A huge issue in this industry that’s still barely discussed is that most founders don’t care about building a real product.

Because for them, the token is the product.
You wouldn’t believe how often founders have flexed in DMs or calls about how much money they make by trading their own token treasury with market makers.
The entire system is propped up by deeply misaligned incentives:
- Exchanges: enable this extractive behavior in the first place, so you can take a massive cut of the total supply
- Market makers: this is essentially their entire reason for existing
- KOLs: get paid to hype tokens to drive volume and fees
- VCs: play along with the ponzi, low entry prices reduce risk and allow them to sell their mark-ups on paper to LPs
As long as we keep treating tokens as the product and extracting maximum short-term value from them, instead of shipping real products that actually grow the pie, this industry will keep bleeding out.
Another reason why tokens should be treated as onchain equity.