Some quick $0.02 about tokens - as a pre-cursor to an article I hope to drop later this week. 1. Crypto is capital coordination technology. It helps move money, faster. The after effect of that, is capital chases and leaves ventures far faster. When ventures do not understand the side-effects of this, tokens list at high fdv and trend in one direction - downwards. 2. Markets are incentive design systems. VCs have a reason to list at high fdv. Founders have a reason to list at high fdv. Exchanges have a reason to list at high FDV. Market-makers have a reason to list at high FDV. When the high fdv games worked (2021-2023) - nobody was worried about revenue multiples. But markets are also truth machines. ICOs abused retail. So did exchange listings. Now that the marginal bid has gone, we are back to discussing revenue. 3. From a capital efficiency pov, smart contracts allow some of the highest margin businesses. Hyperliquid, Pump, Aave and Uniswap move more capital than most of their traditional peers. Tether is a highly profitable business. The challenge is not with revenue, it is with the lack of rights associated to tokens. You are not going to go buy a token (say UNI) if the foundation can take its own sweet time (six years?) to say - you know, we think the token should accrue value from interface fees. Pump clears a million in fees each day, but what is the person buying the token getting? In current state - crickets. Founders have low incentive to tie revenue to tokens and get tied up in DAO noise (refer Jup). Traditional allocators are not going to come bid something because "it has revenue bro". You need frameworks. Capitalism evolved over four centuries. We are trying to speed-run that in .. *checks notes*.. eight years. 4. DATs opened the kimono. We are now talking to TradFi. People want to understand the why. Most projects with lindy effects on revenue (hyperliquid?) trade at comparables to traditional fintech counterparts. AI becoming a high volatility avenue, alongside tariff drama meant people had no reason to come play around crypto (for vol). Those offerings are now in the equities market. 5. I think a huge reason why crypto struggles for relevance is we have the peter pan effect still going on. L2s gather around parties, ecosystem leads bicker on the feed while founders with revenue and scale struggle to find home. Marketing leads look at clicks and eyeballs instead of who is watching. The hyperbole feeds to the rot in the system. Year after year, the rot makes the system crumble - and you are left with what we have now. An ecosystem of L1s and L2s that have 10x more users, apps and revenue than 2022 - but with nobody valuing them. 6. TradFi companies struggle with revenue too. They also struggle with governance. The difference is there is forward leaning optimism and incentives for people to stick around. Startup equity can blow up to be worth nothing overnight in the traditional world (rippling vs deel?) - but there are large pools of capital that stabilise ecosystems. In crypto, said capital formation has not happened yet. Large funds (PE, hedge funds) - formed in 2022, but have mostly been burned (coatue, tiger, softbank) betting on liquid tokens. The managers that could bridge these pools of capital have low incentives to stick around when the game is based on social signaling and exchange listings. 7. I think every founder in the industry has one core challenge - finding pools of capital that are here to stick. For VCs, the problem is the same. Finding founders that are here to stick. Both are hard challenges when VCs hedge and founders call it a day 18 months in (story, aptos). The premia has eviscerated because trust has vanished. Thinking revenue fixes it, or techno-optimism will fix it, is akin to thinking putting together all the parts of a plane in a garage will have it fly. You need these parts arranged (governance, revenue, incentives, ecosystem) - from the get go. The difference between the apple/windows/linux discourse and crypto - is that the former had passionate people that were not selling their equity every 18 months. These things take time. All of these are issues that emerge in all technological cycles. I don't think there's a single fix to it. Perhaps, being honest about what's broken is a good place to start.