We’ve spent a decade arguing about categories. DeFi. DePIN. DAOs. RWAs. Infrastructure. Every few months someone draws new boxes and insists—again—that this time we’ve mapped the terrain.

None of it matters.

There’s one fact that explains everything worth paying attention to in crypto:

Tokens coordinate scarce resources under adversarial conditions.

That’s the whole game. Everything else is just different substrates running the same pattern.

Look at what actually succeeds:

Infrastructure tokens coordinate the network’s own machinery. Validators stake capital, produce blocks, earn rewards. The system bootstraps and maintains itself.

DeFi tokens coordinate financial risk and capital allocation. Liquidity providers front capital, borrowers take leverage, liquidators enforce solvency. The market keeps itself honest.

TCOCS (Token-Coordinated Off-Chain Systems) coordinate everything outside the chain: physical hardware, compute, bandwidth, storage, mobility, human labor, data collection, location proofs, reputation.

This last category is where we’ve been blurry. We treat DAOs, DePIN, and other off-chain coordination systems as different species. They’re not. A validator set, a mesh network of hotspots, and a collective of open-source maintainers are all running the same loop:

Stake something. Do verifiable work. Get rewarded. Repeat.

Only the substrate changes. The pattern doesn’t.

TCOCS forces the real question; maybe the only question that matters:

What off-chain resource are you coordinating, and why does blockchain coordination beat the existing alternative?

Not "is this decentralized?"

Not "does this need a token?"

Just: what resource, what coordination failure, why this mechanism?

Most projects can’t answer that cleanly. They bolt on tokens because it vibes like crypto, or because investors expect it, or because they assume composability is magic even when there’s nothing worth composing.

But when the answer is clear, when you’re dealing with a real resource, real adversarial dynamics, and a real coordination failure that no centralized actor can solve at scale—then TCOCS stops being a category and becomes foundational infrastructure.

The next decade won’t be about new acronyms. It’ll be about pushing this pattern into every domain where coordination breaks down. Crypto is not about decentralization for its own sake; it’s about coordinating real-world resources with the same elegance DeFi brought to capital markets.

Not because it’s ideological. Because the old ways keep failing, and now we have another tool.