Every L2 deck now has a fee switch slide. Almost none of them have a fee switch.
The pattern is familiar: usage charts go up, token charts go down, and somewhere in governance a forum post titled "Activating value accrual" collects sympathetic comments and no votes.
A fee switch you have not turned on is a promise, not a mechanism. And the market has stopped pricing promises in this category. Hyperliquid did not win the value-capture argument with a roadmap slide. It routed real revenue to the token while everyone else was still drafting the proposal.
If your token's bull case starts with "once governance approves", you do not have a bull case. You have a dependency.
Watch what gets switched on, not what gets presented.
The sourced version
Apps Eat the Stack: Why L2 Tokens Keep Underperforming
Layer 2 networks process five times Ethereum's transaction volume. Their tokens have lost 80-90% of their value. The value is migrating to applications, and the market is only just starting to price it.
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