Cryptocurrency Investment: Free Cash Flow Valuation Method

After I shared my attempts to evaluate crypto projects using future free cash flow, many readers left comments sharing their views.

One common perspective is:

Using this method to evaluate projects in the crypto ecosystem, there are hardly any projects of value.

Overall, I also agree with this viewpoint.

However, I still want to specifically point out that there are indeed some quite good projects in the crypto ecosystem that have already generated free cash flow and I believe will continue to do so in the future.

Uniswap, AAVE, MakerDAO, and Compound are projects that I consider to be quite good.

Although their revenue cannot compare to that of traditional good companies, they started generating profits and net income quite early. Achieving this in the newly emerging crypto ecosystem is already impressive, and in my view, they are among the few valuable projects.

Of course, I am not saying that these are the only projects in the ecosystem, but among the projects I focus on, I recognize these.

For example, in the DEX sector where Uniswap operates, I believe it will increasingly become a necessity in the crypto ecosystem in the future, and this sector is large enough to accommodate a certain number of competitors, so I believe Uniswap will still have good free cash flow in the future.

Specifically regarding the Uniswap project, I actually think the biggest factor affecting its future free cash flow is whether it has a sufficiently deep moat.

On this point, I have also shared my views in previous articles: I believe that although Uniswap currently has certain advantages, it is hard to say how long these advantages will last. For example, in the BASE ecosystem, its advantages are not as strong as Aerodrome's, and its moat may not be that deep.

Not only Uniswap, but I also think AAVE, MakerDAO, and Compound have similar issues, because the core competitiveness these projects currently possess is based on having sufficient liquidity in certain tokens. However, in the future, for new tokens that may emerge in other ecosystems (such as Ethereum Layer 2 scaling), I am doubtful whether they can quickly establish such deep liquidity.

In addition to the moat issue, I believe there is a more general and deeper problem. It troubles the entire crypto ecosystem, which is that the token attributes have always been poorly defined.

I will still take Uniswap as an example.

I previously wrote in earlier articles that if the UNI token issued by Uniswap were not just a governance token, but a token with clear equity attributes like a stock, I would likely buy some. I even wanted to find large holders through various means to collectively buy 51% of the circulating UNI tokens.

This way, I could force Uniswap to distribute a portion of the nearly $5 billion in net profits it has received over the years as dividends, obtaining real monetary returns.

Unfortunately, the above idea is purely a fantasy in the current scenario.

Even if I bought all these tokens and used governance voting to force the project to distribute dividends, there would be nothing I could do if they refused to comply.

The ideal way to implement this would be for such rights to be written into a smart contract, creating a strong binding with the project token in the code. This way, as long as the contract is executed, the rights would take effect and would not be interfered with by human factors. This would achieve "code is law" in the field of rights exchange.

Back to reality, currently, the only project in the crypto ecosystem that can perform this operation is COINBASE. Investors can acquire COINBASE stock on the secondary market to obtain the associated rights. However, the process of buying and selling COINBASE stock is too complex, requiring too much control and supervision from centralized institutions, making it inefficient. Additionally, in my view, COINBASE's current price is still significantly higher than its intrinsic value. Therefore, I would not buy its stock at this time.

When a truly equity-attributed token emerges in the crypto ecosystem, only then will projects like Uniswap that have already realized value see their tokens truly reflect their intrinsic value.

At that time, if these tokens can also be traded seamlessly and permissionlessly on decentralized exchanges, the game will be very exciting.