VC vs Community: Where Are the Real Excess Returns?

Author: Green But Red

Compiled by: Ken, ChainCatcher

The cryptocurrency space is primarily composed of two types of tokens:

• Those backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital

• And those supported by users

Both have the potential for appreciation.

Only one side consistently determines who wins and loses, whose share gets diluted, and who gets eliminated first.

This series of articles does not compare different narratives.

It contrasts community-funded MetaDAO issuance with its VC-backed competitors to identify the true factors driving long-term token performance: structure, incentives, dilution, and who captures the upside.

1. Solomon vs. Athena: The Yield Battle

Solomon (community-funded) and Ethena (venture capital-funded) are at the intersection of the three dominant forces shaping today's crypto finance:

• The growing demand for "yield-bearing dollars"

• The quest for safer, more sustainable leverage

• The migration of on-chain bond-like yields

Both aim to create efficient digital dollars, but their design philosophies are starkly different. One is synthetic, market-driven, while the other is backed by reserves and treasury-managed.

Two Models, Two Yield Engines

Ethena uses a delta-neutral structure to build its synthetic stablecoin. By hedging futures positions, it creates an asset pegged to the dollar that can generate floating yields directly tracking derivative market financing rates.

Research from academia and industry consistently shows that these strategies can yield extremely high returns when market conditions are favorable. However, they are also highly dependent on liquidity and financing cycles. When financing dries up or negative yields occur, returns can plummet quickly—sometimes even dramatically.

In contrast, Solomon issues USDv, a reserve-backed stablecoin supported by a diversified on-chain treasury. Its yields come from a combination of staking, lending, and basis strategies, rather than perpetual futures.

The result is a lower nominal annual yield but higher yield stability. Architecturally, Solomon resembles a tokenized digital asset management platform rather than a trading engine.

Market Perception Divergence

On the surface, both protocols promise the same thing:

A globally accepted crypto dollar.

However, the market positions them quite differently:

Ethena's trading characteristics are fast, highly liquid, and yield fluctuates significantly.

Solomon's trading strategy is based on trust, capital preservation, and slow compounding.

Their long-term trajectories may ultimately answer a deeper question in the cryptocurrency market:

Will capital continue to chase the stimulus of synthetic yields, or will it turn to the patience of on-chain reserves?

Token Comparison Snapshot --- $SOLO vs. $ENA

$SOLO (Solomon)

Issue Price: $0.800

Current Price: $0.780

Performance: -2.5%

Largest Supporter: MetaDAO ($8 million)

Listing Status: DEX only (Solana)

TVL: N/A

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 100%

Market Cap / FDV: $32 million / $32 million

CMC Ranking: Unranked

$ENA (Ethena)

Issue Price: $0.78

Current Price: $0.28

Performance: -64.1%

Largest Supporters: Dragonfly, Polychain, Pantera Capital (Total $165 million)

Listing Platforms: Binance + multiple CEXs

TVL: $6.9 billion

Annual Revenue: $98 million

Circulating Supply: 51%

Market Cap / Final Price: $2.1 billion / $4.1 billion

CMC Ranking: #40

Conclusion

Ethena dominates in liquidity, exchange access, and raw trading volume—but at a cost, suffering significant capital retracement and token dilution risks post-TGE.

Meanwhile, Solomon's liquidity market size is much smaller, with limited price discovery and currently no significant revenue—but it benefits from a fully circulating supply and structurally lower reflexive pressure.

This highlights the core contradiction between venture-scale stablecoin engineering and community-scale reserve finance—and sets the tone for the upcoming comparisons.

2. Paystream vs. Kamino Finance: The Liquidity Optimizer Battle

Paystream and Kamino operate as the routing layer of DeFi, abstracting cumbersome manual operations like lending, liquidity mining, and incentive mining into streamlined automated products.

Their true advantage lies not just in higher nominal APY.

This is risk-adjusted yield:

• Venue diversification

• Dynamic rebalancing

• Automated liquidation and incentive management

Same vertical.

Completely different heavyweights.

Kamino: The Heavyweight Optimizer

Kamino is Solana's primary, on-chain native yield engine:

• Deeply integrated with money markets and LST for massive throughput

• Advanced concentrated liquidity automation

• Intentional loans tailored for treasuries, funds, and structured vaults

It not only optimizes yield—it industrializes yield. Billions of mines are now flowing into Kamino, effectively turning Solana itself into a yield processing machine.

This is what it looks like when venture-scale infrastructure reaches escape velocity.

Paystream: The Lightweight Streamer

Paystream completely disrupts the traditional architecture by embedding yield routing directly into the payment process:

• Every idle dollar in the stream is immediately deployed into carefully curated strategies.

• Lean design optimizes P2P efficiency and leveraged vaults

• Actively shifts idle base liquidity from protocols like Kamino into higher turnover matches

Paystream does not own a balance sheet; it rides on top of it.

It is not trying to become the base layer.

It aims to be a spread extractor.

Stack Dynamics and Market Realities

Unlike the stablecoin competition, this is not a winner-takes-all battle.

They can stack:

Kamino = VC-backed base layer

1. Huge TVL

2. Emission-driven growth

3. Institutional-level liquidity depth

Paystream = Community-funded routing layer

• MetaDAO growth of about $750,000

• Post-ICO retracement

• Experimental but capital-efficient design

Kamino wins with scale and gravity.

Paystream competes on capital turnover and efficiency per dollar.

Broader Signals

This combination illustrates the actual direction of DeFi yield development:

From:

• Manually flipping vaults

• Chasing emission rewards

• Static strategy sets

To:

• Middleware battles

• Strategic intelligence

• Automated risk control

• Native wallet and new bank integrations

Kamino expands the base.

Paystream sharpens the edge.

Token Comparison Snapshot --- $PAYS vs $KMNO

$PAYS (Paystream)

Issue Price: $0.075

Current Price: $0.051

Performance: -32.3%

Largest Supporter: MetaDAO ($750K)

Listing Status: DEX only (Solana)

TVL: N/A

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: ~100%

Market Cap / FDV: $0.9M / $1.7M

CMC Ranking: Unranked

$KMNO (Kamino)

Issue Price: $0.04

Current Price: $0.06

Performance: +50%

Largest Supporters: Delphi Ventures, LongHash Ventures ($6M+)

Listing Status: Binance, MEXC, Gate + DEXs

TVL: $2.53B

Annual Revenue: $42.7M

Circulating Supply: 34%

Market Cap / FDV: $221M / $647M

CMC Ranking: #155

Conclusion

$KMNO wins in scale, liquidity, revenue, and institutional adoption—but still bears the structural burden of heavy unlocking and FDV expansion risks.

$PAYS occupies a less liquid niche but benefits from:

• Full circulation

• Extremely high capital efficiency

• And the asymmetrical upside potential if embedded yield becomes a true distribution wedge

The key to this showdown is not who can win today, but whether the routing layer can ultimately extract meaningful economic benefits from the yield giants.

3. ZKLSOL vs. Starknet: The Zero-Knowledge Battle

ZKLSOL and Starknet both rely on ZK—but they apply the technology to completely different problems.

One is built for transaction anonymity.

The other for scalable computational infrastructure.

The same mathematical principles.

Completely opposite priorities.

ZKLSOL: Solana's Native Privacy Mixer

ZKLSOL provides transaction-level privacy protection directly on Solana:

• Deposits fragmented into a shielded pool

• ZK circuits prove the authenticity of transfers without exposing the sender, receiver, or amount.

• Provides mixer-style anonymity and staking-style yield mechanisms for DeFi users

Conceptually, it is a combination of Tornado Cash and Solana's native liquidity hooks—purely expressing the argument that, regardless of regulatory pressure, private capital flows will always exist.

This is not a strategy taken to scale.

It is a bet against censorship and for financial privacy.

Starknet: Scalability-First ZK Infrastructure

Starknet achieves zero-knowledge from the opposite direction:

General scalability, rather than default privacy protection.

• Validity proofs generated by Cairo for Ethereum L2 execution

• Privacy is an emerging feature of applications, not a core protocol guarantee.

• What the system hides is the computational process, not user identity.

Starknet is designed as industrial ZK infrastructure—a settlement layer that can build both private and public applications, but never presupposes anonymity.

It pursues developer freedom and throughput, rather than financial confidentiality.

Broader ZK Divides

This showdown reflects the most profound divides in today's zero-knowledge research field:

Application-Level Privacy

1. Mixers, shielded pools, strict user anonymity

2. Maximum sovereignty, maximum regulatory pressure

Infrastructure-Level Zero-Knowledge

1. Aggregation, validity proofs, correctness guarantees

2. Developer flexibility, regulatory compatibility

ZKLSOL represents a permissionless privacy layer.

Starknet represents a fully zero-knowledge proof-based L2 architecture focused on scaling Ethereum itself.

Both are "ZK".

They just address different political and economic issues.

Token Assessment: Efficiency vs. Capital Flood

$ZKLSOL, despite raising less than $1 million, has seen its price drop only 11.9% from its issue price of $0.097.

In contrast, $STRK, despite absorbing $282.5 million in venture capital (nearly 300 times its funding amount), has seen its price drop 93.6% from its issue price of $2.34.

Here are the original results:

• Streamlined capital structure retains optionality.

• Significant early sell pressure from venture capital.

• Scale advantages do not protect tokens from oversupply impacts.

For now, privacy flows outperform bloated infrastructure betas.

Token Comparison Snapshot --- $ZKLSOL vs. $STRK

$ZKLSOL

Issue Price: $0.097

Current Price: $0.085

Performance: -11.9%

Largest Supporter: MetaDAO / IDO (~$970K)

Listing Status: DEX only (Solana)

TVL: N/A

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 50%

Market Cap / FDV: $1.05M / $2.1M

CMC Ranking: Unranked

$STRK (Starknet)

Issue Price: $2.34

Current Price: $0.15

Performance: -93.59%

Largest Supporters: Paradigm, Sequoia, etc. ($282.5M)

Listing Status: Binance, Bybit + DEXs

DeFi TVL: $222.45M

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 48%

Market Cap / FDV: $545M / $1.13B

CMC Ranking: #88

Conclusion

$ZKLSOL remains a robust, streamlined privacy investment with minimal dilution pressure.

$STRK is a classic example of what happens when venture-scale capital meets weak token-side demand:

Massive infrastructure, real usage rates—and a catastrophic post-launch supply shock.

In the ZK market, capital efficiency currently trumps capital dominance.

4. Loyal vs. Arkham: Intelligence Protocol Challenge

Crypto intelligence is becoming a distinct asset class.

Not yield.

Not block space.

But raw information.

Loyal and Arkham represent two diametrically opposed approaches to monetizing on-chain intelligence:

• One views intelligence as a public utility owned by users.

• The other sees it as proprietary institutional alpha.

The same market.

Opposing power structures.

Loyal: User-Centric AI

Loyal is building on-chain conversational agents to interpret wallets, protocols, and social dynamics without routing sensitive behavior through centralized Web2 intermediaries.

• AI assistants optimized for user privacy and autonomy

• Conceptually aligned with decentralized analytics like Ritual, Bittensor, and Dune

• Intelligence is viewed as a connected public service, not a closed garden.

The stakes are simple:

If data is user-generated, then the intelligence layer built on that data should also belong to the users.

Loyal is not trying to invest more in data labeling than existing enterprises.

It seeks to surpass them in trust.

Arkham: Surveillance-Level Analysis

Arkham takes the opposite approach:

Maximum tagging, maximum attribution, maximum extraction.

• Proprietary entity graphs

• Active de-anonymization bounty markets

• Turning wallet behavior into institutional dashboards for:

1. Trading advantages

2. Compliance tools

3. Investigative intelligence

This places Arkham in the same commercial lineage as Nansen, Chainalysis, and TRM Labs—monetizing blockchain transparency as a premium surveillance product.

Loyal seeks to protect identity information,

Arkham is designed to make them collapse.

Core Research Themes in Crypto Intelligence

This showdown reveals three structural truths about the intelligence market:

The real moat is data, not models

Address labels, entity graphs, and behavioral clustering are more important than LLM wrappers.

There is always a tension between the two:

1. Intelligence as a public product → open, user-owned, anti-censorship

2. Intelligence as alpha → closed, exclusive, monetized for institutions

Token value reflects attention and trust, not always TVL.

Adoption by influential users, perceived neutrality, and revenue consistency are more important than sheer sales.

This is the little-known battlefield behind most "AI x crypto" narratives.

Market Structure Conflict

This is not just a distinction between decentralization and centralization.

It is a conflict between:

User-First Intelligence

→ Slow to monetize, hard to scale, high trust ceiling

Institutional Surveillance Intelligence

→ Fast monetization, high compliance requirements, low trust tolerance

Both will exist.

But they will attract entirely different capital and user bases.

Token Comparison Snapshot --- $LOYAL vs. $ARKM

$LOYAL (Loyal)

Issue Price: $0.250

Current Price: $0.212

Performance: -15.2%

Supporters: Community / IDO ($2.5M)

Listing Status: DEX only

TVL: N/A

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 100%

Market Cap / FDV: $2.3M / $6.09M

CMC Ranking: Unranked

$ARKM (Arkham)

Issue Price: $0.65

Current Price: $0.248

Performance: -61.85%

Supporters: Ribbit Capital, Coinbase Ventures ($14.5M)

Listing Status: Binance, Gate, Bybit + DEXs

TVL: N/A

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 23%

Market Cap / FDV: $51M / $226M

CMC Ranking: #426

Conclusion

$ARKM aims to expand institutional-level alpha and compliance intelligence—but with only 23% of the supply in circulation, it carries extremely high FDV and release excess risk.

$LOYAL remains a streamlined, fully circulating decentralized intelligence investment—lower liquidity, slower monetization, but higher structural consistency between users, data, and tokens.

This is not a debate about dashboards.

This is a war for control of the collective intelligence layer in cryptocurrency.

5. Avici vs. Plasma: The Infrastructure Victory

Web2 neobanks like Revolut and N26 encapsulate traditional banking systems in beautifully designed mobile applications.

The trend in cryptocurrency is quite the opposite.

It is not about perfecting closed systems but about reconstructing "accounts + cards + yield" as an open on-chain financial stack—where balances, treasuries, and solvency are all publicly verifiable.

This is not a disruption of user experience.

This is an inversion of infrastructure.

Stack Inversion

The operating model of traditional fintech is:

• Closed databases

• Opaque balance sheets

• Slow, permissioned settlements

• Extracting yield through obscure money market structures

Crypto neobanks disrupt every layer:

• Deposits → Tokenized dollars (USDC, USDT, USDv)

• Balance sheets → Public, real-time supply chain transparency

• Yields → DeFi protocols, not internal funding transparency

Users are no longer just holding balances.

They have auditable financial conditions.

Two prototypes emerge.

This inversion creates two distinctly different paths to the same ultimate market.

Avici: Protocol-Native Neobank

Avici starts with DeFi and builds a fintech system on top:

• On-chain governance and fund management

• Credit cards, exit mechanisms, and credit scoring as modular add-ons

• Capital formation occurs after product validation, not before.

This is a bottom-up banking model:

Protocol first, compliance second, user experience paramount.

It is optimized for:

• Capital efficiency

• Full token circulation

• Direct connection between users and vaults

Plasma: Capital-Intensive Fintech Company Transitioning to Crypto

Plasma takes the opposite path:

• First raises significant venture capital

• Has licenses, rails, and front-end distribution

• Then expands into L1 tokens, tokens, and DeFi integration

This is full-stack control:

User experience, custody, compliance, liquidity, and token issuance all under one roof—structurally similar to companies like Nexo.

It is optimized for:

• Accelerated path to mass market

• Regulatory defensibility

• Distribution dominance

The cost is:

High dilution

• Slow token supply release

• Huge FDV backlog

• True disruption: equity-like deposits

The real transformation is not cheaper effects or prettier applications.

It is this:

• Yield-bearing stablecoin deposits

• Revenue-sharing cards

• On-chain solvency visible in real-time to users, regulators, and investors

Deposits no longer operate like liabilities.

They begin to function like productive financial assets.

This will blur the lines between:

• Banking

• Asset management

• And on-chain capital markets

Strategic Questions

The focus of this debate is not on functionality.

The key is which capital structure can prevail in the long run:

• Lean, community-funded protocol financing (Avici)

• Or venture-scale, vertically integrated fintech companies (Plasma)

The former achieves compounding through user consistency.

The latter expands through distribution and regulation.

Token Comparison Snapshot --- $AVICI vs. $XPL

$AVICI (Avici)

Issue Price: $0.350

Current Price: $7.170

Performance: +1,948.7%

Supporters: IDO ($3.5M)

Listing Status: MEXC + DEXs

TVL: N/A

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 100%

Market Cap / FDV: $70.62M / $70.62M

CMC Ranking: #3651

$XPL (Plasma)

Issue Price: $0.83

Current Price: $0.21

Performance: -75.3%

Supporters: Framework Ventures, 6th Man Ventures ($75M)

Listing Status: Coinbase, Binance + CEXs

TVL: $3.1B

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 18%

Market Cap / FDV: $309M / $1.71B

CMC Ranking: #132

Conclusion

$AVICI is a textbook case of what happens when fully circulating tokens meet real user demand: price discovery is brutal, rapid, and positively reflexive.

$XPL shows the opposite trade-offs:

Massive TVL, strong distribution capabilities, regulatory positioning—but still faces severe dilution ahead, leading to weak token performance.

This is the new banking battle in cryptocurrency:

Transparent protocols vs. closed capital systems.

So far, the market has favored consistency with existing strategies over excessive hoarding.

6. Umbra vs. zkSync: Privacy vs. Scalability

Umbra and zkSync both rely on zero-knowledge cryptography, but they apply it to opposing economic goals.

• Umbra is optimized for transaction confidentiality.

• zkSync optimizes infrastructure throughput.

The same cryptographic toolbox.

Completely different outcomes.

Umbra: Pure Transaction Privacy

Umbra's design has one goal: to hide who is paying whom and how much.

• Hidden addresses, view keys, and ZK circuits

• Disrupting the identity association between sender and receiver during transactions and transfers

Conceptually, it lies between:

1. Tornado-style mixers

2. And protected DEX execution

It provides instant, default anonymity at the transaction layer—but also comes with some known trade-offs:

• Reduced user experience simplicity

• Regulatory friction

• Narrow composability

Umbra's goal is not to scale DeFi.

It seeks to maintain the flow of private capital in adverse environments.

zkSync: Scalability-First ZK Aggregation

zkSync applies ZK proofs to the opposite problem:

How to compress Ethereum at scale.

• Validity proofs efficiently verify transactions in bulk.

• By default, transparent state achieved through elastic chains and shared sequencers

The priorities of this roadmap include:

1. Throughput

2. Fee compression

3. Modularity

4. Developer tools

Privacy is not an inherent feature of the underlying architecture.

It may appear through:

• Account summaries

• Encrypted memory pools

• Or higher-level privacy modules

But these are not zkSync's primary design constraints.

zkSync hides computational costs.

It does not hide user identities.

The ZK Privacy Paradox

Academic research is clear on one point:

True aggregate-level privacy requires encrypted memory pools, shielded pools, or trusted hardware—none of which are standard configurations in today's production aggregators.

Thus, this divergence is structural:

Umbra = Narrow, direct secrecy

1. Privacy is the product

2. Everything else is secondary.

zkSync = Broad composability and scalability

1. Privacy settings are optional

2. And pushed to the upper layers

They are not substitutes.

They reflect different threat models.

Non-Converging Convergence

This is a deeper pattern prevalent in the ZK market:

• Privacy tools first pursue anonymity.

• Rollups first need throughput.

They may one day be able to interoperate—

But they will never be the same product.

Token Comparison Snapshot --- $UMBRA vs. $ZK

$UMBRA (Umbra)

Issue Price: $0.300

Current Price: $0.769

Performance: +156.3%

Supporters: IDO ($3M)

Listing Status: MEXC + DEXs (Solana)

TVL: N/A

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 30%

Market Cap / FDV: $16.7M / $47M

CMC Ranking: #3730

$ZK (zkSync)

Issue Price: $0.32

Current Price: $0.04

Performance: -87.5%

Supporters: Andreessen Horowitz, Dragonfly, Paradigm ($458M)

Listing Status: Binance, Bybit + DEXs

TVL: $37M

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 35%

Market Cap / FDV: $300M / $700M

CMC Ranking: #136

Conclusion

$UMBRA reflects what happens when a focused, conviction-driven privacy tool meets strong narrative demand: even with limited composability, the token retains asymmetric upside potential.

$ZK reflects the opposite extreme:

Massive venture capital, ambitious infrastructure scale—and a token still overshadowed by oversupply and slow demand formation.

This showdown reinforces the broader ZK theme of this article:

Capital efficiency continues to outperform capital dominance.

In the privacy market, focus trumps scale—at least for now.

7. Omnipair vs. Morpho: Lending Protocol Showdown

Omnipair and Morpho form the core of the next generation of cryptocurrency infrastructure:

Permissionless Credit

They transform DEXs and routers from simple trading venues into seamless lending and leverage channels—without banks, credit committees, or account-based gatekeeping.

This is an evolution from passive yield to native, composable leverage infrastructure.

From Compound to Modern Credit Markets

Early protocols like Compound and Aave created the first generation of on-chain banks:

• Permissionless supply and borrowing for whitelisted assets

• Risk management:

1. Over-collateralization

2. Liquidation bots

3. Replacing human credit committees with algorithmic parameters

Morpho advances this model by acting as a liquidity meta-optimizer:

• Directing funds to the most efficient trading venues (Aave, Compound, order books)

• Retaining open access for retail and institutional users.

• Maximizing capital efficiency while minimizing idle liquidity.

Morpho does not compete with money markets.

It transcends them and redefines how capital flows between them.

Omnipair: DEX as the Entry Point for Credit

Omnipair disrupts the architecture again—merging spot trading and money markets into a single platform:

• Transforming DEX positions into instant credit risk exposures

• No accounts, no permissions

• Providing composable leverage only at the point of execution

Here, the DEX itself becomes the lending interface.

This transformation is deeper than it appears:

DEXs are no longer:

• Just price discovery engines

But rather:

• The liquidity absorption valves of the entire credit system

Omnipair does not aim to dominate TVL.

It seeks to capture fee flows at the moment leverage demand arises.

Structural Summary

This showdown showcases the increasing maturity of DeFi lending:

From:

• Isolated lending pools

• Manual leverage stacking

• Fragmented risk exposures

To:

• Unified, permissionless credit infrastructure

• Where:

1. Router resources are utilized

2. DEXs activate it

3. Optimizers distribute it

Morpho achieves backbone industrialization.

Omnipair weaponizes the entry points.

Token Comparison Snapshot --- $OMFG vs. $MORPHO

$OMFG (Omnipair)

Issue Price: $0.112

Current Price: $0.549

Performance: +389.9%

Supporters: IDO ($1.11M)

Listing Status: DEXs (Solana)

TVL: Growing (active lending pools)

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 100%

Market Cap / FDV: $12M / $12M

CMC Ranking: #3767

$MORPHO (Morpho)

Issue Price: $1.90

Current Price: $1.50

Performance: -21.05%

Supporters: a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital ($69.35M)

Listing Status: Binance, OKX, Bybit, Coinbase + DEXs

TVL: $6B+

Annual Revenue: N/A

Circulating Supply: 36%

Market Cap / FDV: $458M / $1.22B

CMC Ranking: #100

Conclusion

$MORPHO dominates in scale, institutional adoption, and TVL gravity—but still bears the structural burden of FDV expansion and unlocking risks.

$OMFG, in contrast:

Is fully circulating, ultra-streamlined, and precisely positioned at the surface of DeFi's most defensible—at the moment leverage is generated.

This again confirms the financing model that runs throughout this piece:

Capital efficiency trumps capital dominance.

Why do community-funded projects continue to succeed (so far)?

Community-funded projects implement fair price discovery mechanisms from the start:

1. No multi-year lock-up periods

2. No hidden cliffs

3. No board-engineered exit liquidity

SOLOMON, Avici, Umbra, Omnipair, and other companies in this study are not designed to achieve a 10x growth in fund size.

Their purpose is to:

• Solve real user problems

• Align token holders with the protocol's economy

• Survive even without a financial oxygen mask

This structural trade-off is now reflected in the data:

Once-accelerated growth from venture capital has turned into an inherent liability at the token layer:

• Massive issuance will inevitably dilute future equity.

• Every unlocking triggers a volatility event.

• Long-term holders are forced to become counterparties to early investors.

In contrast, community-funded teams are compelled to achieve:

• Capital discipline

• Faster paths to usage

• Closer coordination between users, vaults, and tokens

So far, the market has been rewarding this constraint.