Fixing Crypto’s Broken Token Structures | Roundup

Bullish:

• $UNI - Uniswap is praised for unifying their foundation and labs entities to properly align value accrual to token holders, addressing previous misalignment issues and doing 'the hard thing' to fix structural problems

  • “Uniswap has done the hard thing. They were kind of the poster child of this misaligned incentives, this misalignment not because they wanted to be, but because that was the game on the field and the game changed and they're doing the hard thing.”

    Mike·57:55
• $HYPERLIQUID - Hyperliquid is highlighted as a success story in crypto due to its buyback programs that properly accrue value to token holders

  • “If you think about what tokens people are, like, enjoy holding and our success stories in crypto, at least in my opinion, you have things like Pump.fun, which has, like, a bunch of buybacks and you have Hyperliquid, same story, where you have a bunch of buybacks.”

    Xavier·59:13
• $PUMPFUN - Pump.fun is cited as a crypto success story with proper value accrual through buyback programs that benefit token holders

  • “If you think about what tokens people are, like, enjoy holding and our success stories in crypto, at least in my opinion, you have things like Pump.fun, which has, like, a bunch of buybacks”

    Xavier·59:13
• $MORPHO - Morpho could capitalize on Aave's missteps by properly aligning token holder interests and ensuring value accrues to the DAO rather than equity holders

  • “Maybe someone like Morpho or someone like that can understand that, okay, like the Aave token is tanking because, you know, value is accruing to the equity. Maybe Aave's end goal is to be acquired by some major fintech company. Why don't we have a lot of value accrued to the DAO and, like, push forward like that?”

    Xavier·38:52

Bearish:

• $AXL - Axelar acquisition by Circle only benefited the labs team/IP while token holders received nothing, exemplifying problematic misalignment between equity and token value

  • “You're expecting value to accrue to the thing that you're investing in. You're not expecting value to accrue to two different things, and you're certainly not expecting value to just accrue to one entity, which you don't have any sort of like, you know, whatever enforceability authority over.”

    Xavier·0:00
• $AAVE - Aave Labs redirected approximately $10M in annual swap fee revenue from the DAO to themselves by changing routing from Paraswap to Cowswap, extracting value from token holders

  • “So I think this was going you know, they were routing, like, swaps to Paraswap, which is an older project. And the labs team, I think, like, made an upgrade to route swaps to Cowswap. But in making this change, they also changed where the obvious, like, share of the swap fee revenue goes... that revenue is now gonna go to the labs team.”

    Myles·7:54
• $TENSOR - Tensor was acquired with no value accruing to token holders despite previously having decent fundamentals and bullish sentiment

  • “Tensor was... I feel like that project wasn't also like a rocket ship in terms of its fundamentals, but it was doing pretty well. Like, I think people were fairly bullish on Tensor, and now, like, that's gone.”

    Myles·41:45