Network Effects & LiquidityWide moat

The economic engine of the monopoly is the liquidity network effect, the same one that protects every dominant exchange on earth. Traders want to transact where they can get the best price and fill an order instantly, and that is wherever the most other traders already are. So order flow concentrates at the venue with the deepest book, which makes that book deeper still, which attracts yet more flow — a virtuous circle that, once established, is extraordinarily hard for a challenger to break. GPW is the beneficiary of decades of that compounding for Polish securities.

This is why an exchange's incumbency is so valuable and so defensible. A rival cannot win by matching GPW's technology or undercutting its fees, because neither addresses the thing that actually matters to a trader: where the liquidity is. To lure flow away, a competitor would have to persuade a critical mass of traders to move simultaneously to an empty book on the promise that everyone else will follow — a coordination problem that almost never resolves in the challenger's favor. The liquidity pool is the moat's deep water, and it has taken a generation to fill — the 2025 boom showed what a full pool pays: revenue up 18,7%¹.