Chainfeeds Guide:
In the crypto field, token incentives are not just a marketing tactic, but a structured growth financial model that achieves low-cost user acquisition and continuous growth by financializing user behavior.
Article Source:
https://x.com/lzminsky/status/1912123502515061234
Article Author:
Lauris
Perspective:
Lauris: In the traditional internet, CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is viewed as an accounting metric, meaning "how much money is spent to acquire a user"; but in the crypto world, CAC is more like a structural financial tool. Tokens are not just an incentive mechanism, but a "options contract" for user behavior. Each token distribution is not "rewarding" users, but pricing future user participation behavior, writing a derivative of user behavior. Unlike traditional CAC, Token CAC has convex returns, endogenous pricing, and reflexive momentum. This design makes growth expenditure no longer a sunk cost, but a convertible portfolio of user behavior assets that can form a positive flywheel between attracting users, maintaining activity, and building consensus. Airdrop behavior is usually seen as "being taken advantage of" or "wasting budget", but at a deeper level, airdrops are essentially users voting on future value - they are not exchanging behavior for rewards, but exercising options. Each airdrop round is like an early behavioral market pricing. Protocol designers knowingly tolerate, and even encourage, such simulated loyalty behavior because it brings liquidity, attention, and a narrative to tell. Blur and Blast are typical examples of such mechanisms, which are not doing marketing, but establishing an on-chain price discovery system and discourse rights battle through "bidding behavior". Blur prices behavioral density through leaderboard + decay curve, while Blast goes further by designing participation as a "metagame" and creating an emerging secondary market around behavior options. In the crypto field, CAC should not be understood as "reducing", but being "priced". Excellent protocols do not simply buy users with money, but design a mechanism that allows users to obtain upside exposure related to network growth through participation. This is why the best Web3 growth engines are more like hedge funds, narrative movements, or game systems. The core commonality of "Fat Apps" like Blur, Blast, and friend.tech is that they are not just applications, but synthetic economies with their own token systems, distribution logic, and narrative construction. These protocols transform each user into a growth agent through token-based CAC, not only taking on a propagation role but also sharing the expected returns of system growth. Under the current background of financial uncertainty, only systems that financialize user behavior into structural growth products can truly resonate and achieve genuine mainstream onboarding. [Original text was in English]
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