Rational Investment in the Crypto Space: Understanding the Essence of Tokens through Uniswap as an Example

In yesterday's article, I shared the investment value of Uniswap from the perspective of future free cash flow.

I wonder if readers have noticed a phenomenon:

If we consider the market value of the Uniswap token as the market value of its equity (stock) assets, believing that the "stock" market value of Uniswap is this price, and then compare this "market value" with its intrinsic value to measure how the investment value of Uniswap stands, this method of measurement and comparison is still reliable.

After summarizing these data and seeing this result, I thought of the following points:

First: In the subconscious of the general participants in the crypto ecosystem (including myself), the vast majority of people have actually regarded these types of tokens as equity assets (stocks) of these projects. Because the price trends of these tokens shown by the data and the various phenomena they reflect are very similar to stocks.

However, now I, in actual investment, will break out of this subconsciousness and return to common sense. Because these types of tokens are not stocks, their actual equity is far less than that of stocks, so these types of tokens are not worth the pricing given by the current market.

On the other hand, we must also note that the market is often irrational. In times of irrationality, the market will have its own "narrative," giving any asset a seemingly "irrefutable" high price. But in the long run, the market will eventually return to rationality, return to essence, and recognize the truth.

From the perspective of long-term investment, in the future, when I buy these types of tokens, I will be extra cautious and will treat them as collectibles or souvenirs, rather than as equity assets.

Second: In the crypto ecosystem, using future free cash flow to evaluate projects is appropriate and fitting.

From the case of Uniswap, even if we are not buying real stocks but rather buying tokens that superficially wrap a layer of "equity" nature, we can still use this method to assess whether the token price is reasonable.

Furthermore, to accurately assess a project's investment value using this method, we ultimately need to see the project's real financial data, whether on-chain data or off-chain data; in short, I want to see its total assets, total liabilities, total revenue, total expenses, net profit, free cash flow…

Even if these data are not visible in the short term, I will still approach the investigation from a financial perspective and cannot just listen to its stories or look at a casually written page of tokenomics.

Third: For future projects in the crypto ecosystem to reach the public, especially to attract large capital and institutions, and to bring in truly large-scale external investors, there are probably only two paths. One is to issue assets that are inherently similar to "commodities" with actual utility; the other is to issue assets with real equity value.

The first path is easy to understand, while the second is a bit more convoluted.

Here, we focus on the second path.

In the current crypto ecosystem, some venture capitalists have received tokens from projects after investing in them.

I have always been curious whether these venture capitalists received any other rights besides tokens from the project parties?

Did they only receive governance-function tokens like we did through airdrops?

In the early days, Uniswap received investments from some heavyweight venture capitalists; did these venture capitalists only hold UNI tokens without any other benefits?

If they only held UNI tokens and merely obtained a governance voting function, then they could only watch the nearly 5 billion net profit that Uniswap has generated over the years with wide eyes. Such an investment seems very unwise to me.

There is very little information available on this aspect in the market, and we cannot know for sure.

But I believe that truly pragmatic investors will definitely aim for genuinely valuable assets. As time goes on, the attributes and definitions of these types of tokens for a project will become increasingly clear, and at that time, their prices will also increasingly return to their essence.