According to @ItsDave_ADA, traders should discount vanity metrics like transaction volume, TVL, DAU, and fees because they can be engineered via circular liquidity, recursive staking, automated transactions, and near-zero-fee spam that permanently expands ledgers, making these figures unreliable for valuation or rotations. Source: @ItsDave_ADA. He warns that advertised high throughput often relies on centralized infrastructure, increasing outage risk and prompting emergency interventions, which raises a chain’s risk premium and weakens long-term investment theses. Source: @ItsDave_ADA. He recommends prioritizing fundamentals in allocation decisions, including multi-year reliability, decentralization, censorship resistance, immutability, and a fixed monetary base, rather than chasing metric-driven narratives. Source: @ItsDave_ADA. As a monetary example, he highlights capped-supply assets like Bitcoin (BTC) for predictable scarcity and aligned incentives, contrasting them with discretionary supply policies that reintroduce trust in human intervention. Source: @ItsDave_ADA. He argues market capitalization ultimately anchors to credibility and scarcity over time, implying capital consolidation into chains with proven uptime and rule stability rather than those optimized for optics. Source: @ItsDave_ADA. Actionable takeaway: de-emphasize TVL and fee leaderboards in trade theses, stress-test chains for outage history and protocol churn, and overweight assets with credible scarcity such as BTC for core positions. Source: @ItsDave_ADA.

According to @ItsDave_ADA, traders should discount vanity metrics like transaction volume, TVL, DAU, and fees because they can be easily engineered via circular liquidity, recursive staking, automated transactions, and near‑zero‑fee spam, which distorts adoption signals (source: @ItsDave_ADA, X, Oct 21, 2025). He warns that claims of high throughput often rely on centralized infrastructure, with some chains experiencing outages and emergency interventions, making metrics‑driven pivots a red flag for protocol risk (source: @ItsDave_ADA, X, Oct 21, 2025). He argues the durable drivers of long‑term value are reliability, decentralization, censorship resistance, immutability, and monetary scarcity, noting some blockchains have operated eight years or more without interruption while others struggle to achieve a single uninterrupted year (source: @ItsDave_ADA, X, Oct 21, 2025). For positioning, he highlights fixed monetary bases—exemplified by Bitcoin’s capped max supply (BTC)—as aligning incentives through predictable scarcity, while discretionary supply changes reintroduce human trust and policy risk (source: @ItsDave_ADA, X, Oct 21, 2025). Trading takeaway: prioritize credibility, uptime, and scarcity over headline TVL/DAU/fee metrics, and be skeptical of rapid design pivots meant to defend narrative metrics rather than security and sustainability (source: @ItsDave_ADA, X, Oct 21, 2025).