The last 4 months of 'trenches' has been a euthanasia roller coaster, with ever-increasing extractive schemes and ever-decreasing opportunities. Every week a new launchpad or gimmick or meta siphons off additional capital, while launchpad fees, insiders, and hypemen make off with additional bips of retail capital, selling a dream of 'making it' that gets further and further away. 'Runners' top out lower and lower, and more PVP copycats and 'beta plays' exhaust a given meta or concept quickly (e.g. NeiroETH vs. NeiroSOL) Garbage in, garbage out: Trading tokens that represent attention is a losing game, as attention is fickle and easily manipulated (e.g. Loudio). When the token is the only product, the people who win are the ones selling you the product. The nihilism borne out of extractive VC token models is itself highly extractive. Far from PumpFun's eventual token launch being a spark that reignites a wave of 'meme frenzy', I believe it will be the death knell for this era of 'trenching' -- the Otherside moment for memecoins. Yes, echoes of past greatness will linger, but there will be no more capital injections to look forward to. It will get harder and harder to convince new participants to board another euthanasia train and stay at the memecoin casino. The solution to these problems is ownership in real businesses and real products that generate revenue and have staying power. It doesn't matter if someone is paying attention to a good business, because they will make money anyway. And when you own a share in that business, you benefit from betting on a product's and team's success rather than a short-lived attention bump. The recent shift in US regulatory environment (see a16zcrypto.com/posts/article… for more in-depth discussion here) is promising and gives businesses a path to credible decentralization that would enable them to function as real businesses without needing decentralization theatre and/or governance fugazi. As new products transition from foundations to companies, we must of course demand ownership. Dual token/equity structures are similarly extractive and detrimental, as value can accrue to equity-owners without accruing to token-owners (e.g. Uniswap's foundation versus UNI holders). Tokens should be ownership. Tokens should be equity. Token buyers should not be second-class citizens, and should not have to worry about leaking value to equity investors. We still have a long way to go here, but there are glimmers of hope already. Revenue (and profit) is king. Hyperliquid is obviously the best example of a well-executed approach to drive value back to a token. There will be more, and the pattern of value-accrual will rhyme with Hyperliquid's approach: Token-holders will receive a meaningful share of the product's success, and there will not be extractive middlemen siphoning their own share. Once more, with feeling: give me ownership or give me death.