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Good products come from tight cycles: ship something, listen to users, iterate. Token economics break that cycle by introducing a competing optimization target.

Good products come from tight cycles: ship something, listen to users, iterate. Token economics break that cycle by introducing a competing optimization target. The team stops asking "what do our developers need?" and starts asking "what supports the token narrative?" In other words, the team starts asking "How can we maximize the token price while delivering as little product value as possible"? This is why 99.99% of crypto projects are a scam. No, your token investors don't give a damn what you deliver. They only care about the price of the token. Lie if you have to. Hype up your project like it's the greatest thing in the world. Do whatever to enable security fraud. When teams discover that lying does more for the token price than actually building, they quickly switch incentives. Now they'll just lie, sell tokens, repeat, until a final rug pull to scam the remaining bag holders.

pjc50 8mo ago
Yes - but the sad thing is how badly this has bled back to the real markets. That's how you get things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Corporation I'm concerned we may not be able to pull back from low-trust society in which most investments are fradulent; eventually it will become impossible to raise money for real ventures!
kevinak 8mo ago
Yep! People in the Bitcoin space have been screaming at the top of their lungs about this for decades at this point, but it's hard to work against the marketing machine that comes from these ICOs.
pavlov 8mo ago
The weird thing is that this outcome was always obvious. Token-driven projects were clearly just penny stock boiler room scams dressed up in a trenchcoat made of jargon whitepapers.
- mhendric 8mo ago
  Author here. The essay's argument is actually the opposite of that. The team was talented. Proof-of-Transfer was a real technical contribution. The SEC qualification was historic. What I'm describing is how structural incentives bent a legitimate effort toward narrative optimization over time. That's a harder problem than fraud. There's no villain, just a system that rewards the wrong things. Reducing it to "scams" makes it too easy and misses the lesson for anyone building with a financial instrument attached.
SlinkyOnStairs 8mo ago
If you'll humor a cheeky substitution: > No, your VC investors don't give a damn what you deliver. They only care about the valuation. Lie if you have to. Hype up your project like it's the greatest thing in the world. Do whatever to enable security fraud. People are quite good at recognizing this dynamic amongst crypto startups. Yet they pretend it's not the driving force in both the VC world and Big Tech.
- oofbey 8mo ago
  Clever comparison, but the key difference is there’s no mechanism for a rug pull for most startups. Unless they reach a huge valuation, the stock is absolutely not liquid. There’s no way to cash out.
  - SlinkyOnStairs 8mo ago
    The incentives are the same. Rug-pulls just make it faster to cash out. > There’s no way to cash out. There are precisely two: Go for an IPO, or get acquired by a major tech firm. Both of these run near-exclusively on hype. So long as the company isn't showing actively fraudulent numbers, you can IPO with a terrible product that doesn't turn a profit.
    - oofbey 8mo ago
      It's not just that crypto lets you cash out faster - it lets you do it with zero notice, accountability, or diligence. Startup exits (IPO or acquisition) often have a big chunk of hype associated with them. But often the hype is backed by factual numbers of revenue or user-base. Even if it's pure hype, there will be mountains of legal paperwork. Hundreds if not thousands of hours spent by professional lawyers checking that whoever is putting up the money really is getting what they're paying for, even if what they're buying is a dream. If not, somebody has broken the law (fraud) or a shocking amount of incompetence has occurred. Your typical crypto scam thrives because there are no such procedural guarantees.
- aurareturn 8mo ago
  Not the same because VCs can only make money when the startup gets acquired by a bigger company or by IPO. Both of them will require professional due diligence. So it's far harder to fool investors than crypto which prey on the least sophisticated investors.

pjc50 8mo ago

Yes - but the sad thing is how badly this has bled back to the real markets. That's how you get things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Corporation I'm concerned we may not be able to pull back from low-trust society in which most investments are fradulent; eventually it will become impossible to raise money for real ventures!

kevinak 8mo ago

Yep! People in the Bitcoin space have been screaming at the top of their lungs about this for decades at this point, but it's hard to work against the marketing machine that comes from these ICOs.

pavlov 8mo ago

The weird thing is that this outcome was always obvious. Token-driven projects were clearly just penny stock boiler room scams dressed up in a trenchcoat made of jargon whitepapers.

mhendric 8mo ago
Author here. The essay's argument is actually the opposite of that. The team was talented. Proof-of-Transfer was a real technical contribution. The SEC qualification was historic. What I'm describing is how structural incentives bent a legitimate effort toward narrative optimization over time. That's a harder problem than fraud. There's no villain, just a system that rewards the wrong things. Reducing it to "scams" makes it too easy and misses the lesson for anyone building with a financial instrument attached.

SlinkyOnStairs 8mo ago

If you'll humor a cheeky substitution: > No, your VC investors don't give a damn what you deliver. They only care about the valuation. Lie if you have to. Hype up your project like it's the greatest thing in the world. Do whatever to enable security fraud. People are quite good at recognizing this dynamic amongst crypto startups. Yet they pretend it's not the driving force in both the VC world and Big Tech.

oofbey 8mo ago
Clever comparison, but the key difference is there’s no mechanism for a rug pull for most startups. Unless they reach a huge valuation, the stock is absolutely not liquid. There’s no way to cash out.
- SlinkyOnStairs 8mo ago
  The incentives are the same. Rug-pulls just make it faster to cash out. > There’s no way to cash out. There are precisely two: Go for an IPO, or get acquired by a major tech firm. Both of these run near-exclusively on hype. So long as the company isn't showing actively fraudulent numbers, you can IPO with a terrible product that doesn't turn a profit.
  - oofbey 8mo ago
    It's not just that crypto lets you cash out faster - it lets you do it with zero notice, accountability, or diligence. Startup exits (IPO or acquisition) often have a big chunk of hype associated with them. But often the hype is backed by factual numbers of revenue or user-base. Even if it's pure hype, there will be mountains of legal paperwork. Hundreds if not thousands of hours spent by professional lawyers checking that whoever is putting up the money really is getting what they're paying for, even if what they're buying is a dream. If not, somebody has broken the law (fraud) or a shocking amount of incompetence has occurred. Your typical crypto scam thrives because there are no such procedural guarantees.
aurareturn 8mo ago
Not the same because VCs can only make money when the startup gets acquired by a bigger company or by IPO. Both of them will require professional due diligence. So it's far harder to fool investors than crypto which prey on the least sophisticated investors.