Most crypto tokens are designed backwards. You make money by selling, not by holding. Which means every other holder is your competition from day one. Founders are timing their vesting unlock, investors are timing theirs, and retail is trying to front-run both. Nobody is actually aligned; everyone is just playing musical chairs. The fix isn't complicated in theory, if holders earn by holding rather than selling, the incentive flips. You stop trying to outmaneuver other holders and start trying to grow the protocol. Your competition becomes other protocols, not your own community. The reason it hasn't happened comes down to two things: • Distributing revenue to holders looked too much like an unregistered security under existing law. That legal risk killed the idea before it started for most teams. • The infrastructure to do it cheaply didn't exist. Gas costs on the mainnet Ethereum made programmatic revenue distribution impractical. L2s solved the second problem, and L1 is scaling. Regulation is close to solving the first. The teams paying attention to this now have a real head start. Worth reading the full piece ↓