Those PFPs and membership cards are, in essence, the new era’s “brand tax”—you pay money to buy a sense of belonging, while the project team takes that money to buy attention. Recently, scheduled staking unlocks have been lined up and dumping pressure has been hitting the market; a lot of people are panicking. I actually think if a project team truly believes its brand is valuable, it should turn on the protocol’s fee switch and use the cash flow to repurchase tokens, rather than relying only on drawing avatar images to generate community sentiment value. The token unlock calendar is right there—worries about sell pressure aren’t coming out of thin air—but projects with real long-term value won’t be propped up by narratives alone. For the guy upstairs who said “membership benefits can survive through bull and bear markets,” you can split the protocol profits with me first before you go on talking.