Gas vs. application-driven revenue

In this episode of Exponential, Jin Kwon, co-founder of saga.xyz, explains how blockchain infrastructure will disappear into the background.

Saga began as what Jin calls “a chain to launch chains.” The original thesis was simple: make block space more accessible for builders. But while the early bottleneck in crypto was scarce block space, today the challenge is different. There is more capacity available, yet building and operating a chain remains complex.

“The technical complexity is mostly solved,” Jin explains. “But the operational complexity is definitely not.”

Launching a blockchain is not just about spinning up code. It requires validators, economic design, token distribution, and ongoing coordination. Saga abstracts that operational burden. Builders submit a configuration request, and Saga’s mainnet validators automatically spin up a fully connected, decentralized chain, complete with bridging and orchestration. The model works more like AWS than a traditional blockchain launch, with predictable infrastructure costs instead of open-ended gas economics.

Underneath that architecture is a deeper critique of blockchain economics. “Blockchain economics is terrible for everybody involved,” Jin says bluntly. Most networks depend on gas fees for both spam prevention and revenue, but Jin argues those functions should be separated. In Saga’s model, infrastructure costs are minimized and predictable, while long-term revenue should come from the economic activity built on top of applications, not from taxing every transaction.

He points to Solana as a partial step in that direction, where gas is cheap enough to fade into the background and much of the value accrues elsewhere in the stack. Saga aims to push that further by removing gas as a core revenue mechanism and focusing instead on enabling sustainable application-layer economies.

The conversation also explores a broader debate in crypto: whether blockchain’s primary use case is finance or something else entirely. Jin rejects the distinction. “Finance is just one of the rails in which you create an economy,” he says. From his perspective, blockchain is fundamentally an economy-generation tool. Whether the use case is gaming, commerce, prediction markets, or payments, the underlying goal is building and coordinating new digital economies more efficiently.

Looking ahead, Saga is moving upstream from infrastructure into applications, particularly at the intersection of AI and commerce. The team is exploring how crypto rails and AI tooling can simplify merchant activity, advertising, and digital payments while hiding the “gunkiness” of Web3 from end users.

The long-term vision is clear: remove friction layer by layer until blockchain becomes invisible. When that happens, users won’t ask whether something is “Web3” or “finance.” They’ll simply use applications that are cheaper, faster, and more aligned with the digital economies they power.