AI LABS ARE THE NEW CRYPTO L1S

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

OpenAI ($852B post-money, $40B ARR) and Anthropic ($965B post-money, $65B ARR) are each priced on a winner-take-all infrastructure thesis that mirrors how crypto VCs funded L1s last cycle, when the prevailing assumption was that the fastest, most capable layer would capture the bulk of economic value. Routing abstractions are eroding that logic: OpenRouter aggregates 400+ models from 80+ providers behind a single API, Stripe has agreed to acquire it, and DeepSeek's share of platform token volume doubled from 9% to 18% in six months, converting model selection into a per-task price and latency optimization. The Polymarket/Polygon split shows where value actually settles once infrastructure commoditizes, with Polymarket retaining $15.3M in protocol revenue over 30 days against $2.1M for Polygon's base layer, a 7.3x gap that reflects customer ownership residing with the application, not the chain underneath it.