[woah]

This is an amusing truth in the industry. The VC's have given much of their money to "layer 1" blockchain projects that are supposed to have lots of application projects building on them.

But VC's aren't investing as much in application projects, since there often isn't a clear path to profitability with a decentralized application. A big reason for this is that the layer 1 blockchain will capture most of the value of the applications running on it (for a real life example of this, see Uniswap on Ethereum).

At the same time, the success of a layer 1 blockchain is judged by how many applications it has. So maybe one could argue that applications are valued more highly by VCs for enhancing the appearance of success of layer 1 blockchains than for their own sake.

This leads to the situation you portray, where it's sometimes easiest for a founder to get investment money from VCs that has first passed through the hands of a layer 1 project.