The crypto token launch game has been fully cracked; during this speculative retreat phase, where average holding times have shrunk to just seconds, only two types of tokens can survive the cycle and become lasting assets.
Author: Donn (Tze Donn Ng, Investor at Brevan Howard Digital)
Compiled by DeepChain TechFlow
DeepChaohao Summary: Amid the extreme industrialization of token creation and selling processes on platforms like Pump.fun, where retail holding times have plummeted to mere seconds, the crypto industry is undergoing a brutal cognitive cleanse: creating tokens has become incredibly cheap, but building a long-term asset worth holding for over a year is becoming increasingly difficult.
Investor Tze Donn Ng (@tzedonn) from the renowned hedge fund Brevan Howard Digital (BH Digital) has published an in-depth long-form article introducing the "Crypto Endgame Bimodal Model," a framework to cut through market fog. He argues that tokens capable of enduring cycles and cultivating genuine demand follow two distinctly different yet highly clear pathways: on the left, pure "faith assets" anchored by spiritual leaders, near-death rebirths, and fervent communities; on the right, "cash flow assets" characterized by on-chain verifiable profits, elimination of equity dilution, and mandatory buybacks and dividends.
In this article, the author not only conducts a precise, surgical analysis of BTC, ZEC, HYPE, PUMP, LIT, and SKY, but also raises sharp questions about numerous projects that delay dividends under the guise of “investing in growth,” while offering forward-looking projections on美股 RWA, on-chain casinos, and the next generation of perpetual DEX tokens. DeepTide TechFlow has provided a comprehensive translation of this piece, offering every investor seeking genuine alpha in the secondary market a highly insightful framework guide.
The token launch game in cryptocurrency has been completely cracked. Pump.fun-style pump-and-dump factories have become highly automated, with every token release instantly bundled by bots, while KOLs, fearful of missing out, have perfected the art of secretly dumping through side wallets. The average holding time for tokens is now measured in seconds.
The industry has become extremely efficient at creating new tokens, but it has never been more difficult to create an asset with lasting vitality that investors would want to hold for more than a year.
When considering how tokens can generate lasting, genuine demand, I find it highly effective to examine them through two distinct core dimensions: the strength of the belief supporting the asset, and whether the economic value accruing to token holders is authentic and reliable.
Belief Assets: A Consensus Religion Beyond Cash Flow
So-called faith assets are those with no underlying cash flows, whose value derives entirely from collective belief. Their value exists only if others believe they have value.
As a rational investor who does not blindly follow Bitcoin dogma, I bought BTC simply because I believe enough people hold an unshakable belief in it.
However, what exactly distinguishes fleeting, short-lived memes like WIF or BONK from super memes like BTC, which possess enduring permanence?
Looking back at history, enduring assets that have weathered multiple cycles commonly share the following five highly overlapping hallmark characteristics:
First, possess a sacred spiritual totem and a divine leader. For a faith-based asset, there must be a spiritual leader who transcends the mundane. BTC has Nakamoto, ETH has Vitalik, SOL has Anatoly, who daily engages in fierce debates on Twitter with Ethereum minimalists, and HYPE has Jeff. The leader of a faith-based asset must embody an otherworldly sense of grandeur—whenever the token is mentioned, that name must instantly and reflexively surface in your mind.
Second, having survived near-death experiences and been reborn from the ashes. BTC endured the catastrophic collapse of Mt. Gox, ETH weathered the split and reconstruction following The DAO incident, and SOL narrowly escaped the ruins of FTX’s downfall—yet all of them survived against all odds. HYPE faced the JellyJelly attack, with its price plummeting to single digits, prompting the entire market to question whether it would vanish entirely. Surviving such a brush with death filters out all speculative traders, leaving only the most fervent loyalists—and forging the strongest, most resilient foundation of consensus.
Third, enable early believers to achieve massive wealth. Price appreciation is the best business development (number go up is the best BD), and those you lead to financial freedom will naturally become your most passionate advocates. BTC delivered 200x returns to early participants between 2013 and 2018, ETH achieved a 40x surge from 2020 to 2022, and SOL similarly executed a 100x miracle. HYPE achieved a 30x increase while maintaining sufficient liquidity and distributed highly lucrative airdrops to its early supporters.
Fourth, build a passionate community with its own unique symbol and insider memes. Even with tangible financial incentives, you still need memes capable of viral spread. You need insider jargon that the community understands intuitively, fostering a sense of belonging to an exclusive elite club; you need people to blindly follow a larger vision. BTC has “laser eyes,” ETH has “.eth” domains, SOL has “◎” and “.sol,” and HYPE has its active, even slightly provocative, “.hl” supporters.
Fifth, a minimalist yet powerful one-liner slogan. Spreading a digital religion requires an extremely concise rallying cry. BTC’s slogan is “Digital Gold”; ETH’s banner is “The World Computer”; SOL was once called “Ethereum Killer” or “Decentralized Nasdaq”; and HYPE’s positioning is “The House of All Finance.”
In recent markets, ZEC (Zcash) has come close to meeting the above criteria: it faced a life-or-death test due to a major vulnerability in its shielded pool; its price surged from $40 to $1,200 within a year; and it has distinctive narratives such as “the privacy version of Bitcoin” and “the upcoming quantum-resistant Bitcoin.”
These characteristics are impossible to artificially industrialize. You cannot awkwardly unilaterally declare something a religion simply because you built a community. In this space, I’m personally most interested in PRL (so-called “AI Bitcoin”) and view it as an early asymmetric bet, watching to see if it can gradually develop the traits mentioned above.
However, there is a more straightforward path to reaching the peak of enduring tokens.
Cash flow assets: Verifiable real economic surplus
In the crypto world, assets that generate genuine positive cash flow are extremely rare. There are two main reasons for this:
First, it is far easier to sell tokens and grand narratives to extract liquidity than to build a real business with positive free cash flow (FCF).
Second, if the team truly had a cash-generating business running 24/7 with no need for external funding to expand, choosing not to issue a token and instead keeping all net profits directly in their own pockets would save them from endless compliance and governance headaches.
Teams with extremely lucrative profits, such as DexScreener, Axiom, and Trojan, have long been content to claim 100% of their commercial profits for themselves. The entire industry has tacitly accepted this unwritten rule until Hyperliquid emerged and completely shattered the status quo.
Hyperliquid has proven to the market with undeniable facts: you can build a business empire with extremely strong cash flow, continuously empower the token with value, and achieve market capitalization leverage and ecosystem outcomes that far surpass the short-term gains of pocketing immediate profits for personal benefit.
When screening this type of asset, you must critically ask the following five key questions:
First, the economic foundation: Do persistent economic surpluses and business profits exist? HYPE and PUMP serve as the best examples in this dimension, consistently generating real profits of $1 million to $2 million daily throughout the year. Revenue from perpetual contract DEXs tends to be more sustainable and less cyclical, especially after introducing RWA stock perpetual contracts such as those from U.S. equities. The sustainability of revenue from launchpad platforms is often questioned; the market was correct in concluding that platforms like PONS, STONK, and GP could not sustain their income, yet PUMP continues to disprove this stereotype.
Second, data transparency: Can these economic surpluses be transparently verified on-chain? The purest, most unimpeachable revenues are those that occur entirely on-chain, such as HYPE and PUMP, as they require minimal trust assumptions. In contrast, projects like GRASS generate all their revenue off-chain (through private commercial agreements with leading AI labs), and the market naturally questions the authenticity of such income—even though I am confident it is real.
Third, token vs. equity ownership: Who ultimately captures the economic surplus—the tokens or the equity-held corporation? Is there a traditional equity entity quietly siphoning off value behind the scenes? This has sparked widespread debate recently: Venice recently completed a funding round through equity while freely distributing tokens to the community; GRASS was also forced to hold an urgent communication session to clarify that all commercial value belongs to token holders.
The most classic cautionary example is SHFL: it is indeed a highly profitable gambling business, but all the real money flows to a traditional equity company registered in Curaçao, which just distributed a massive $18 million cash dividend—while token holders on the secondary market received nothing more than a token chance to win a prize.
Fourth, value capture mechanism: Is value directly channeled to the token through buybacks or dividends? This is self-evident, but automated buybacks and dividends enforced via smart contracts (e.g., HYPE, LIT, SKY) offer far greater transparency and certainty than discretionary buybacks entirely dependent on the team’s subjective judgment (e.g., PUMP).
Fifth, the trust and generational growth quadrant: If dividends are deferred to reinvest in business growth, is the team truly trustworthy? This model most closely resembles traditional venture capital. Tokens such as GRASS, ENA, CHIP, and CARDS fall into this quadrant. They explicitly state that all business value ultimately belongs to token holders, but are currently reinvesting all profits into scaling operations.
This heavily relies on moral trust in the project team, as token holders often have no legal protections and may not even have a board of directors or audited financial statements. For this reason, initiatives like the Token Transparency Framework (TTF) introduced by Blockworks are especially important.
Demanding that an early-stage startup distribute all its profits immediately will undoubtedly stifle its long-term growth potential. However, it is equally understandable that token holders prefer the certainty of immediate cash dividends. If holders cannot be confident that retained earnings will ultimately benefit them, "investing in growth" essentially requires investors to bet not only on the team’s operational capabilities but also on their future integrity. Automated buybacks today resolve this significant uncertainty, and I greatly appreciate CHIP’s recent positive improvements in clarifying the logic of token value accumulation.
In today’s market, the only gold-standard assets that simultaneously meet all five stringent criteria are HYPE, LIT, PUMP, and SKY. New tokens that check all five boxes are extremely rare.
PAPER was one of the most promising recent attempts, originally fully capable of generating substantial revenue, but unfortunately, the team abandoned the token because its mechanism design inadvertently created arbitrage vulnerabilities that enabled malicious attacks on the exchange.
I believe the cash flow token sector is on the brink of a transformative breakthrough. HYPE pioneered the paradigm of high-value utility tokens, while PAPER revealed the immense appeal of this architecture. Imagine if a high-cash-flow business like Polymarket—generating approximately $20 million in monthly profits—officially launched a token and allocated all its profits directly to token holders. The valuation potential unleashed would be extraordinary.
In fact, the Shuffle team has recently been internally exploring the launch of a purely on-chain decentralized casino. If such a system were truly implemented and 90% of daily net gambling revenues were automatically used to repurchase tokens on the open market, SHFL would instantly rise to the top of the entire valuation ranking. Buying projects at the bottom of the list essentially amounts to betting that their teams will fundamentally transform and proactively move toward the upper right quadrant.
Looking ahead, I am closely monitoring the emergence of next-generation perpetuals DEX tokens, such as VAR (Variational) and XTEN (Extended). Other high-quality trading targets worth continued tracking include ARCUS, ENTROPY, and the potential future token launch from POLYMARKET.
The End of Cryptocurrency: Two Mountains and the Final Evolution of Tokens
Throughout the long history of cryptocurrency development, becoming a durable hard currency capable of enduring multiple bull and bear cycles ultimately comes down to only two narrow paths to the top:
BTC, ZEC, and early HYPE chose to scale the "Mountain of Faith" on the left, while HYPE, LIT, and PUMP are steadily ascending the "Mountain of Cash Flow" on the right.
Among all digital assets, HYPE offers the most comfortable holding experience, as it simultaneously generates high-certainty cash flow while demonstrating significant potential to evolve into a lasting belief asset.
In contrast, the vast majority of other tokens, despite repeatedly attempting to reach new highs, inevitably plummet into obscurity. This includes both legacy Layer 1 blockchain tokens that have become part of a zero-sum game with excess supply, as well as ancient DeFi tokens that generate no real protocol revenue and certainly offer no value back to holders.
Many purely concept-driven speculative assets (such as various shallow AI-themed coins) attempt to repeatedly climb the mountain of belief on the left, but before the cold forces of gravity and time, they ultimately crash back down to the valley.
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