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This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, subscribe  “Nobody goes to the store to buy a Swiss Army knife. It’s something you get for Christmas.” — Jensen Huang Great businesses start as scalpels, not Swiss Army knives. By choosing one thing to do, companies are more likely to get great at that one thing — and customers are more likely to know that’s the thing they do. Here, for example, is Yahoo’s homepage, circa 1999: There’s a lot going on there — search, auctions, news, email, instant messaging — and Yahoo wasn’t particularly good at any of it. Here’s Google’s homepage, circa 1999: It’s easy to see why that proved to be the winner: the single-purpose website made it clear to users what Google does, and that helped Google get very good at doing it. The fact that lowercase “google” has since become a verb and Yahoo doesn’t do anything more important than host my fantasy baseball league is evidence that being great at one thing generally beats being average at many things. Will that apply to blockchains, too? Bitcoin is a single-purpose chain — all it does is send bitcoin — and its simplicity might be the main reason it’s been such a success. But Ethereum and Solana are also general-purpose chains and they, too, have had some success.  And neither approach seems to be encroaching on the other: Bitcoin has so far failed at DeFi and Ethereum has so far failed to become money. So maybe both approaches can peacefully co-exist? It might be too early to answer, because general-purpose chains will soon have a new, single-minded competitor. Last week, Stripe and Paradigm formally announced the development of a stablecoin-focused blockchain, Tempo, that feels like an instant favorite to win the emerging crypto payments…

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Filed under: News - @ September 9, 2025 10:33 pm