Grass offers an important lesson for the encryption industry: what exactly should a token represent?
This Grass case made me rethink a question: what should a token represent?
Many crypto projects follow a logic like this:
Issue points → distribute airdrops → attract users → generate activity → then tell a grand future story.
But Grass has a different twist.
Early users contributed real bandwidth resources.
These resources helped the network get through its cold start, and before the project had fully matured and before business revenue had taken shape, early participants received, through tokens, some kind of entitlement to the future value of the network.
In fact, this is a pretty straightforward logic:
Contribute real resources in exchange for a portion of future value.
At this point, a token is no longer just a “speculation chip.”
It’s more like:
early contribution → network growth → future value
a connector between the three.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that a project must be valuable just because it has “contribution-for-tokens.”
What really matters is the second half:
After the airdrop ends, points end, and subsidies decrease, will users keep using the product?
If they do, it suggests their motivation to participate may come from real needs.
If they don’t, then no matter how impressive the early data looks, it may have been mostly built through incentives.
So if you look at Grass, PONS, Blast, and similar models side by side, you get a useful judgment framework:
Don’t just study how a single project issues tokens—study what real contribution the token actually corresponds to.
Data can be packaged.
TVL can be artificially amplified through incentives.
User numbers can also be boosted by airdrops.
But the real challenge is:
Whether users are still willing to continuously do something valuable for the network even when there’s no airdrop.
That might be the most important thing to observe—whether a tokenomics model can survive the cycle.
A token isn’t value itself.
The key is whether there’s a genuine economic activity operating behind it.
This Grass case made me rethink a question: what should a token represent?
Many crypto projects follow a logic like this:
Issue points → distribute airdrops → attract users → generate activity → then tell a grand future story.
But Grass has a different twist.
Early users contributed real bandwidth resources.
These resources helped the network get through its cold start, and before the project had fully matured and before business revenue had taken shape, early participants received, through tokens, some kind of entitlement to the future value of the network.
In fact, this is a pretty straightforward logic:
Contribute real resources in exchange for a portion of future value.
At this point, a token is no longer just a “speculation chip.”
It’s more like:
early contribution → network growth → future value
a connector between the three.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that a project must be valuable just because it has “contribution-for-tokens.”
What really matters is the second half:
After the airdrop ends, points end, and subsidies decrease, will users keep using the product?
If they do, it suggests their motivation to participate may come from real needs.
If they don’t, then no matter how impressive the early data looks, it may have been mostly built through incentives.
So if you look at Grass, PONS, Blast, and similar models side by side, you get a useful judgment framework:
Don’t just study how a single project issues tokens—study what real contribution the token actually corresponds to.
Data can be packaged.
TVL can be artificially amplified through incentives.
User numbers can also be boosted by airdrops.
But the real challenge is:
Whether users are still willing to continuously do something valuable for the network even when there’s no airdrop.
That might be the most important thing to observe—whether a tokenomics model can survive the cycle.
A token isn’t value itself.
The key is whether there’s a genuine economic activity operating behind it.