There is a kind of helplessness called "your favorite project, which has a lousy Token design".

Most Tokens are launched to exit liquidity and transfer legal liability, not to decentralize. Decentralization" may not even be a consideration when releasing Tokens. You can say it out loud, because these Tokens are completely useless. All you can do is look at customer service complaints in the project forum and pledge those Tokens, which can then be used to acquire more useless customer service Tokens.

But if the market will buy anything you sell, then why not launch a Token? You can blame the VC, you can blame the greedy team, you can blame the stupid people, you can blame the Fed, and if it relaxes your soul, you can do whatever you want. At the end of the day, it's a broken incentive cycle, and if everyone is driving the cycle, then there really isn't any one group to blame.

Over time, market participants will become more astute and realize that most Tokens are just useless governance Tokens. therefore, project parties must up their game to sell useless (product) Tokens. you can no longer just launch a governance Token, you need 'Token Economics' and various air fresheners to cover up how much your shit Token is bad. In most cases, these Tokens will go to zero, thank goodness. To be fair, many of these projects have great innovative products, but that doesn't mean their Tokens are great.

Some Token economics designs worth reflecting on.

1. every shitcoin is pledged (staking), the pledge is simply used as a reward for shitcoin to incentivize you to hold shitcoin and temporarily reduce the selling pressure on shitcoin. the APY makes no sense because it is priced in shitcoin, the pledge makes the asset more illiquid by locking in supply, so it also makes the asset more reflexive in both directions. We see this clearly in the cosmos eco-projects like Osmosis and Juno. Once demand and prices start to collapse, then massive unlocking can lead to massive retractions. Pledging is a double-edged sword.
2. every shitcoin has liquidity mining, paying people to use your product is great for early traction, but that traction is transient, crypto natives are gold diggers and once you run out of money, they don't need you. over 99% of the agreements pay out more in rewards than they receive in revenue, and due to continued selling pressure, these tokens will also keep down, which is why DeFi Token's chart looks to be going to zero.
3. The Solana ecosystem has a lot of low liquidity, high VC allocation projects, and due to the low liquidity, insiders can only lock in their earnings by hedging the crazy FDV and then dumping the tokens to takers.
4. Allocating Sushiswap fees to Token holders reduces the resources of the team, which has minimal ownership of the protocol from the start, so the team has little incentive to focus on the project.
5. OHM tied and crazy APY created an inverse monster, which led to excessive speculation and subsequent collapse due to massive inflation (-3, -3).
6. Terra stablecoin burning/minting mechanism and Anchor reserves, this topic has been discussed in tons of articles, so you can read them for more nuances. Basically, you can only get people to use your stablecoin for a limited time by paying for it, and if it doesn't attract people before the money runs out, then it's probably cooked.
7. Axie's SLP model. If no new money is flowing into the game to support the price, then an unlimited supply of multiplying coins won't work.
8. Airdrop. Due to the wide distribution and high level of interest, airdrop Tokens will pull up quickly at first, but then slowly go to zero because it's free money and everyone will pull it off the table after a certain point, leading to selling pressure and ugly charts.
9. Paraswap Anti-Witch Attack. It turns out that pissing off users is not a good marketing strategy. Excessive witch filtering can have the side effect of alienating users as well as overly narrowing the distribution. Token distribution is your best marketing tool, you want people to talk about your shitcoin, if you delete everyone's airdrop, then no one will talk about it.
10. Solidly ve (3,3) and the Toekn distribution. the game theory of SOLID Toekn distribution led to the mercenary project launching with the crazy APY because of the AC exit and we didn't get to see the ve (3,3) mechanism fully work, but most likely it would have been like OHM with a very reflexive parabolic move before buying interest ran out.

There is not enough nuance in any of these Toekn analyses for each to use its own sub-stack. Yes, I have an aversion to most of the token models in the space, but no solutions are offered and I'm sure I've forgotten some, either way I hope this is a good overview.

While some projects have used one or more of these models above, they have still been successful and there are other improved Token models that are worth looking at in depth. But in general, Token incentives are broken, and as long as tokens continue to dilute supply without improving profitability, then their fate is ultimately to go to zero. If your protocol needs a token to run, then it may not be able to escape death. Tokens are designed to enhance the user's incentives and experience, not the entire experience.

We are still in the early stages of Token design and experimentation, and without these examples, the industry will not progress. There are more Tokens to zero in on, more failed Tokens to release, and more to learn. The crypto industry will continue to evolve, and one last thing.

Not everything needs to be released as a Token.