Cashflow is vital for a sustainable business. Insufficient cash flow can lead to business and economic collapse due to external market forces. Similarly, permissionless networks need continual value flow for healthy growth. Value flow encourages participants to reinvest their own value back into the network. Businesses, networks, and economies that successfully and sustainably manage cash flow can maintain growth over long periods.

Protocols in blockchain-based networks, including Layer 2 blockchains, DeFi protocols, NFT communities, DAOs, and more, have attempted to kickstart cashflow engines using attention campaigns and token emissions. Thus far, most protocols don’t focus on cash flow itself, rather they focus on capturing attention and then monetizing later, more like complex loyalty programs than designed economies.

These are largely experimental networks, and the broader market has entertained them because of speculative profit-taking and the hope that some of these networks will create enough momentum from loyalty and perceived value to kickstart an actual cash flow economy as strong as the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks. Too often we have seen the value of emissions in a constant hype-driven industry become unsustainable beyond the network’s periphery, leading to failed experiments, with builders and users left in the wake.

However, in the course of these experiments there have been successful revenue streams built on top of blockchain rails that have found product market fit. Blockspace, transaction fees, data provisioning, security stake, and a wide variety of financial primitives have proven to drive consistent value across ecosystem participants. As an L2 blockchain network, the Last Network captures numerous and ever-expanding revenue streams from external blockchains and within the Last Network itself, then redirects them back into the system as a cash flow engine. In this way, the network itself offsets token emissions, drives value back to the chain participants, and allows novel, sustainable incentive structures that can scale far into the future. Last is a long-term, bountiful model that incentivizes the builder and user base to participate in the network and distribute value.

From a practical standpoint, Last embeds this cash flow reinvestment hypothesis into the operational mechanisms of the network itself. The network itself reinvests any and all profit generated by the execution environment directly back into the growth levels of the ecosystem.

This is the Last mission – to be a sustainable cash flow network, providing long-term, sustainable, and highly compelling incentives for builders, users, and governors across the Last Network.

The following paper will explain how the Last Network architecture and mechanics work to achieve this mission.