Hey it’s Marc.
For fifteen years, the way to bet on crypto infrastructure was to buy the token.
That was the industry’s founding financial promise, formalized in 2016 as the fat protocol thesis: applications would commoditize, protocols would capture the value, and the token was your claim on the protocol. If the network won, you won.
That deal is dead. Today, I’m going to show you why.
June should have been the month that promise paid out.
Tokenized equities traded a record $3.86 billion onchain in June, up 145% from May, according to CoinDesk Data.
The trigger was SpaceX’s June 12 Nasdaq listing, a $75 billion raise, with tokenized SpaceX shares going live on Solana the same day. Tokenized SPCX alone traded $1.19 billion, roughly 31% of all tokenized equity volume that month. Solana settled about 96% of everything. On June 23, tokenized assets passed memecoins as a share of Solana’s daily spot volume for the first time. Active addresses are retesting yearly highs. Throughput is approaching an all-time record.
And SOL trades around $77, as of July 2026. Down half over twelve months, 73% below its peak, and in mid-June it touched its lowest level since December 2023.
The most-used network in crypto’s fastest-growing category is priced like a network in decline.
The consensus explanation is macro: bear market, ETF outflows, be patient.
My read is different. What broke this cycle is the link itself. Value creation left the token layer and moved to the equity layer, to the companies building the plumbing. And those companies don’t have tokens. Follow where money actually changed hands:
Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge in February 2025.
Mastercard signed a definitive agreement in March to acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, after Coinbase came close to buying it for around $2 billion before that deal fell apart in November.
Kraken agreed in December 2025 to acquire Backed Finance, the issuer behind xStocks, ahead of its own planned 2026 IPO.
Securitize is listing its own common stock on the NYSE and tokenizing it on Solana on day one. Not one of these value events happened in a token. Every one happened in equity.
The reason is boring and legal: Equity is an enforceable claim on cash flows. Most tokens are not.
When $3.86 billion of tokenized stock changes hands on Solana, the network earns fractions of a cent per transaction, because near-zero fees are the product. The mint-and-redeem spreads, custody fees, and market-making profits land in the income statements of issuers, brokers, and exchanges. The token gets the headline. The company gets the revenue.
Ethereum just provided the dissection. Robinhood launched its own chain on July 1, an Ethereum layer-2 built on Arbitrum’s stack, serving tokenized stocks to customers in more than 120 countries. Within a week it processed $568 million in daily trading volume. Then Lorenzo Valente at ARK Invest published the revenue anatomy: of roughly $816,000 the chain has grossed since inception, Robinhood keeps about 89%, Arbitrum takes 10%, and Ethereum earned $1,538 for settlement. Fifteen hundred dollars, or 0.15%, for securing the whole thing. Robinhood was never going to build anywhere else; it wanted to own its stack and be the landlord rather than the tenant. Ethereum won the deal on merit and priced its settlement, the most valuable service in crypto, at marginal cost. The fat protocol thesis said the base layer captures the value. Here is the base layer capturing $1,538. And the instrument that captures Robinhood Chain’s success does exist. It trades on Nasdaq under HOOD. There is no Robinhood Chain token, and nobody misses it.
And the internet already ran this experiment. TCP/IP, HTTP, and SMTP created more value than any technologies in history and captured none of it. The value went to what was built on top: Google, Amazon, Netflix, Airbnb. In the late 1990s, carriers laid over 80 million miles of fiber to own the internet’s growth, and George Gilder, the era’s loudest prophet, promised that in a trillion-dollar market "there will be no loser." Within a year his two champion carriers were bankrupt. More than $500 billion evaporated and 216 telecom companies failed, while 85% of the fiber still sat dark in 2005. That dark fiber later made bandwidth cheap enough for YouTube to exist. The plumbing created the value. The companies on top captured it. Crypto’s layer-1s are rerunning the telecom trade.
Let’s look at Ethereum. Robinhood launched its own chain on July 1, built on Arbitrum (an Ethereum Layer 2), serving tokenized stocks in more than 120 countries. Two weeks after launch it processed $568 million in daily volume, flipping Ethereum. Now look at the revenue split: of the roughly $816,000 the chain has grossed, Robinhood keeps about 89%, Arbitrum takes 10%, and Ethereum earned $1,538 for settlement. The fat protocol thesis said the base layer captures the value. Here is the base layer capturing $1,538. And the upside instrument exists. It trades on Nasdaq under HOOD. There is no Robinhood Chain token, and nobody misses it.
Here is the harsher version, and I’ll say it plainly:
A meaningful share of the last decade’s token projects could not have raised money in traditional markets: No revenue, no enforceable claim on future revenue, no credible plan to produce either.
In equity markets, that company does not get funded. In crypto it got funded at scale, because the token solved a problem no security ever could: it let early investors exit without the company ever having to work.
Binance Research documented this in 2024. Tokens launched with an average of just 13% of supply circulating, with roughly $155 billion of locked supply scheduled to hit the market between 2024 and 2030. Venture funds bought at private prices and sold into unregulated secondary markets after one-year cliffs, instead of the seven-to-ten-year wait equity demands. The counterparty? Retail. Even the venture side admits it: Haseeb Qureshi at Dragonfly has described price discovery in these launches as happening in a private market that is “rigged, delusional, or both.” None of this required fraud. That is what makes it worse. The structure was disclosed, legal, and it paid people to build nothing.
Let’s look at Celestia (TIA). TIA launched with inflation starting at 8% a year and peaked near $20.85 in February 2024. Then, on October 30, 2024, a single cliff unlock released 176 million tokens, nearly doubling the circulating supply, with early backers selling over the counter while buyers hedged in perpetuals, and roughly 409 million more tokens vesting through early 2027. The token now trades below $0.40, about 98% off its high. And here is the usage those emissions were supposedly tied to: over one recent 24-hour stretch, the entire network recorded $89 in fees. Not $89 million. Eighty-nine dollars, against a market cap near $370 million. The token raised $155 million for the project. Keeping any of it was never part of the design.
And Celestia is not the outlier. It is the pattern. Polkadot was a top-five asset in 2021, valued above $50 billion, and every cycle the pitch was the same: one more leg higher. On June 28 it made a fresh all-time low of $0.7993, six years after launch. DOT trades below $0.90 today, roughly 98% under its peak and beneath its 2020 listing price. And this happened after the project did everything holders asked for: it hard-capped supply at 2.1 billion DOT and cut issuance by more than half in March, landed a Nasdaq-listed spot ETF the same month, and still ranks among the top blockchains by developer activity. The fundamentals improved. The price made new lows anyway, because the price was never attached to the fundamentals in the first place.
Solana is the strongest counterexample available, which is what makes June so telling. SOL has real fee capture, real staking economics, and the deepest usage in the industry, and it still decoupled. If the best token can’t convert record usage into price, the weaker ones have no argument at all.
Which leaves an uncomfortable asymmetry:
The layer public investors can buy does not capture the value. The layer that captures the value, public investors mostly cannot buy, because it sits in private companies getting absorbed by Stripe, Mastercard, and Kraken before a prospectus ever prints.
… unless they IPO, right? Crypto companies raised $3.4 billion through IPOs in 2025, and a 2026 pipeline formed behind them. Then the the public market audit ran through them too: Gemini is down 89% from its opening trade, BitGo 77%, Bullish 71%. The listings with recurring, usage-linked revenue held: Circle still trades roughly 110% above its offer price, Figure about 24% above. Equity is not a magic wrapper. It is a claim on cash flows, and where the cash flows are real, the claim held through the worst crypto tape since 2022.
And that is what this bear market is actually doing. A drawdown is an audit. It separates assets that were claims on something from assets that were claims on attention, and it does not respect asset-class boundaries: it repriced exchange stocks levered to trading volume almost as brutally as it repriced tokens. Ten years of crypto capital formation is getting marked to market, and the marks are landing exactly where the legal claims on real cash flows are.
Where I could be wrong: tokens are programmable claims, and claims can be rewritten. Fee switches, buybacks, and revenue distribution could re-couple usage and price, and Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade plus a real regulatory framework might do exactly that. Haseeb Qureshi at Dragonfly has also shown that 13% launch floats were normal last cycle too, so the structure isn’t new; what may be new is simply that the marginal buyer stopped showing up. And it’s possible this is just beta. Tokenized RWAs are up 40% year-to-date while the broader crypto market fell about 20%, so the divergence may compress when macro turns. My bet is it doesn’t compress much, because the divergence is contractual, not cyclical.
The fat protocol thesis said value would pool at the protocol and the token was your share of it. What this cycle shows is that value pools at whoever holds the legal claim, and the legal claims were never in the token. They were on cap tables the whole time.
That’s all for now, folks.
– Marc
