📋 摘要
加密貨幣市場正經歷K型復甦，大部分代幣將持續下跌，僅少數具備真實價值的代幣有望上漲。傳統的「液體創投」投資策略已不再有效，投資者需轉向基本面分析。 市場面臨每月30-60億美元的代幣解鎖壓力，缺乏價值累積機制的項目將持續承壓。成功項目需具備回購機制、穩定收入流和可持續增長能力。前十一大應用已產生61億美元年收入，其中四個項目向代幣持有者返還12億美元價值。 代幣估值應採用調整後市值計算方法，考慮實際流通供應量而非完全稀釋估值。流動性不足的代幣需要額外折價。回購機制代幣應享有估值溢價，而存在大量解鎖的代幣應以折價交易。 比特幣週期性波動仍主導代幣表現，為基本面強勁項目提供深度價值投資機會。未來十年，隨著機構資本進入和監管環境改善，代幣投資將從「智能投資者的噩夢」轉變為「智能投資者的美夢」。
📄 完整內容
Not All Tokens Are Created Equal
lowhangingfruit
Dec 22, 2025
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Extreme alt dispersion, coupled with a BTC dominance chart that leaves many fund managers begging for answers, has led to a high level of exhaustion among market participants. Not only are we seeing an exhaustion in flows for tokens, but also an exhaustion in the imagination of token investors, and I see this as an opportunity.
Over the last few cycles, most of us have been used to everything going up. Last cycle, if you asked why a token was up 100% on any given day, you’d be ridiculed, for any given cryptocurrency didn’t need a reason to go up. This environment does not exist anymore. Today, for a token to go up, there needs to be a very compelling reason for it to do so.
Crypto investing has largely been (and likely will continue to be) based on principles of venture investing. However, more and more investors believe there is an opportunity for tokens and stocks to be treated the same. This requires a shift in thinking about token markets, albeit with nuance. While you cannot only look at fundamentals to model out an investment thesis for a project (that may have a liquid token but be very early in its product cycle), you also cannot completely ignore them, as used to be done in cycles past.
The K Shaped Market
I think it is safe to say that
market recovery moving forward is going to be K-shaped
. What this means is that most tokens are going to continue to go down in price and some tokens have a chance to fight for the right to go up in price.
The chart above indicates that only tokens with buybacks will go up - I don’t believe this to be fully true. While tokens with buybacks (read: value accrual) have a good chance of going up in price (provided they continue to show KPI growth), other tokens that may just be starting out or tokens for projects that promise other things that investors consider valuable, will also go up in price. Zcash, for instance, is up +500% this year because its investor base has come to value privacy a whole lot more. You can argue whether this has staying power or not, but
there is something of value at the other end that those with capital are willing to pay for.
Liquid Venture Sounds Cooler Than It Is And Is Much Harder Than It Sounds
Liquid and venture are separate approaches to investing, and for a good reason, attract different kinds of investors. When you try to mix the two, there is a massive misalignment in incentives that decays any sort of alpha you think you have. Another way to think about it is, you are venture investing and paying a liquid premium to do so. You might be paying a momo premium as indicated by long-bias OI, which can be directionally calculated via funding rate, on the token. Instead of doing a deal at $10M with 0 traction, you are buying a token anywhere between a
3x to 10x markup
(more in some cases) - with just some traction (sustainability of which is unclear). You’re paying a premium for traction that should actually attract a discount. There’s also the aspect that you are simply at an informational disadvantage. Early investors know more than you do, and the team knows more than you do, and there’s a token that exists to act on information latency. You then have to factor in consistent market cap dilution (which affects price) coming from early investors (and the team) that have achieved venture scale returns without their entire thesis manifesting. Why wouldn’t they sell? While there are outliers, by and large, a “liquid-venture” approach to token investing has yielded poor results so far.
Two years ago,
I wrote a report on perps dexes
with the lens that in crypto, you can make venture-esque investments, while still adopting a more fundamental, liquid markets approach to tokens. I was sorta right about the traits that would make for a successful perps dex token; however, every single one of the tokens I wrote about is down over 90%, while a competitor usurped them all and took almost all marketshare. These markets are vicious and rapidly evolving. Even though I was right about the thesis, forcing myself to make a liquid venture bet at that stage would have meant I bought one or some of those tokens that went down -90%, and the only way I had a chance of making a return on that thesis was if I was agile enough to rotate from those tokens to HYPE at genesis.
I’m not saying that underwriting tokens in this method is impossible, or not profitable, but I have a sense that a larger share of investors realise that executing a strategy like this is much much harder than they initially thought. You are likely better off buying and holding BTC. There is still a market that exists where you can make a bet (through the token) on high quality teams (venture style), and make money. It isn’t easy, though.
Token Overhang: Show Me The Incentives and I’ll Show You The Outcome
There’s between $3B and $6B worth of tokens hitting the market every month, solely from locked supply. This is bad, since in most cases, the projects or protocols behind these tokens do not produce any value. Even if they produce some value, it is likely that these tokens trade (at least in the past, this has been the case) at premiums that they cannot sustain.
These premiums are in most cases, a strong incentive to sell.
If you are an early investor in some of these tokens, or if you are a member of the team, and you’re up 10x, 100x, or 1000x, and you get tokens that are unlocked, it is much easier to sell into liquidity, realise your profit, and underwrite the token again in a down market. Structurally, purely on flows, most tokens will not be able to sustain their valuations. They will perpetually go down until there is little incentive for unlocked holders to sell anymore. Projects that remove this incentive to sell (by creating strong incentives to hold, i.e., value of some sort), will obviously do well.
As a result, multiples of tokens with large overhangs or unlocks that are looming
should trade at a discount
to multiples of tokens that do not have large overhangs or unlocks that are looming.
I read
this post
by
DougieDeLuca
after writing the paragraph above, and nothing explains the narrative impact of overhang better than this. I would strongly recommend reading it.
The Cyclical Nature of Token Markets Can Provide Deep Fucking Value (If You Know Where To Look)
Even if a token has strong fundamentals and acceleration in KPIs, they will go down in price if Bitcoin goes down in price. While this phenomenon is slowing, tokens are still extremely tethered to Bitcoin. Look at HYPE, for instance. Over the last year, Hyperliquid revenues have not just been consistent, but are up almost over 2x in the second half of the year, but its token, HYPE, is down ~50% from August (BTC is down ~33%).
While you could write this chart off as a correction in an already inflated valuation or the market sniffing out ephemeral traction/usage and subsequently, unsustainable fees, I believe this is a clear illustration of how the cyclical nature of crypto provides deep value opportunities. HYPE is down because BTC is down.
Hyperliquid has incredible product quality, feature parity with CEXs, growing revenues, and even business line expansion and feature expansion that will drive future fee growth, and you have the opportunity to buy this at a cheap price simply because BTC is down -30%.
You can make a similar argument about other tokens as well. You want to have dry powder to buy these dips.
So, How To Think About Value?
Now that we’ve hit a period where there are a handful of protocols that have been around for a while, have generated
between $100M and $1B in revenue / earnings over the last year,
and are showing signs that they may be able to sustain (and even grow) these revenues over the foreseeable (medium term) future, the path to defining methodologies to value these tokens gets a whole lot clearer.
In the last year, the top
eleven applications have generated ~$6.1B in revenue (or fees) in 2025 and nine of them have liquid tokens. Four of these tokens have passed on ~$1.2B in value to tokenholders. I’m not saying buying these tokens today means you will do well, but you can analyze them against a few years worth of hard data, which is as good a starting point as anyone could ask for in crypto.
How do you think about valuing these very internet native businesses that may or may not yield two years from now, as they have done in the past? The easiest way to think about valuation from a liquid token perspective is the amount of free cash flow you estimate a protocol will be able to generate over the next few years and whether you expect the protocol as a whole will be able to do this at an accelerating rate and in a sustainable manner. This is your baseline.
Now while we are trying to value tokens like stocks, we must remember, these are not equal, yet. In addition to operating economics that you would look at while valuing a stock, there’s slightly more nuance to tokens - supply dynamics, inflation, burns, unlocks / overhang, buybacks, and there’s second order effects like the impact of early liquidity on the team’s motivation, the way the organisation is structured and whether it is built for long term alignment, equity/token COIs, extremely high operating leverage etc.
All of these nuances should have a positive or negative impact on the multiple you would finally assign to baseline cashflows.
Low Hanging Fruit: Looking At Token Supply The Right Way
Arca
published a report
that proposes a method to more accurately price token valuations based on a more calibrated approach to calculating total token supply. Many market participants have wised up towards allocating to tokens with a low float and high FDV, launching at valuations that do not have the fundamentals to match. I agree with Arca’s take that FDV based on total outstanding supply is a very inaccurate representation of token valuations.
Eventually, we are betting on larger capital pools coming in and looking at tokens as ownership opportunities in high-growth, high revenue businesses, and it is likely that they look at the supply dynamic of most tokens in a similar vein to equity shares. There is also
potentially an underpricing of token valuations caused by accounting for tokens that are never likely to hit circulating supply in the short term, or ever.
Adjusted market cap is a more accurate reflection of the total amount of tokens outstanding (both liquid and locked, but accounted for) that are in the market or are confirmed to hit the market in the near to medium term. If the thesis is that future flows into tokens will be much larger (and much more traditional) than all the flows into tokens until now, then, those flows are likely to at least look at token supply logically. The difference in understanding of supply dynamics creates a unique opportunity in the market, where some tokens may be cheap today because most of the market is socializing its value over a larger number of tokens than they need to.
Buybacks: Show Me The Incentives and I’ll Show You The Outcome
Over the short term, buybacks have very little impact on the price of a token.
Over the long term, if the protocol has sizable cashflows, buybacks can have an impact on the token price.
At a certain scale, buybacks remove tradeable supply off the market over a long enough time period. They also seem to create trust, and we know you can’t put a price on trust.
While buybacks are the most direct form of value accrual, they may not be the most efficient method of capital allocation in all cases. However, it is a
good starting point to align value with tokenholders
.
As a result, multiples of tokens with large buybacks
should trade at a premium
to multiples of tokens that do not have large buybacks or any buybacks. I agree that buybacks (in an equity sense) are a capital allocation decision, and given that tokens are 80-90 vol assets, more often than not, buybacks are not a profitable form of capital allocation at all. In a mature market, this will bode poorly on token price.
However, I guess the question today is whether buybacks make other people want to buy the token. The answer to this is also nuanced, but if you just look at the current universe of buyback tokens (RAY, PUMP, AAVE, BNB, SYRUP, JTO etc.) - the only token with buybacks to write home about was HYPE (and price went up) and for a brief period PUMP (and price went up).
Buybacks at this stage are more a signal of alignment, which in an environment of projects that rug/lie to the average token investor (Like RLB for instance - there was no way to verify revenue on-chain or even offchain, and no audits, they were just burning random tokens or selling from treasury) - it makes the token look good. Going forward, I expect we start seeing diversification start to happen, with protocols starting to build balance sheets and focus on capital allocation in a much more traditional sense.
Token Debt Isn’t As Bad As Tech Debt
Just like tech-debt, older tokens suffer from what I would call token debt. Almost all tokens that existed more than 3 to 5 years ago and continue to exist today, likely haven’t seen their previous cycle all time high, or have suffered from anemic price action. Some of these tokens have made meaningful progress on a fundamental front, and have even started generating value, however their token suffers from mechanism design choices made in the past, and a sub par return on incentives spent.
For example, Helium is now generating ~$20M ARR (in sales), with all revenues burning the HNT token. Sales have been on a tear in 2025, however, Helium’s burn-mint token design
has capped token upside
. While burns push tokens up in price, it also means the emissions being paid out are worth more, which incentivizes selling. Not the most ideal token design choice. There is hope though. Given that tokens are programmable structures,
changing mechanics
isn’t really a hard thing to do, and we’re seeing a wide range of projects course correct.
Some tokens can and have made attempts to grow out of their token debt (by changing aspects of token economics, calibrating emissions, retroactive burns, changing their token model entirely, launching new tokens), and I expect more tokens to follow suit.
I think what
MetaDAO is doing warrants some attention
. Tokens that trade like equity (well, to some extent).
The Liquidity Adjustment To Token Valuations (Liquidity-Adjusted Valuation)
As we saw on October 10th, many token prices are propped up by opportunistic MMs (which is almost an open secret - this is how some tokens may be priced at any given point in time). When the MMs disappeared, tokens couldn’t find a floor, and the market didn’t know what price to step in and buy them. It was truly amusing to behold.
This is something we have known for a long time.
Look at ATOM as an example. Even today, the ATOM token is “worth” ~$900M and does over $60M in daily trading volume.
Yet, if you sell more than $150k of the token, you are going to materially move the price. If an asset is worth $1B but you cannot sell more than $100k without moving the price a significant amount, then is that asset really “worth” $1B?
In situations like these, valuations should be marked down based on available liquidity. There’s no two ways about this, in my opinion. Just like adjusted market cap based on calibrated supply, we should have a discount factor to adjusted market cap based on trailing 30D liquidity of a token. An easy way to ballpark this would be to apply a “liquidity haircut” to every token you analyze. You can get there by benchmarking each token’s depth-to-cap ratio against Bitcoin.
The Path Forward
I started writing this blog to create a soft framework for those navigating token markets to use. What I have realised while writing the entirety of this out, is that, we are still so early. The mature, institutional capital that we have been begging for in cycles past has arrived, and yet, not a single long term dollar from these pools of capital have touched our tokens. We’re moving towards a blended world of tokenized equity and tokens, and capital allocation is going to happen on-chain. We benefit from that. Tokens are going up against equity (and this is a good thing), and good tokens benefit from that.
Over the last 5 years, just going by the hostile regulatory outlook towards tokens, broken token distribution, broken token mechanisms, lots and lots of overhang, and no real mature capital in token markets- buying a token was an intelligent investor’s nightmare.
Buying tokens over the next decade is going to be an intelligent investor’s dream.
References
[1]
https://www.ar.ca/blog/fixing-token-valuations-arca-proposes-adjusted-market-cap-standard
[2]
Dougie
@DougieDeLuca
https://t.co/jvmikq7uy3
4:47 PM · Dec 10, 2025
·
14.5K Views
22 Replies
·
8 Reposts
·
114 Likes
[3
Taiki Maeda
@TaikiMaeda2
Expect a K-shaped recovery for crypto moving forward
4:33 PM · Nov 5, 2025
·
305K Views
120 Replies
·
81 Reposts
·
1.19K Likes
/photo/1
[4]
https://mohitpandit.substack.com/p/whats-up-with-defi-derivatives-dexs
[5]
Dougie
@DougieDeLuca
https://t.co/yRHjc88i4H
4:25 PM · Dec 3, 2025
·
21.1K Views
9 Replies
·
3 Reposts
·
77 Likes
[6]
https://defillama.com/protocol/fees/hyperliquid
[7]
https://aave.tokenlogic.xyz/revenue
[8]
Cobie
New launches (part 1) - private capture, phantom pricing
Welcome friends, been a while…
Read more
2 years ago · 661 likes · 105 comments · Cobie
[9]
https://vote.uniswapfoundation.org/proposals/93
[10]
https://caia.org/blog/2025/12/15/utility-tokens-portfolio-allocation-digital-counterparts-commodities
[11]
Felipe Montealegre
@TheiaResearch
VC AUM is $3.1T
I believe there is a credible case that MetaDAO take >1% of the market if it can overachieve on DPI and revenue per USD raised ($310B)
Total MetaDAO raised to date $35M
This is an extremely high edge bet at anything above >5% probability and I think we will win
Felipe Montealegre
@TheiaResearch
my only prediction for 2026 is that the three MetaDAO cohorts of ownership coins (2024: MetaDAO // 2025: Avici, Umbra, etc // 2026: TBD) will outperform Crypto VC results for the same periods on —
(1) DPI and TVPI versus Market Cap relative to USD invested
(2) Revenue relative
5:14 PM · Dec 20, 2025
·
6.1K Views
9 Replies
·
1 Repost
·
47 Likes
Disclaimer:
This report is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. The author is not a registered investment advisor, and all analysis is based on data sourced from third-party platforms (such as DeFiLlama and Token Terminal) which, while believed to be reliable, cannot be guaranteed for accuracy or completeness. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the risk of total loss, due to extreme volatility, regulatory shifts, and liquidity constraints. The author and associated entities may hold long or short positions in the tokens or protocols mentioned herein and may trade these assets at any time without prior notice, which may present a conflict of interest. All projections, including “Adjusted Market Cap” and “Future Net Earnings,” are forward-looking statements based on current market assumptions and are not guarantees of future performance; past performance is never indicative of future results.
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lowhangingfruit
Dec 22, 2025
2
1
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Extreme alt dispersion, coupled with a BTC dominance chart that leaves many fund managers begging for answers, has led to a high level of exhaustion among market participants. Not only are we seeing an exhaustion in flows for tokens, but also an exhaustion in the imagination of token investors, and I see this as an opportunity.
Over the last few cycles, most of us have been used to everything going up. Last cycle, if you asked why a token was up 100% on any given day, you’d be ridiculed, for any given cryptocurrency didn’t need a reason to go up. This environment does not exist anymore. Today, for a token to go up, there needs to be a very compelling reason for it to do so.
Crypto investing has largely been (and likely will continue to be) based on principles of venture investing. However, more and more investors believe there is an opportunity for tokens and stocks to be treated the same. This requires a shift in thinking about token markets, albeit with nuance. While you cannot only look at fundamentals to model out an investment thesis for a project (that may have a liquid token but be very early in its product cycle), you also cannot completely ignore them, as used to be done in cycles past.
The K Shaped Market
I think it is safe to say that
market recovery moving forward is going to be K-shaped
. What this means is that most tokens are going to continue to go down in price and some tokens have a chance to fight for the right to go up in price.
The chart above indicates that only tokens with buybacks will go up - I don’t believe this to be fully true. While tokens with buybacks (read: value accrual) have a good chance of going up in price (provided they continue to show KPI growth), other tokens that may just be starting out or tokens for projects that promise other things that investors consider valuable, will also go up in price. Zcash, for instance, is up +500% this year because its investor base has come to value privacy a whole lot more. You can argue whether this has staying power or not, but
there is something of value at the other end that those with capital are willing to pay for.
Liquid Venture Sounds Cooler Than It Is And Is Much Harder Than It Sounds
Liquid and venture are separate approaches to investing, and for a good reason, attract different kinds of investors. When you try to mix the two, there is a massive misalignment in incentives that decays any sort of alpha you think you have. Another way to think about it is, you are venture investing and paying a liquid premium to do so. You might be paying a momo premium as indicated by long-bias OI, which can be directionally calculated via funding rate, on the token. Instead of doing a deal at $10M with 0 traction, you are buying a token anywhere between a
3x to 10x markup
(more in some cases) - with just some traction (sustainability of which is unclear). You’re paying a premium for traction that should actually attract a discount. There’s also the aspect that you are simply at an informational disadvantage. Early investors know more than you do, and the team knows more than you do, and there’s a token that exists to act on information latency. You then have to factor in consistent market cap dilution (which affects price) coming from early investors (and the team) that have achieved venture scale returns without their entire thesis manifesting. Why wouldn’t they sell? While there are outliers, by and large, a “liquid-venture” approach to token investing has yielded poor results so far.
Two years ago,
I wrote a report on perps dexes
with the lens that in crypto, you can make venture-esque investments, while still adopting a more fundamental, liquid markets approach to tokens. I was sorta right about the traits that would make for a successful perps dex token; however, every single one of the tokens I wrote about is down over 90%, while a competitor usurped them all and took almost all marketshare. These markets are vicious and rapidly evolving. Even though I was right about the thesis, forcing myself to make a liquid venture bet at that stage would have meant I bought one or some of those tokens that went down -90%, and the only way I had a chance of making a return on that thesis was if I was agile enough to rotate from those tokens to HYPE at genesis.
I’m not saying that underwriting tokens in this method is impossible, or not profitable, but I have a sense that a larger share of investors realise that executing a strategy like this is much much harder than they initially thought. You are likely better off buying and holding BTC. There is still a market that exists where you can make a bet (through the token) on high quality teams (venture style), and make money. It isn’t easy, though.
Token Overhang: Show Me The Incentives and I’ll Show You The Outcome
There’s between $3B and $6B worth of tokens hitting the market every month, solely from locked supply. This is bad, since in most cases, the projects or protocols behind these tokens do not produce any value. Even if they produce some value, it is likely that these tokens trade (at least in the past, this has been the case) at premiums that they cannot sustain.
These premiums are in most cases, a strong incentive to sell.
If you are an early investor in some of these tokens, or if you are a member of the team, and you’re up 10x, 100x, or 1000x, and you get tokens that are unlocked, it is much easier to sell into liquidity, realise your profit, and underwrite the token again in a down market. Structurally, purely on flows, most tokens will not be able to sustain their valuations. They will perpetually go down until there is little incentive for unlocked holders to sell anymore. Projects that remove this incentive to sell (by creating strong incentives to hold, i.e., value of some sort), will obviously do well.
As a result, multiples of tokens with large overhangs or unlocks that are looming
should trade at a discount
to multiples of tokens that do not have large overhangs or unlocks that are looming.
I read
this post
by
DougieDeLuca
after writing the paragraph above, and nothing explains the narrative impact of overhang better than this. I would strongly recommend reading it.
The Cyclical Nature of Token Markets Can Provide Deep Fucking Value (If You Know Where To Look)
Even if a token has strong fundamentals and acceleration in KPIs, they will go down in price if Bitcoin goes down in price. While this phenomenon is slowing, tokens are still extremely tethered to Bitcoin. Look at HYPE, for instance. Over the last year, Hyperliquid revenues have not just been consistent, but are up almost over 2x in the second half of the year, but its token, HYPE, is down ~50% from August (BTC is down ~33%).
While you could write this chart off as a correction in an already inflated valuation or the market sniffing out ephemeral traction/usage and subsequently, unsustainable fees, I believe this is a clear illustration of how the cyclical nature of crypto provides deep value opportunities. HYPE is down because BTC is down.
Hyperliquid has incredible product quality, feature parity with CEXs, growing revenues, and even business line expansion and feature expansion that will drive future fee growth, and you have the opportunity to buy this at a cheap price simply because BTC is down -30%.
You can make a similar argument about other tokens as well. You want to have dry powder to buy these dips.
So, How To Think About Value?
Now that we’ve hit a period where there are a handful of protocols that have been around for a while, have generated
between $100M and $1B in revenue / earnings over the last year,
and are showing signs that they may be able to sustain (and even grow) these revenues over the foreseeable (medium term) future, the path to defining methodologies to value these tokens gets a whole lot clearer.
In the last year, the top
eleven applications have generated ~$6.1B in revenue (or fees) in 2025 and nine of them have liquid tokens. Four of these tokens have passed on ~$1.2B in value to tokenholders. I’m not saying buying these tokens today means you will do well, but you can analyze them against a few years worth of hard data, which is as good a starting point as anyone could ask for in crypto.
How do you think about valuing these very internet native businesses that may or may not yield two years from now, as they have done in the past? The easiest way to think about valuation from a liquid token perspective is the amount of free cash flow you estimate a protocol will be able to generate over the next few years and whether you expect the protocol as a whole will be able to do this at an accelerating rate and in a sustainable manner. This is your baseline.
Now while we are trying to value tokens like stocks, we must remember, these are not equal, yet. In addition to operating economics that you would look at while valuing a stock, there’s slightly more nuance to tokens - supply dynamics, inflation, burns, unlocks / overhang, buybacks, and there’s second order effects like the impact of early liquidity on the team’s motivation, the way the organisation is structured and whether it is built for long term alignment, equity/token COIs, extremely high operating leverage etc.
All of these nuances should have a positive or negative impact on the multiple you would finally assign to baseline cashflows.
Low Hanging Fruit: Looking At Token Supply The Right Way
Arca
published a report
that proposes a method to more accurately price token valuations based on a more calibrated approach to calculating total token supply. Many market participants have wised up towards allocating to tokens with a low float and high FDV, launching at valuations that do not have the fundamentals to match. I agree with Arca’s take that FDV based on total outstanding supply is a very inaccurate representation of token valuations.
Eventually, we are betting on larger capital pools coming in and looking at tokens as ownership opportunities in high-growth, high revenue businesses, and it is likely that they look at the supply dynamic of most tokens in a similar vein to equity shares. There is also
potentially an underpricing of token valuations caused by accounting for tokens that are never likely to hit circulating supply in the short term, or ever.
Adjusted market cap is a more accurate reflection of the total amount of tokens outstanding (both liquid and locked, but accounted for) that are in the market or are confirmed to hit the market in the near to medium term. If the thesis is that future flows into tokens will be much larger (and much more traditional) than all the flows into tokens until now, then, those flows are likely to at least look at token supply logically. The difference in understanding of supply dynamics creates a unique opportunity in the market, where some tokens may be cheap today because most of the market is socializing its value over a larger number of tokens than they need to.
Buybacks: Show Me The Incentives and I’ll Show You The Outcome
Over the short term, buybacks have very little impact on the price of a token.
Over the long term, if the protocol has sizable cashflows, buybacks can have an impact on the token price.
At a certain scale, buybacks remove tradeable supply off the market over a long enough time period. They also seem to create trust, and we know you can’t put a price on trust.
While buybacks are the most direct form of value accrual, they may not be the most efficient method of capital allocation in all cases. However, it is a
good starting point to align value with tokenholders
.
As a result, multiples of tokens with large buybacks
should trade at a premium
to multiples of tokens that do not have large buybacks or any buybacks. I agree that buybacks (in an equity sense) are a capital allocation decision, and given that tokens are 80-90 vol assets, more often than not, buybacks are not a profitable form of capital allocation at all. In a mature market, this will bode poorly on token price.
However, I guess the question today is whether buybacks make other people want to buy the token. The answer to this is also nuanced, but if you just look at the current universe of buyback tokens (RAY, PUMP, AAVE, BNB, SYRUP, JTO etc.) - the only token with buybacks to write home about was HYPE (and price went up) and for a brief period PUMP (and price went up).
Buybacks at this stage are more a signal of alignment, which in an environment of projects that rug/lie to the average token investor (Like RLB for instance - there was no way to verify revenue on-chain or even offchain, and no audits, they were just burning random tokens or selling from treasury) - it makes the token look good. Going forward, I expect we start seeing diversification start to happen, with protocols starting to build balance sheets and focus on capital allocation in a much more traditional sense.
Token Debt Isn’t As Bad As Tech Debt
Just like tech-debt, older tokens suffer from what I would call token debt. Almost all tokens that existed more than 3 to 5 years ago and continue to exist today, likely haven’t seen their previous cycle all time high, or have suffered from anemic price action. Some of these tokens have made meaningful progress on a fundamental front, and have even started generating value, however their token suffers from mechanism design choices made in the past, and a sub par return on incentives spent.
For example, Helium is now generating ~$20M ARR (in sales), with all revenues burning the HNT token. Sales have been on a tear in 2025, however, Helium’s burn-mint token design
has capped token upside
. While burns push tokens up in price, it also means the emissions being paid out are worth more, which incentivizes selling. Not the most ideal token design choice. There is hope though. Given that tokens are programmable structures,
changing mechanics
isn’t really a hard thing to do, and we’re seeing a wide range of projects course correct.
Some tokens can and have made attempts to grow out of their token debt (by changing aspects of token economics, calibrating emissions, retroactive burns, changing their token model entirely, launching new tokens), and I expect more tokens to follow suit.
I think what
MetaDAO is doing warrants some attention
. Tokens that trade like equity (well, to some extent).
The Liquidity Adjustment To Token Valuations (Liquidity-Adjusted Valuation)
As we saw on October 10th, many token prices are propped up by opportunistic MMs (which is almost an open secret - this is how some tokens may be priced at any given point in time). When the MMs disappeared, tokens couldn’t find a floor, and the market didn’t know what price to step in and buy them. It was truly amusing to behold.
This is something we have known for a long time.
Look at ATOM as an example. Even today, the ATOM token is “worth” ~$900M and does over $60M in daily trading volume.
Yet, if you sell more than $150k of the token, you are going to materially move the price. If an asset is worth $1B but you cannot sell more than $100k without moving the price a significant amount, then is that asset really “worth” $1B?
In situations like these, valuations should be marked down based on available liquidity. There’s no two ways about this, in my opinion. Just like adjusted market cap based on calibrated supply, we should have a discount factor to adjusted market cap based on trailing 30D liquidity of a token. An easy way to ballpark this would be to apply a “liquidity haircut” to every token you analyze. You can get there by benchmarking each token’s depth-to-cap ratio against Bitcoin.
The Path Forward
I started writing this blog to create a soft framework for those navigating token markets to use. What I have realised while writing the entirety of this out, is that, we are still so early. The mature, institutional capital that we have been begging for in cycles past has arrived, and yet, not a single long term dollar from these pools of capital have touched our tokens. We’re moving towards a blended world of tokenized equity and tokens, and capital allocation is going to happen on-chain. We benefit from that. Tokens are going up against equity (and this is a good thing), and good tokens benefit from that.
Over the last 5 years, just going by the hostile regulatory outlook towards tokens, broken token distribution, broken token mechanisms, lots and lots of overhang, and no real mature capital in token markets- buying a token was an intelligent investor’s nightmare.
Buying tokens over the next decade is going to be an intelligent investor’s dream.
References
[1]
https://www.ar.ca/blog/fixing-token-valuations-arca-proposes-adjusted-market-cap-standard
[2]
Dougie
@DougieDeLuca
https://t.co/jvmikq7uy3
4:47 PM · Dec 10, 2025
·
14.5K Views
22 Replies
·
8 Reposts
·
114 Likes
[3
Taiki Maeda
@TaikiMaeda2
Expect a K-shaped recovery for crypto moving forward
4:33 PM · Nov 5, 2025
·
305K Views
120 Replies
·
81 Reposts
·
1.19K Likes
/photo/1
[4]
https://mohitpandit.substack.com/p/whats-up-with-defi-derivatives-dexs
[5]
Dougie
@DougieDeLuca
https://t.co/yRHjc88i4H
4:25 PM · Dec 3, 2025
·
21.1K Views
9 Replies
·
3 Reposts
·
77 Likes
[6]
https://defillama.com/protocol/fees/hyperliquid
[7]
https://aave.tokenlogic.xyz/revenue
[8]
Cobie
New launches (part 1) - private capture, phantom pricing
Welcome friends, been a while…
Read more
2 years ago · 661 likes · 105 comments · Cobie
[9]
https://vote.uniswapfoundation.org/proposals/93
[10]
https://caia.org/blog/2025/12/15/utility-tokens-portfolio-allocation-digital-counterparts-commodities
[11]
Felipe Montealegre
@TheiaResearch
VC AUM is $3.1T
I believe there is a credible case that MetaDAO take >1% of the market if it can overachieve on DPI and revenue per USD raised ($310B)
Total MetaDAO raised to date $35M
This is an extremely high edge bet at anything above >5% probability and I think we will win
Felipe Montealegre
@TheiaResearch
my only prediction for 2026 is that the three MetaDAO cohorts of ownership coins (2024: MetaDAO // 2025: Avici, Umbra, etc // 2026: TBD) will outperform Crypto VC results for the same periods on —
(1) DPI and TVPI versus Market Cap relative to USD invested
(2) Revenue relative
5:14 PM · Dec 20, 2025
·
6.1K Views
9 Replies
·
1 Repost
·
47 Likes
Disclaimer:
This report is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. The author is not a registered investment advisor, and all analysis is based on data sourced from third-party platforms (such as DeFiLlama and Token Terminal) which, while believed to be reliable, cannot be guaranteed for accuracy or completeness. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the risk of total loss, due to extreme volatility, regulatory shifts, and liquidity constraints. The author and associated entities may hold long or short positions in the tokens or protocols mentioned herein and may trade these assets at any time without prior notice, which may present a conflict of interest. All projections, including “Adjusted Market Cap” and “Future Net Earnings,” are forward-looking statements based on current market assumptions and are not guarantees of future performance; past performance is never indicative of future results.
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文檔 ID：
94549826-f84e-4a39-92f2-c1ad200b56b0
建立時間：
2025-12-28 21:28:46.661691
更新時間：
2025-12-28 21:28:46.661691