms. Ethereum is a true platform: projects that build on top of it are actually financially incentivised to support the value of the underlying tech in order to secure their project.

Ethereum is more of a platform than the Internet giants

Robert Greer says that there are three asset superclasses: <ol><li>Capital Assets are productive & generate value or cash-flow: equities, bonds, or rentable real estate. </li><li>Transformable/Consumable Assets: can be consumed one time, transformed into another asset, and their consumption produces economic yield: energy or commodities. </li><li>Store-of-Value Assets are scarce, cannot be consumed, just transferred, and their value persists over time and space: gold, currencies, art, or bitcoin. </li></ol>

Tripple point money

A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.

Bitcoin is a database that does only 1 thing: track ownership of coins.  Ethereum adds the computational capabilities that makes Excel more than a database: <ul><li>Turing Completeness. It means that it can solve any computational problem. With the introduction of formulas, Excel became Turing complete. With Ethereum's smart contracts you can solve any reasonable problem. </li><li>Composability. In Excel, “You can chain functions, passing the output of one function as the input to another, allowing for an enormous number of potential computational pipelines.” This is very similar to the idea of “Legos.”</li></ul>

Ethereum is the Excel of Blockchains

How does more activity on top of Ethereum translate into a higher price for ETH?Today, when you want to transact on Ethereum, you need to use ETH. There are currently around 116 million ETH. More transactions on Ethereum means more demand for ETH which means a higher price.The Future will see Ether become triple-point money, which means it will be a combination of:<ol><li>Store of Value</li><li>Consumable Asset: Any time something happens on Ethereum, gas needs to be burned, decreasing the overall supply.</li><li>Capital Asset. Owning ETH represents a share of the Ethereum network, like owning equity in a company.</li></ol>

Why is Eth valuable?

Ethereum is a “world computer”: It lets people build apps & products with money baked into the code. If you believe that web3 is going to continue to grow, then you likely believe that over time,Ethereum will become the “settlement layer” of the internet: All sorts of transactions (whether on-chain or even Visa) will turn to Ethereum to exchange funds and keep secure, immutable records.Owning ETH is like owning shares on the internet. Demand for ETH will go up with increased web3 adoption, while upcoming changes will decrease the supply of ETH and let more value accrue to holders.