Is Everything Except Bitcoin Dead?
Speakers
Avichal Garg
— Co-Founder, Electric Capital
Summary
Avichal Garg of Electric Capital refutes the narrative that crypto outside Bitcoin is dead, explaining why Ethereum is a programmable store of value, Solana remains a strong retail-focused L1 with top talent, and Near is leading in cross-chain intents and agentic AI infrastructure.
- Ethereum is an internet-native store of value with seizure resistance and programmability, hosting stablecoin volume and future global finance.
- Solana’s high-throughput chain and low-cost infrastructure make it an underappreciated retail and consumer ecosystem with excellent builders.
- Near’s intent-based routing, confidential compute, and agentic-first design position it ahead of the curve for an agentic economy.
- Multiple internet-native stores of value can coexist, just as multiple large social networks emerged after Facebook.
- The conversation touches on institutional DeFi and the re token project, but no details are provided.
Ideas
Programmable store of value like Bitcoin.
Ethereum is an internet-native store of value, similar to Bitcoin, with seizure resistance, easy transferability, subdivision, and global liquidity. It is programmable, hosts stablecoin volume, and the global financial system will likely be built on Ethereum. ETH behaves like a store of value and its properties check all the boxes.
Underappreciated retail and consumer L1 ecosystem.
Solana is a high-throughput chain with fast settlement, a robust retail and consumer ecosystem, excellent talent and builders (e.g., Ellipses Labs, Phantom wallet), and low-cost L1 infrastructure. It can be quite valuable as a user/retail ecosystem even if it does not become a store of value, and is unfairly beaten down in the bear market.
Agentic AI and cross-chain intent infrastructure.
Near has built a distributed cross-chain intent system (Near Intents) with real traction, a confidential compute layer for trusted execution, and an infrastructure designed agentic-first. It has zero downtime in five years, strong technical founders (Transformer paper author), and is ahead of the curve for an agentic economy.
Up Next
This Milk Road Macro video, published August 09, 2026, features Avichal Garg discussing ETH, SOL, NEAR. 3 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.
Speakers: Avichal Garg · Tickers: ETH, SOL, NEAR