BlackRock's staked ether fund keeps 5% to 30% of its ether unstaked to meet redemptions. Behind that sleeve is a validator exit queue shared by the whole network, which hit 46 days in September 2025 because one operator got cautious.
Agent performance drops from 60% on a single run to 25% across eight runs of the same task. Nothing errors, nothing times out, every trace is green, and the answer is wrong.
Strip the bots and self-transfers out of the $33 trillion and you get $10.2 trillion, of which under 1% is retail. The two numbers justify different systems, and neither is the real reason to build.
The AEO multiples in circulation have no control group. The one study that added one found roughly two thirds of the headline gain was ChatGPT growing, not optimization working.