This article is based on my personal experience as well as research from other founders on social networks. There may be things that I have not realized in my current position, so this article will be 'in my opinion'.

Many people argue that most crypto startups don’t actually need a token to run their business. However, when we talk about how a crypto project can generate income, there are three main categories:

(Note: This does not include raising funds from seed/private rounds or selling your token through a public IDO.)

This is the most solid and meaningful source of income. If a team can survive purely on real product revenue, they essentially never need a token. It reflects true product-market fit and creates long-term stability.

Ex: Top DEXes like Uniswap, Pancakeswap, Raydium... are models for protocols whose main income comes from real revenue.

Many projects launch tokens on platforms like Clanker, Virtuals, Pumpfun... or other launchpads. These platforms often share a significant portion of their 1% trading fee with the project.

If the team captures a hot narrative and builds strong hype, the stream of trading fees can outperform the small real revenue from point 1 — especially in the early stage.

Launching a token also brings in the speculative “degen” crowd. While many will only trade the token, a portion will actually try the product, and some may stay as real long-term users if the product is good enough.

Ex: most of the AI ​​Agent projects on Virtuals have very little real revenue from the protocol, their main revenue comes from the hype of AI Agents tokens and they collect a lot of trading fees.

This is the low-quality approach. Some teams launch a token mostly to profit from their team allocation or manipulate early prices and sell to inexperienced buyers. This model never lasts — everyone ends up dumping on each other, and the project has no true intention of building for the long run.

Bottom Line

For early-stage teams — especially small teams without much attention — launching a token can be useful for marketing, building an initial community, and generating some fee-based income while real product revenue is still weak.

If the team executes well, real revenue will eventually grow and help support the token’s long-term value.

On the other hand, if a project already has strong backing (for example, those supported by Base), then having a token or not matters much less because they already have enough runway to operate for years.

The most important thing is to avoid projects that rely on the low-quality behavior described in point 3.

This article is based on my personal experience as well as research from other founders on social networks. There may be things that I have not realized in my current position, so this article will be 'in my opinion'.

Many people argue that most crypto startups don’t actually need a token to run their business. However, when we talk about how a crypto project can generate income, there are three main categories:

(Note: This does not include raising funds from seed/private rounds or selling your token through a public IDO.)

This is the most solid and meaningful source of income. If a team can survive purely on real product revenue, they essentially never need a token. It reflects true product-market fit and creates long-term stability.

Ex: Top DEXes like Uniswap, Pancakeswap, Raydium... are models for protocols whose main income comes from real revenue.

Many projects launch tokens on platforms like Clanker, Virtuals, Pumpfun... or other launchpads. These platforms often share a significant portion of their 1% trading fee with the project.

If the team captures a hot narrative and builds strong hype, the stream of trading fees can outperform the small real revenue from point 1 — especially in the early stage.

Launching a token also brings in the speculative “degen” crowd. While many will only trade the token, a portion will actually try the product, and some may stay as real long-term users if the product is good enough.

Ex: most of the AI ​​Agent projects on Virtuals have very little real revenue from the protocol, their main revenue comes from the hype of AI Agents tokens and they collect a lot of trading fees.

This is the low-quality approach. Some teams launch a token mostly to profit from their team allocation or manipulate early prices and sell to inexperienced buyers. This model never lasts — everyone ends up dumping on each other, and the project has no true intention of building for the long run.

Bottom Line

For early-stage teams — especially small teams without much attention — launching a token can be useful for marketing, building an initial community, and generating some fee-based income while real product revenue is still weak.

If the team executes well, real revenue will eventually grow and help support the token’s long-term value.

On the other hand, if a project already has strong backing (for example, those supported by Base), then having a token or not matters much less because they already have enough runway to operate for years.

The most important thing is to avoid projects that rely on the low-quality behavior described in point 3.