A series of 2025 acquisitions forced a question the crypto market had long preferred to blur: token holders are usually neither creditors nor shareholders. The point became stark when Circle announced the acquisition of Interop Labs, the core development team behind Axelar, while explicitly excluding the AXL token, the Axelar network, and the Axelar Foundation. In public markets, that distinction hit fast. The old assumption that buying a token meant gaining exposure to the startup behind it looked much weaker once the legal entity, the protocol, and the token were separated in the deal terms.
The pattern showed up elsewhere. In July 2025, Ink, the Layer 2 network under Kraken, acquired Vertex Protocol’s engineering team and its trading infrastructure; Vertex later shut down its service and VRTX was abandoned. In October, Pump.fun acquired trading terminal Padre, and PADRE was declared void with no future plan. In November, Coinbase bought trading terminal technology built by Tensor Labs, with no token rights for TNSR included. Across these deals, acquirers were paying for engineers, code, infrastructure, and distribution. The tokens were often left behind.
The CLARITY framework sharpened the divide
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act attempted to draw a cleaner line. Assets that are fully decentralized and have no real controlling party could be treated as digital commodities under CFTC oversight. Assets showing centralized control or sold through promises of returns would fall into restricted digital asset or securities territory under the SEC. For networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that split was relatively favorable. For a large share of DeFi projects and DAOs, it created a narrow path.
The bill also required intermediaries involved in digital asset trading to register and comply with AML and KYC rules. For DeFi protocols operating through smart contracts, that is a difficult fit. The summary text left room for exemptions tied to certain decentralized finance activity related to blockchain network operation and maintenance, but fraud and manipulation enforcement stayed in place. Projects were pushed into a blunt choice: claim decentralization and keep the token from carrying obvious economic rights, or try to reward holders and face securities scrutiny more directly.
Teams, front ends, and tokens were priced separately
The same tension appeared inside DeFi. In December 2025, Aave was pulled into a fight over who should receive front-end revenue. Community members noticed that Aave Labs had altered front-end code so that fees generated when users swapped tokens through the web interface were routed to the Labs company account rather than the Aave DAO treasury. Labs argued from a standard business position: it built the website, paid for servers, and bore compliance risk. Token holders saw something else. Users came for the Aave protocol, not for an HTML wrapper. The dispute erased $500 million from Aave’s token market value in a short period.
Uniswap took a different route, but ran into the same structural problem. Between 2024 and 2025, it advanced the long-discussed fee switch proposal, aiming to direct part of protocol trading fees toward buying back and burning UNI, giving the token a more direct economic role. That also raised the risk of a securities argument. To reduce that pressure, Uniswap used a more complex legal and organizational split, including registering a DUNA entity in Wyoming. On December 26, 2025, the final governance vote passed, including a plan to burn 100 million UNI, close front-end fees at Uniswap Labs, and focus more tightly on protocol-layer development.
A tradable claim is not the same as residual ownership
The article compares this token-rights crisis with the ADS and VIE structures familiar in public equity markets. The key difference is not complexity. It is legal recourse. ADS holders may not own the operating entity directly, but in a buyout or privatization they sit within a recognized legal process and hold residual claims. Many governance tokens do not. The 2025 M&A cycle showed that these assets often sit outside both the liability side and the equity side of a balance sheet.
For years, that fragile relationship was sustained by community consensus and bull-market belief. Development teams could hint that tokens reflected the value of the project, and investors could act as if protocol growth would eventually flow back into price. As compliance pressure increased, that tacit arrangement broke apart. Value moved more clearly toward the parts law can recognize and enforce: companies, equity, licenses, regulated accounts, and contracts. Tokens still trade, but the market is being forced to ask a tougher question: what layer of rights, if any, is actually being bought?