How should those who build and maintain decentralized systems be compensated, and how can we ensure their incentives remain tightly coupled to the long-term health of their organizations? This challenge, which we call the Alignment Trilemma, has long shaped institutional design. But in traditional systems, the tradeoffs are structural and persistent. As a firm scales, it almost inevitably deprioritizes one of these groups—and it’s rarely the teams. Decentralized systems offer an opportunity to

The MetaDEX continuously rewards active participants, aligning liquidity providers and tokenholders around the DEX’s future success. Meanwhile, a programmatic, immutable emissions schedule prevents reckless over‑issuance, and the built‑in cushion against downturns averts catastrophic liquidity collapses. In this way, “overpaying” in emissions doesn’t become a liability; it becomes a rational investment in the protocol’s long‑term trajectory.

A new decentralized onchain economy is being created, supported by blockchains and decentralized protocols that unlock new and competitive financial and organizational structures. A new paradigm requires new tools to consistently measure and evaluate these systems. In Part 1: On DEXs, Dromos examined the evolution of decentralized exchanges, demonstrating how models to date have not effectively solved for the DEX Trilemma. In Part 2: On the Token, Dromos showed how the MetaDEX model solves fo...