Recently looking at the economic models of chain games, I’m increasingly feeling that inflation and output are like boiling a frog in warm water. Many projects use high output early on to attract users—on the surface, the pool looks liquid—but if the output dumped in is mostly sell orders and not tied to the consumption side, then once inflation kicks in, it’s a collapse. In plain terms, fast output doesn’t equal ecosystem health: users farm and then leave, and the pool is left as an empty shell.

Social mining and fan tokens are also quite popular now, with the idea of “attention as mining,” but I still feel it’s a bit shaky. Can attention really support sustained value? When trading volume dips, the token gets dumped faster than anyone else. It feels like the same old story as chain games—swap the soup but not the medicine. Anyway, whenever I look at this kind of thing now, I remind myself: I’m treating simplicity as a trap.

Long-termism, then—observe first before acting, and don’t let short-term output rates get you carried away.