Cicada Capital

The global financial landscape is currently undergoing its most significant transformation in decades. As we move through 2026, the traditional dominance of fiat based reserves is being challenged by a structural shift toward hard assets.
This report provides a deep dive analysis into the 2024–2026 supercycle in Gold and Silver, examining the convergence of geopolitical tension, fiscal instability, and a fundamental realignment of global liquidity.
By synthesising macroeconomic data with shifting sovereign risk perceptions, we outline why precious metals have transitioned from simple hedges into the primary engines of modern portfolio diversification.
Executive View: The Structural Foundation
Gold remains structurally supported by three distinct and powerful forces that define the current market regime:
Investment liquidity from global financial centers.Asian physical demand combined with the strategic activities of central banks.The diversification of global reserves away from concentrated USD exposure.
It is a vital premise for this analysis that the recent market correction was entirely liquidity driven and not a result of a collapse in structural demand. Gold has formally entered a structural supercycle, driven primarily by sovereign states.
For portfolio managers and private investors alike, gold remains one of the most effective and essential diversification tools in the modern financial era.
Liquidity Structure and the Geography of Global Flows
Price acceleration phases in the current environment are primarily driven by Western financial capital. This includes United States and European exchange traded funds, COMEX positioning, and over the counter flows cleared via London.
The year 2025 delivered one of the strongest accumulation cycles in exchange traded funds on record, with 801T added globally. This data confirms that macro allocation, rather than traditional jewelry demand, has become the dominant price driver.
When real yields decline or the USD weakens, these flows act as a powerful multiplier for the upside.
Conversely, Asian demand operates under a different logic. Markets in China, India, and the Middle East absorb pullbacks via the purchase of bars, coins, and local exchange traded funds. In India, there has been a significant shift from jewelry toward investment formats, even at elevated price levels.
Meanwhile, central bank purchases remain at historically high levels, reflecting a broad diversification from USD assets and an increased awareness of sanctions risks. Together, these factors create a permanent structural floor under the market.
Geographical Flow Centers
The global infrastructure of the gold market is divided into specific hubs:
London LBMA: Functions as the primary clearing and over the counter hub.New York COMEX: The primary engine for leveraged positioning.Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Dubai: These cities represent the global centers for physical absorption.
Analysis of market volatility shows that spikes typically originate from Western positioning resets, not from Asian liquidation. It is specifically the demand from Asia and the official sector, meaning central banks, that stabilises the market during corrections.
The Dynamics of Market Corrections
When corrections occur, the pressure generally originates from redemptions in exchange traded funds, leveraged futures liquidation on the COMEX, and an increase in recycling supply triggered by higher prices. It must be emphasised that these corrections are predominantly driven by financial flows rather than a collapse in physical demand.
Geopolitical Premium and the Weak USD Path
Since the pivotal events of 2022, central bank accumulation has remained elevated, and the share of gold in global reserves has seen a consistent increase.
The freeze of $300B in Russian reserves shifted the global perception of sovereign risk, embedding a structural geopolitical premium into gold pricing. This component is regime driven and structural, not cyclical.
The Weak USD Policy Scenario
Under the current administration path, if policy tilts toward competitive USD weakening and expanded trade measures to support domestic industry, the transmission mechanism for gold becomes clear:
USD Down: Supports gold mechanically.Increased Trade Tensions: Increases the risk premium.Real Yields Under Pressure: Accelerates allocation flows into precious metals.
Confirmation signals for this scenario include a sustained downtrend in the DXY, declining 10 year real yields, renewed inflows into exchange traded funds, and an escalation in trade policy.
Under these conditions, gold could transition from its current steady uptrend into a phase of allocation driven acceleration.
The 2024–2026 Gold Rally: Four Reinforcing Pillars
Since the start of 2024, gold has jumped +155% from its $2,050 base, reaching an all-time high of $5,608 in January 2026. In 2025 alone, the asset grew by 67%, marking the strongest annual performance in 47 years, a feat not seen since 1979. This acceleration has pushed gold into a state of price discovery, where technical resistance levels are practically absent.
Pillar 1: The Debasement Trade and Long-term Fiat Depreciation
The $300B freeze of Russian reserves in 2022 became the primary catalyst for a global re-evaluation of the safety of USD denominated assets. Central banks, particularly those within the BRICS+ alliance, began a systematic diversification into physical gold, which stands as the only asset without counterparty risk. According to the Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey, 81% of central banks expect further growth in gold reserves, and 28% plan to increase their holdings within the next 12 months.
Pillar 2: Real Rates and Monetary Conditions
With 10 year Treasuries yielding approximately 4.05% and core inflation at 2.7%, real rates are hovering around the 1.3–1.6% range. Historically, gold performs with exceptional strength when real rates remain below 2%. In a sustained environment of Quantitative Easing, gold serves as a critical hedge against hidden inflation.
Pillar 3: US Fiscal Crisis and the Debt Supercycle
Federal debt has now exceeded the $38.8T mark, and the budget deficit is running at over 6% of GDP, with $1.9T projected by the CBO for the 2026 fiscal year. Deep political polarisation prevents any serious attempt at fiscal consolidation. Investors increasingly understand that this debt will be eroded via inflation and nominal growth, which implies a fundamental, long term weakness for the USD.
Pillar 4: The Trump Factor and Geopolitical Turbulence
The current administration actively pursues a policy of USD weakening to bolster domestic exports. As a result, the DXY has lost 13% over the past year. Concurrent geopolitical tensions, ranging from issues involving Greenland and Venezuela to the broader Middle East, generate a continuous and robust demand for safe haven assets. Gold remains the traditional and ultimate safe haven in global financial markets.
Central Banks and Global Demand Structure
Central bank purchases remain the core engine of this rally. Following the record breaking 1,136t in 2022, the pace of accumulation stabilised at 1,044–1,051t annually. In the 2023–2024 period, this volume was 2.2x above the pre-crisis norm of 2010–2021, which averaged 473t per year.
2025 Statistics: Net known purchases reached 863t.Third Quarter 2025 Data: Central banks bought 220t, which is 10% more year over year, and a significant 28% increase quarter over quarter despite the record high price environment.Secondary Demand Drivers: The market saw record inflows into exchange traded funds of 801t and physical bar and coin demand reaching 1,374t.Total Volume: Total global demand in 2025 exceeded 5,000t, valued at approximately $555B, an increase of 45% year over year.
Silver 2024–2026: Fundamental Drivers and Market Volatility
Silver has experienced its own powerful growth cycle in recent years. In 2025, silver prices surged by approximately 147%, reaching record levels above $120/oz amidst supply deficits and macro economic drivers. By early 2026, silver continues to show strong growth, outpacing gold in annual percentage terms with a 30% increase year to date.
The market, however, remains highly volatile, with large swings and drops of over 30% in short periods being a notable feature of the 2026 landscape.
Key Fundamental Drivers for Silver
Structural Supply Deficit: Silver has been in a supply deficit for several consecutive years, with demand significantly exceeding available supply. The Silver Institute estimates that deficits may reach tens of millions of ounces in 2026. Producкtion growth is inherently limited to 1% or 2% per year, as most silver is produced as a byproduct of other metals like gold and copper, making rapid expansion nearly impossible.Industrial Demand Growth: Silver properties of conductivity and reflectivity make it essential for electronics, sensors, artificial intelligence data centers, solar panels, and the electric vehicle industry. The solar sector alone consumes hundreds of millions of ounces annually. Unlike gold, 50–60% of silver demand is industrial, adding a long term structural factor to its price.Macro and Safe Haven Demand: Like gold, silver is viewed as a hedge during trade wars, geopolitical tensions, and periods of rate cut expectations. For example, in February 2026, silver exchange traded funds and futures surged in direct response to rising trade and geopolitical risks.Demand Structure: Investment demand remains strong with inflows into silver exchange traded funds, particularly during market turbulence. Physical demand for coins and bars remains solid into 2026 despite the high price environment.
Tokenised Silver as the New Player
Representing physical silver in the form of real world assets tradable on blockchain exchanges, tokenised silver offers significant advantages:
Fractional ownership down to 1g or 1oz.24/7 trading with higher liquidity than physical silver.Usability in decentralised finance and smart contracts.
Scenarios, Outlook, and Monitoring 2026–2027
Gold Price Framework
Base Case with 65% Probability: Consolidation between $4,800 and $5,600 with a gradual move to new highs of $5,700 to $6,300 by late 2026. Central bank and institutional demand is expected to fully offset weakness in the jewelry segment.Bull Case with 25% Probability: A geopolitical shock or US recession could drive prices toward $6,300 to $7,500 by 2026–2027.Bear Case with 10% Probability: A stronger USD, combined with sharp Federal Reserve tightening and trade war de-escalation, could lead to a correction toward $4,300 to $4,800.
Short term period of 1 to 3 months expects volatility of ±10% with support at $4,700 to $4,800 and resistance at $5,300 to $5,500. The mid term period of 6 to 18 months outlook remains a confident uptrend with targets of $5,900 to $6,500 by the end of 2026 and $6,800 to $7,800 in 2027.
Silver Price Framework
Base Case with 60% to 70% Probability: Consolidation around current levels with a gradual move to new highs. Support is found at $70 to $90/oz, with resistance at $100 to $120.Bull Case with 20% to 30% Probability: Geopolitical stress or a sharp USD drop could push silver to $150 and above in 2026–2027.Bear Case with 10% Probability: Real rate hikes and risk on sentiment could lead to a pullback toward $45 to $60/oz.
Conclusion: Navigating the Supercycle
In conclusion, the data confirms that gold and silver are no longer just cyclical commodities but have become central to a regime driven monetary reset.
The combination of inelastic supply, particularly in the silver market, and an insatiable demand from the official sector creates a unique environment of allocation driven acceleration. While short term volatility is inevitable, the long term trajectory is underpinned by a historic debt supercycle and the irreversible diversification of global sovereign wealth.
For the discerning investor, the years 2024–2026 represent a generational opportunity to secure value in an era of long term fiat depreciation.
$XAU / $XAG

Featuring insights from TokenLockr team.
The InfoFi narrative reshaped how crypto Twitter thought about content creation. Between mid-2025 and early 2026, engagement metrics became a direct income source for influencers and for a brief period it looked like a structural shift in how attention gets monetized.
That period is now over in its original form. But dismissing InfoFi as simply dead misses the more interesting question: what does the attention economy look like once the speculative layer burns off?
How the Model Took Hold
The conceptual groundwork was laid in November 2024, when Vitalik Buterin outlined a financial mechanism for rewarding valuable information. He did not invent the idea from scratch, but gave it enough structure for the market to act on it.
Kaito, Cookie3 and Galxe moved quickly, each building systems that tokenized audience attention and rewarded content performance on-chain.
For projects: the appeal was immediate. Traditional influencer marketing required upfront payment for unverifiable outcomes. InfoFi flipped that logic: pay post-factum, reward measurable engagement and let the market sort out who actually drives attention.For creators: the barrier to monetization dropped significantly. Participation did not require an established audience or brand deals. A consistent posting cadence and project coverage were enough to generate yield.
The model attracted a wave of new participants to crypto content creation, which expanded the ecosystem but also introduced structural pressure from the start.
Why the Infrastructure Faced Challenges
The core tension in InfoFi was platform-dependent. Most services built their infrastructure directly on top of the X API without meaningful diversification.
When Nikita Bier, Head of Product at X, announced the disconnection of InfoFi projects from the API on January 15, the entire category collapsed within days.
$KAITO and $COOKIE tokens dropped 54% and 63% respectively. Galxe held up better precisely because it had less direct dependence on X infrastructure.
Beyond the platform risk, the content quality problem was real and visible. CT filled with low-signal posts, project announcement reposts and engagement-optimized content that delivered nothing analytically useful. By the time the API restrictions came, much of the audience had already disengaged from the format. The infrastructure shutdown accelerated a shift that audience fatigue had already started.
This pattern is not unique to InfoFi. Yield-driven participation in any content system eventually optimizes for the metric rather than the underlying value that metric was meant to measure.
Creator Perspective: Lessons the Industry Chose to Ignore
We spoke with Antons Rasa, Content Strategist at Cicada and experienced creator, who has been working in the crypto content space long enough to watch the InfoFi cycle play out from the inside. Their read on what went wrong is direct.
Q: Where did the first InfoFi platforms go wrong?
The core mistake was how rewards were calculated. Most platforms built their models around impressions and engagement metrics, which are among the easiest numbers to manipulate. Anyone willing to game the system could climb the leaderboards and capture the largest rewards. This created two problems simultaneously: unfair distribution for legitimate creators and poor results for the projects actually paying for promotion.
Q: What did that mean for creators on the ground?
There were genuinely strong creators who earned fair rewards. But many smaller contributors who produced real value got buried. When the ranking logic favors volume and engagement above everything else, the manipulators always win. Over time, this dynamic flooded the space with bots and accounts built specifically to abuse the system. The content quality collapsed and Twitter became a feed of identical spam. That is ultimately what triggered the platform-level response from X.
Q: What should have been done differently?
The platforms should have thought from the beginning about how to filter out bots, farms and inflated accounts. Tying rewards to real KPIs plus verifiable performance indicators would have changed the incentive structure entirely. Even basic solutions, like linking accounts to wallet activity or building in fake-follower checks, would have addressed a significant portion of the problem.
These are not impossible technical challenges. The issue is that most platforms were not trying to solve them. They were optimizing for mention volume with feed presence and many of the projects paying for that coverage were satisfied with the same shallow metrics.
What this perspective makes clear is that the collapse of InfoFi was not primarily a technical failure or a platform policy decision. It was the predictable outcome of an incentive structure that nobody with the power to change it had a reason to fix.
The manipulation was visible, the damage to content quality was visible and the response from X was not a surprise. The question for whatever comes next is whether the platforms building now are solving for verification from the start, or repeating the same shortcuts under a different name.
Where Attention Capital Moves Next
The next phase of the attention economy in crypto is moving away from raw engagement and toward verifiable, on-chain reputation. Several directions are taking shape.
Discord infrastructure is attracting platforms looking for distribution that is not subject to centralized API policy. The architecture is more fragmented, which creates its own challenges, but it removes single-point dependency on a platform that can change terms without notice.
More significantly, on-chain reputation systems are gaining traction as a longer-term alternative. In an environment where AI-generated content and coordinated bot activity are increasingly difficult to detect, transparent and verifiable identity signals carry more weight. Reputation built through consistent, targeted contribution to specific ecosystems is harder to farm and more durable than engagement volume.
The shift is also visible at the individual creator level. Influencers who built value through project coverage, genuine collaborations and analytical output weathered the transition better than those whose income depended entirely on engagement farming. Targeted activity compounds over time. Volume-based farming does not.
InfoFi in its 2025 form was a proof of concept with execution flaws. The underlying premise, that attention has measurable economic value and should be compensated accordingly, remains relevant. The infrastructure to act on that premise is being rebuilt on more defensible foundations.
TokenLockr and the New Attention Infrastructure
Among the projects rebuilding the attention economy on more defensible foundations, TokenLockr represents one of the cleaner attempts to address what the first wave of InfoFi got structurally wrong.
The platform connects creators and projects through smart contract-backed campaigns, where payment is tied not to engagement volume but to verifiable performance against predefined KPIs.
In the original InfoFi model, a creator's income correlated with how much noise they could generate. On TokenLockr projects deposit tokens into a smart contract upfront, define campaign conditions and creators earn based on whether those conditions are actually met.
The guaranteed portion of the reward is released upon task completion. The bonus portion unlocks only if the project hits its token price targets and sustains them. If the KPI is not met, the bonus is not paid. There is no ambiguity, no leaderboard politics, no platform discretion. The contract executes or it does not.
This architecture solves the trust problem that quietly undermined most of the early InfoFi platforms. Projects never had reliable assurance that the content they were paying for was moving any meaningful needle.
Creators had no guarantee that their work would be compensated fairly regardless of where they landed on a ranking system.
TokenLockr replaces both uncertainties with on-chain transparency: every vesting term is visible in the campaign dashboard, every payout condition is set in advance.
— How the Reward Structure Works
The vesting structure is where TokenLockr's design diverges most sharply from anything the first InfoFi cycle produced.
Projects have three tools available:
Token locking: assets are held in the smart contract until work is verified and approved, removing any possibility of non-payment after delivery.Linear vesting: rewards are distributed over time rather than released in a single payout, keeping creator engagement sustained throughout the campaign rather than concentrated at launch.Event-based unlocks: token release is tied to specific milestones such as price targets or volume thresholds, meaning bonus rewards only flow when the project demonstrably grows.
This structure aligns creator incentives with project longevity. A creator on platform has a financial reason to care whether the project they are covering is actually growing, which changes the nature of the relationship between content and outcome.
— Reputation as Infrastructure
The creator side of the platform is built around a reputation system called TokenLockr Score, which determines a creator's tier. The four tiers: Contributor, Creator, Pro, Legend, affect campaign access, reward size and selection priority.
Every creator is audited using AI and on-chain data before being admitted to campaigns. In an environment where AI-generated content is increasingly difficult to identify, verifiable on-chain credentials carry weight as a signal in a way that follower counts never did.
The public profile system reinforces this. Every creator has a transparent record showing their general rating, current tier, completed tasks, campaign participation history and achievements. Projects evaluate creators based on this record. The application process filters by account metrics, audience relevance and tier, meaning the quality bar is enforced at the point of entry.
For projects, the value is equally direct. Payment is conditional on results. KPI-based bonuses turn creators into long-term partners. The vesting and locking mechanics keep creator incentives aligned with project health over time, not just at the moment of a campaign launch.
— Verification Over Volume
The attention economy in crypto spent much of 2025 rewarding volume because volume was measurable, even when it generated nothing of analytical or community value. The model taking shape now treats attention as something that requires verification.
Reputation built through consistent, targeted contribution is harder to manufacture and more durable as a signal. TokenLockr is one of the clearer examples of that infrastructure being built in practice.
Founder's Perspective: What the First Wave Got Wrong
We asked Maxim Moris, founder of TokenLockr, to share his perspective on where the attention economy broke down. His perspective cuts through the noise of what actually went wrong and why it was unlikely to be fixed from within.
Q: How does the reward model actually work?
The guaranteed portion of the reward is paid out after task completion. The bonus portion unlocks only if the project reaches its token price targets and sustains them. But price is just the starting point. In practice, KPI conditions can be tied to anything measurable: new exchange listings, TVL growth in a DeFi protocol, on-chain activity thresholds. The framework is flexible by design, because different projects need to measure different things.
Q: What went wrong with the first wave?
The platforms that dominated 2025 created conditions that actively rewarded manipulation. KOL farms became common: groups of 10 to 15 influencers pooling their audiences, recycling each other's content and buying cheap impressions with no real value delivered to the project. The leaderboard structure made this almost inevitable, because the incentive was to game the ranking rather than produce anything meaningful.
The same leaderboard logic also shut out micro-influencers entirely. A creator with a smaller but highly engaged audience had no realistic path to meaningful rewards when competing directly against accounts with far greater raw reach. The problem is that 100 posts from micro-influencers often drive more genuine impact than a single post from a large account. The old model had no way to capture that.
Q: Why does quality become a structural necessity?
Unique and substantive content matters beyond the immediate engagement metrics. It contributes to GEO optimization, meaning that original analysis and genuine commentary build searchable, indexable presence over time. Identical retweets and recycled announcements produce nothing durable. The shift toward verified, quality-driven contribution is not just about fairness to creators. It is about building something that compounds.
What Maxim Moris is describing is a structural recalibration. The platforms that defined InfoFi in 2025 optimized for what was easy to count. TokenLockr is built around what is harder to fake: verified contribution, sustained performance and reputation that accumulates through real work. The infrastructure is different because the assumptions underneath it are different.
Conclusion
InfoFi was a first attempt at something structurally necessary: making attention in crypto measurable and compensable. The execution was flawed because the incentive design rewarded the wrong things, the infrastructure was built on a single point of failure and nobody with influence over the system had a strong reason to fix it before it collapsed.
What comes after is being built on different assumptions:
Verifiable results over raw volumeOn-chain reputation over engagement scoresKPI-driven compensation over leaderboards
The relationship between creators and projects is shifting from transactional to something closer to a long-term partnership, where both sides have a stake in the same outcome.
The attention economy in crypto is not going away. If anything, it becomes more important as the space matures and the competition for genuine mindshare intensifies. The question was always whether the infrastructure rewarding it was honest enough to last. That infrastructure is now being rebuilt.
Everyone deserves to be rewarded for the real value they create.

Featuring insights from Coinstruct, Cicada MM & Backpack.
In the modern digital assets industry, classic token distribution models are rapidly becoming obsolete. Mechanisms focused on real value and long-term sustainability are replacing the standards of previous years.
Coinstruct founder Maxim Krasnov identifies three fundamental shifts in tokenomics architecture, clearly illustrated by launches from 2024-2026.
High Float vs Artificial Scarcity
One of the clearest departures from the standard playbook in recent launches is the deliberate choice of high initial float: releasing a significant portion of total supply into circulation at TGE instead of drip-feeding it over many years.
This approach counters the dynamics that damaged launches from 2022-2024: low-float tokens with inflated FDV figures looked attractive on day one, then spent the next 18 months in structural decline as VC and team unlocks hit a thin market.
Hyperliquid | $HYPE : The project stands apart from the trend of low-float, VC-backed tokens. With no private entities holding pre-allocated tokens, anyone interested in acquiring HYPE beyond the airdrop must buy directly on the market. This resulted in genuine price discovery from day one, with real buyers against real sellers, rather than an artificial market propped up by restricted supply.Hyperliquid completed its Genesis event in November 2024, distributing 31% of total supply to eligible users: with no allocations for private investors, VC, centralized exchanges, or market makers.Pudgy Penguins | $PENGU : The project applied a similar approach. The entire supply was minted on Solana at TGE, with 25.9% directed to the Pudgy Penguins community and another 24.12% to external communities. In total, approximately half of the supply ended up in community hands at launch.Backpack | BP: The March 23, 2026 launch pushed this logic furthest of all. The tokenomics were deliberately structured to prevent the pattern of insiders dumping on retail. No founder, executive, team member, or venture investor received a direct token allocation. All TGE tokens went to users: 240 million to points program participants and 10 million to Mad Lads NFT holders. Backpack's initial circulating supply of 25% is significantly higher than typical exchange token launches, which often fall in the 7% to 15% range.
The underlying logic across all three cases is the same: high float compresses the gap between market cap and FDV at launch, eliminates the overhang of known future sell pressure and forces price to reflect actual demand. It signals to the market that the team is not relying on token lockups to manufacture alignment, but on building a product worth holding.
Calendar-Based Vesting Problem
The standard vesting schedule in crypto is time-based - a 12-month cliff followed by linear monthly releases over 24 to 36 months. This structure was borrowed from equity compensation models. The problem is that time-based vesting rewards inertia.
Tokens unlock regardless of whether the project has shipped updates, whether TVL has grown, or whether the team has delivered on its commitments. The schedule runs no matter what.
KPI-Based Unlocks as Alternative
Milestone or KPI-based unlocks change this logic - a portion of total supply is not released until measurable progress is demonstrated.
Backpack is the latest example with clearly documented mechanics. An additional 37.5% of total supply, 375 million pre-IPO tokens, becomes available upon reaching key milestones which, according to CEO Armani Ferrante, include opening in a new region or launching a new product. Token supply expands only as Backpack hits measurable growth milestones, with all new tokens directed to users.
Projects can restrict ecosystem allocations to reaching a target TVL, a user count threshold, or a certain number of active integrations. Infrastructure protocols can tie token releases to verifiable on-chain metrics: transaction volume, uptime, or developer activity. The mechanism is flexible; what it requires from a team is the willingness to define success upfront and be held accountable for it.
An honest limitation here is governance complexity. KPI-based unlocks require clear, manipulation-resistant metrics and a reliable verification process, otherwise they become soft commitments dressed up as hard constraints. Used well, however, milestone-based unlocks turn the vesting schedule from a countdown clock into an accountability mechanism.
Connecting the Token to Capital
The token becomes something more than a governance right or a voting pass. The market has recognized that such mechanics were a promise of decentralization that was never intended to be fulfilled. Projects now understand that a token must represent real value for holders through practical utility within the project or projected cash flows, coming indirectly.
An excellent example is the token-to-equity conversion implemented in the Backpack tokenomics. By locking BP for one year, holders gain the right to a 20% equity stake in Backpack as a company.
Quote from Backpack’s documentation:
Users who stake BP for a minimum of one year can convert their tokens into Backpack company equity at a fixed ratio, representing up to 20% of the company at the time of announcement, shared among all eligible stakers.
It is likely that more projects with sustainable businesses will begin offering such an option to token holders. This is beneficial because token holders would actually get exposure to the underlying business.
Vision from the Backpack Team
We reached out to Alessio Brichese, Global Growth Lead of Backpack, to get an insider’s view on their pioneering model.
As a project that has fundamentally challenged the status quo of exchange tokenomics, their team emphasizes that the shift toward accountability is a conscious choice to protect the ecosystem’s integrity.
Backpack’s vision on alignment and transparency:
Backpack is proud to be among the first in the industry to pursue a path of full alignment: bringing users, team, and investors into the same boat, with equal access to upside if the company succeeds.
Too often, token price has failed to reflect real company performance, leaving token holders unrewarded despite the platform’s growth. Backpack’s equity conversion model changes that: users can own a direct stake in the business and exchanges are among the most profitable businesses in financial markets.
Our tokenomics were designed entirely in-house, without relying on external market makers for token allocation or other arrangements that historically have not served community interests.
We wish the best to all projects launching in this cycle especially those who built through the bear market and have chosen to reward their real supporters: the community. Fair supply distribution and transparent, protective incentives for token holders are the standard we believe this industry should hold itself to.
This commentary underscores a pivotal shift: when a team designs its own incentives rather than outsourcing them to third parties, the resulting structure tends to favor long-term holders over short-term market manipulation.
Maxim Moris's Vision, CEO of Cicada
Maxim Moris, CEO of Cicada Market Making, drawing on hands-on experience with more than 1000 tokens, adds to Krasnov's material with a hard-edged perspective from the market-making side.
Simple tokenomics no longer works:
Two to three years ago it was possible to put together a 10-row spreadsheet: 15% to the team, 20% to investors, the rest to the ecosystem and it passed. The market was different, investors were less informed, competition for listings was lower.
That no longer works. Exchanges and VCs scrutinize tokenomics. Retail does too, through the question: will there be a dump after TGE? 89% of tokens decline after a CEX listing. These are statistics we collect every day.
Tokenomics without a business model is a scheme:
It is frustrating when projects arrive with beautiful tokenomics where everything is balanced, but when asked how the project makes money, there is silence. Or when asked: why do you need a token? Silence again.
The market in 2025 to 2026 has raised the bar. Only those who clearly explain their business model and the organic role of their token can raise capital.
The $BNB case: a direct link between business and token:
The best example is BNB. Binance built in the mechanism from the start: each quarter, a percentage of exchange revenue is used to buy back and burn tokens. The business pays for its token with real money. The better the exchange performs, the greater the pressure on supply reduction.
This is not APY from thin air, it is real cash flow converted into value through deflation. If this cannot be explained in two sentences, the tokenomics are not ready.
Standard vesting is a conflict of interest:
The model of a 6-month cliff with 18 to 24 months of linear vesting came from traditional venture capital, where there was no public market in the early years. In crypto, the token trades from day one. The team and investors know the unlock date and so does the market.
Selling pressure begins in advance. This is a structural dump programmed into the document. A built-in adversary is created within the tokenomics itself. Offering standard timelines without KPI conditions today means fewer chances of success.
Public rounds as a proof of concept:
Before VCs commit capital, a project must prove its viability and demand within the industry. This should happen through a public round without a refund policy. For example, raising $100k on a launchpad.
This serves as a validation for funds that the community trusts the founders and is willing to invest their own money. It is crucial that such a round takes place on a platform without a refund mechanism, ensuring genuine commitment rather than speculative participation.
A combined model is needed:
Sound tokenomics today is a hybrid: part time-based unlock, part KPI-based. For the team the logic is straightforward: want tokens, hit the KPIs. The bonus is paid for results, not simply for staying. The team should not hold an unlimited number of tokens available for exit without confirmed progress.
For investors the logic is different. They took on risk at an early stage and deserve the opportunity to exit at a profit as price rises. A portion of tokens can unlock at price triggers. Price rises by X%, the next tranche opens. This is a fair deal: the investor took the risk, the market grew, the investor earned.
Summary, investors, exchanges, and communities have become smarter. 2021-era tokenomics in 2026 is a red flag. Projects must design tokenomics as part of the business, not as a marketing document for raising money.
While most do not understand this yet, the same mistakes keep appearing. The 89% of tokens down after listing is the result of incorrectly designed incentives.
Conclusion
The three elements described above form a transition from an economy of hope to an economy of accountability. Teams consciously place themselves in conditions where project success is inseparably linked to their own benefit, rather than being guaranteed by time. High float and KPIs signal a bet on product quality rather than technical tricks.
Such tokenomics becomes a filter that screens out projects oriented toward a quick exit at the expense of retail investors. Long-term sustainability is valued over temporary pumps. The token becomes a sophisticated financial asset with technological utility or hard economic backing comparable to traditional business equity.