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?"

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.

For an industry that was full of hype and fake products, it was one of the few you could download and get some use out of. I remember a very janky Google Docs clone running on the chain. Sad to see that they’ve lost their way. For now crypto still only has one value prop: token go up.

[1] https://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci2390/2019/readings/blocksta...

The company's stock is the product. The product only has to be good enough to look plausible. Growth can be bought by selling $1 bills for $1.50 and by plowing money into marketing. The most important thing is to keep the hype up and raise the next round and make sure it's not a down round, or even if it is who cares... the execs just pay themselves fat salaries or work side sales of stock into there to cash out even if the main stock price is underwater.

You get inherent problems when you're selling a promise or a certificate not a product.

Admittedly I only read the titles.