The token launch game has been ruined: Only two paths remain for tokens that will survive in the future.

Author: donn (Tze Donn Ng, investor at Brevan Howard Digital)

Edited by: TechFlow

TechFlow Summary: As coin-launch factories like Pump.fun push token creation and dumping into extreme industrialization, with retail holding periods shrinking to “seconds,” the crypto industry is undergoing a brutal cognitive clearing: creating tokens has become incredibly cheap, but building a long-lived asset worth holding for over a year has become increasingly difficult.

In a deep-dive article, Tze Donn Ng (@tzedonn), an investor at the well-known hedge fund Brevan Howard Digital (BH Digital), proposes a “Dual-Peak Model of Crypto’s Endgame” that cuts through market fog. He argues that tokens capable of weathering cycles and cementing real demand actually follow two starkly different yet highly clear paths up the mountain: on the left are pure “faith assets,” built on spiritual leaders, near-death resurrection, and fanatical communities; on the right are “cash flow assets,” featuring on-chain verifiable real profits, free from equity siphoning, and implementing mandatory buybacks and dividends.

In this article, the author not only performs a scalpel-like categorical dissection of BTC, ZEC, HYPE, PUMP, LIT, and SKY, but also poses sharp inquiries to numerous projects delaying dividends under the guise of “investing in growth,” while offering forward-looking projections on U.S. stock RWAs, on-chain casinos, and next-generation perpetual DEX tokens. TechFlow provides a full-text deep compilation, offering every secondary market investor seeking true alpha a highly penetrating framework guide.

The game of cryptocurrency token issuance has been thoroughly conquered. Pump.fun-style pump-and-dump factories have achieved high automation, with every token launch being pre-bundled by bots, while KOLs driven by FOMO have already perfected the art of secretly unloading through sidecar wallets. The average holding time for tokens now counts merely in seconds.

The entire industry has become extremely efficient at creating new tokens, but crafting an asset with lasting vitality that investors would hold for more than a year has become unprecedentedly difficult.

When pondering how tokens forge enduring, real demand, I find it highly effective to approach it through two distinct core dimensions: first, the strength of the faith supporting the asset; second, the authenticity and reliability of the economic value accumulating toward token holders.

Faith Assets: The Religion of Consensus Beyond Cash Flows

By “faith assets,” we refer to those devoid of underlying cash flows, whose value stems entirely from collective shared conviction. Their validity hinges solely on whether others firmly believe they hold value.

As a rational investor who does not blindly follow Bitcoin dogma, I buy BTC simply because I believe enough people hold an unshakable belief in it.

So, what exactly separates fleeting, short-lived Memes like WIF or BONK from BTC, the super-Meme possessing eternal durability?

Looking back historically, enduring faith assets capable of crossing cycles generally share five highly overlapping hallmark characteristics:

First, a sacred spiritual totem and god-tier leader. For faith assets, there must be a transcendent spiritual figure. BTC has Satoshi, ETH has Vitalik, SOL has Anatoly fiercely debating Ethereum minimalists on Twitter daily, and HYPE has Jeff. The leading figure of a faith asset must possess a surreal, elevated aura; whenever the token is mentioned, this name must instantly surface in your mind reflexively.

Second, surviving near-death moments and rising from the ashes. BTC survived the cataclysmic Mt. Gox collapse, ETH endured the fork and reconstruction after The DAO hack, and SOL was buried in the ruins of the FTX empire, yet all miraculously survived. HYPE was attacked by JellyJelly, its price crashed to single digits, and the entire market questioned whether it would vanish completely. Surviving these tests from the brink of death filters out all speculators, leaving only the most fervent die-hard believers, thereby forging your core, hardest consensus foundation.

Third, enabling early believers to strike it rich. Price action is the best business development (“number go up is the best BD”), and those you propel to financial freedom naturally evolve into your most zealous evangelists. BTC delivered 200x returns to early participants between 2013 and 2018, ETH saw a 40x surge from 2020 to 2022, and SOL wove its own hundred-fold myth. HYPE achieved a 30x gain on the premise of sufficient liquidity volume, distributing exceptionally generous large-cap airdrops to early believers.

Fourth, building a fanatic community with exclusive symbols and niche memes. Even with tangible wealth incentives, you still need viral, mutating memes. You need insider jargon that resonates with the community, giving members a sense of belonging to an exclusive elite club; you need people to blindly follow for a grander vision. BTC has “laser eyes,” ETH has “.eth” domains, SOL has “◎” and “.sol,” and HYPE boasts a group of active, even slightly provocative, “.hl” supporters.

Fifth, a minimalist, heart-striking one-sentence slogan. Spreading a digital religion requires an ultra-concise rallying cry. BTC’s slogan is “digital gold”; ETH’s banner is “world computer”; SOL was once dubbed the “Ethereum killer” or “decentralized Nasdaq”; and HYPE’s positioning is the “house of all finance.”

In recent markets, ZEC has partially met these standards: it survived a life-or-death test from a major shield pool vulnerability; its price skyrocketed from $40 to $1,200 within a year; and it commands highly recognizable narrative slogans like “privacy bitcoin” and “the upcoming post-quantum bitcoin.”

These traits can never be artificially faked through industrial scaling. You absolutely cannot awkwardly unilaterally declare something a religion just because you built a community. In this niche, I personally track PRL (so-called “AI bitcoin”) as an early asymmetric bet, observing whether it can gradually accumulate the above characteristics over time.

However, climbing to the peak of enduring tokens actually offers another more straightforward path.

Cash Flow Assets: Verifiable Real Economic Surplus

In the crypto world, assets generating genuine positive cash flow are exceedingly rare. This stems primarily from two reasons:

First, peddling tokens and grand narratives to the market to secure exit liquidity is far easier than groundedly building a real-world business with positive free cash flow (FCF);

Second, if a team truly possesses a cash cow operating day and night without needing external funding to expand, choosing not to issue tokens and instead pocketing all net profits directly into their own accounts saves countless compliance and governance headaches.

Highly profitable teams like DexScreener, Axiom, and Trojan have long gladly claimed 100% of commercial profits for themselves. The industry tacitly accepted this unwritten rule until the emergence of Hyperliquid completely shattered the deadlock.

Hyperliquid proved to the market with irrefutable facts: you can build a commercial empire with immense cash flow, continuously empower the token with that value, and ultimately reap market cap leverage and ecosystem results far surpassing the outcome of greedily pocketing short-term profits.

When screening this category of assets, the core must ask five key questions:

First, economic foundation: Is there persistent economic surplus and commercial profit? HYPE and PUMP are prime examples in this dimension, consistently generating $1 to $2 million in hard cash profit every day year-round. Perpetual DEX revenue tends to be more sustainable with smaller cyclical volatility, especially after introducing perpetual contracts for US stocks and other RWAs. The longevity of launchpad revenue has often been heavily questioned; the market was previously correct in assuming platforms like PONS, STONK, and GP could not sustain revenue, but PUMP continues to debunk this stereotype.

Second, data transparency: Can this economic surplus be transparently verified on-chain? The purest revenue occurs entirely on-chain, such as HYPE and PUMP, requiring minimal trust costs. Conversely, projects like GRASS generate revenue entirely off-chain (private commercial contracts with top AI labs), inevitably leading the market to question the authenticity of this revenue, although I am certain it exists.

Third, token vs. equity ownership: Does economic surplus empower the token or get siphoned by an equity company? Is a traditional equity entity quietly draining value behind the scenes? This has sparked widespread debate recently: Venice just completed equity financing while airdropping tokens for free to the community; GRASS was forced to hold an emergency town hall to clarify that all commercial value belongs to token holders.

The classic negative example is SHFL: it is indeed a highly profitable gambling operation, but all hard cash flows to a traditional equity company registered in Curaçao (which just distributed a massive $18 million cash dividend), while secondary market token holders receive nothing but a meager lottery ticket.

Fourth, value capture mechanism: Does value settle directly into the token via buybacks or dividends? This seems self-evident, but automated buybacks and dividends enforced by smart contracts (e.g., HYPE, LIT, SKY) vastly surpass discretionary buybacks reliant solely on team goodwill (like PUMP) in terms of transparency and certainty.

Fifth, trust and growth generation: If dividends are delayed to invest in business growth, is the team truly trustworthy? This model aligns most closely with traditional venture capital. Tokens like GRASS, ENA, CHIP, and CARDS fall into this quadrant. They explicitly state that all commercial value ultimately belongs to the token, but are currently reinvesting profits fully into scaling operations.

This relies heavily on moral trust in the founding team, as token holders lack legal protection umbrellas and often have no boards of directors or audited financial statements. This makes frameworks like Blockworks’ Token Transparency Framework (TTF) particularly crucial.

Demanding too early that an early-stage startup distribute all profits immediately will undoubtedly stifle its long-term growth ceiling. However, it is equally understandable that token holders prefer immediate, certain cash dividends. If holders cannot verify how retained earnings ultimately feed back to them, “investing in growth” essentially demands investors bet on both the team’s operational capability and their future integrity. Automated buybacks resolve this massive uncertainty today, and I highly applaud CHIP’s recent proactive improvements in clarifying its token value settlement logic.

In the current market, the only golden samples perfectly meeting all five stringent criteria are HYPE, LIT, PUMP, and SKY. New tokens that can check all five boxes are few and far between.

PAPER was once one of the most excellent attempts recently, originally boasting the potential to generate massive revenue. Regrettably, the team ultimately abandoned the token because its mechanism design inadvertently spawned arbitrage vulnerabilities maliciously exploited against the exchange.

I believe the cash flow token sector is undergoing a major transformation on the eve of an explosion. HYPE pioneered the paradigm of high-value appreciation tokens, while PAPER offered a glimpse into the tremendous appeal of this architecture. Imagine the valuation potential unleashed if a high-cash-flow operation like Polymarket, raking in roughly $20 million monthly, officially issues a token and deposits all profits directly into it.

In fact, the Shuffle team is internally exploring launching a purely on-chain decentralized casino. If such a system truly materializes and dedicates 90% of its net gambling proceeds daily to automatically buy back tokens on the open market, SHFL would instantly leap to the very top of this evaluation checklist. Buying projects languishing at the bottom of the list is essentially betting that their teams will eventually reform and actively advance toward the upper-right quadrant.

Looking ahead, I am closely monitoring the debut of next-generation perpetual DEX tokens, such as VAR (Variational) and XTEN (Extended). Other premium trading assets warranting continuous tracking include ARCUS, ENTROPY, and the potentially issuing POLYMARKET.

The Crypto Endgame: Two Mountains and the Terminal Evolution of Tokens

Throughout the long history of crypto development, becoming a durable hard currency capable of weathering multiple bull and bear cycles ultimately boils down to two narrow summit paths:

BTC, ZEC, and early HYPE chose to climb the left “Mountain of Faith”; meanwhile, HYPE, LIT, and PUMP are steadily marching toward the peak along the right “Mountain of Cash Flow.”

Among all digital assets, HYPE is undoubtedly the most comfortable to hold, as it operates as a high-certainty cash flow asset while simultaneously demonstrating immense potential to metamorphose into an enduring faith asset.

Conversely, the vast majority of other tokens, despite repeatedly attempting to scale peaks, inevitably plunge into the abyss. This encompasses newly launched Layer 1 tokens that have long devolved into mature market saturation games, as well as “ancient relic” DeFi tokens that lack genuine protocol revenue and fail to return value to holders.

Many concept-driven narrative speculation pieces (such as various shallow AI concept coins) repeatedly attempt to charge up the left Mountain of Faith, but under the cold gravity of reality and the laws of time, they ultimately crash heavily into the valley floor.