Marc Baumann argues in a 51 Insights commentary translated by TechFlow that the core financial promise behind crypto infrastructure investing has stopped working. For roughly 15 years, the standard bet was to buy a token on the assumption that protocols would capture value while applications turned into commodities. In his telling, that trade is no longer intact. Value creation is leaving the token layer and moving to the equity layer, where claims on cash flow are legally enforceable.
The article frames the point bluntly: tokens solved a problem that equity could not solve in the same way, namely giving early investors a path to exit before a company had to create lasting value.
June was supposed to validate the thesis
Baumann uses June 2026 as a test case. Tokenized stocks traded a record $3.86 billion on-chain during the month, up 145% from the previous month. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on June 12 and raised $7.5 billion, and tokenized SpaceX shares launched on Solana the same day. Tokenized SPCX alone accounted for $1.19 billion in trading, or about 31% of the month’s tokenized stock volume, according to the article.
Solana handled roughly 96% of that trading activity. On June 23, tokenized assets for the first time took a larger share of Solana’s daily spot volume than meme tokens. Active addresses moved back toward yearly highs, and throughput approached record levels.
Yet SOL did not reflect any of that operating momentum. The piece says SOL traded around $77, was down by half over the past year, and sat 73% below its peak, with a mid-June low marking its weakest level since December 2023.
Baumann’s reading is that the problem is not lack of usage. It is the collapse of the link between usage and token value. In his formulation, the most heavily used network in one of crypto’s fastest-growing categories is being priced like a declining network.
Major value events are happening in equity, not in tokens
The article then shifts to where money is actually being made. Baumann points to a series of transactions involving infrastructure companies rather than token issuers:
- Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion in February 2025.
- Mastercard signed an agreement in March to acquire BVNK for as much as $1.8 billion. The article adds that Coinbase had previously come close to buying BVNK for about $2 billion, but that deal fell apart in November.
- Kraken agreed in December 2025 to acquire Backed Finance, the issuer behind xStocks, as part of preparations for a 2026 IPO.
- Securitize is listing its common stock on the New York Stock Exchange and tokenized those shares on Solana on the first day of trading.
None of those value events occurred at the token level, Baumann writes. All of them occurred in equity. His reasoning is legal and simple: equity carries enforceable rights to cash flow, while most tokens do not.
That distinction matters when tokenized stock activity explodes on-chain. In the article’s view, when $3.86 billion of tokenized equities traded on Solana, the network earned only fractions of a cent per transaction because near-zero fees are part of the product. The spread on mint and redemption, custody fees, and market-making profits went elsewhere, onto the income statements of issuers, brokers, and exchanges. Tokens got the narrative. Companies got the revenue.
Robinhood chain: $1,538 for Ethereum versus about $816,000 in revenue
Baumann uses Robinhood’s new chain as a second example. According to the article, Robinhood launched its own chain on July 1, built on the Arbitrum stack as an Ethereum Layer 2, to offer tokenized stocks to customers in more than 120 countries. Within a week, the chain was processing $568 million in daily volume.
He then cites an economics breakdown published by ARK Invest’s Lorenzo Valente. Out of about $816,000 in total revenue since launch, Robinhood kept roughly 89%, Arbitrum took 10%, and Ethereum earned just $1,538 for settlement.
For Baumann, that is a direct challenge to the fat protocol argument. The thesis said the base layer would capture value. In this example, the base layer captured $1,538. The financial instrument that actually reflects the success of Robinhood’s chain, he says, already exists on Nasdaq under the ticker HOOD. There is no Robinhood chain token, and, as he puts it, no one appears to miss it.
The internet analogy: infrastructure created value, companies captured it
The commentary draws a direct comparison to the early internet. TCP/IP, HTTP and SMTP created enormous value, but they did not capture it. Google, Amazon, Netflix and Airbnb did.
Baumann also revisits the telecom buildout of the late 1990s. Carriers laid more than 80 million miles of fiber in an effort to own internet growth. He cites George Gilder’s promise that there would be “no losers” in a trillion-dollar market. Within a year, two carriers Gilder had championed went bankrupt. More than $500 billion was wiped out, 216 telecom companies collapsed, and 85% of fiber was still dark in 2005. That unused capacity later made bandwidth cheap enough for products such as YouTube to exist. The pipes created value; the businesses built on top captured it. In Baumann’s view, Layer 1 blockchains are replaying the same trade.
The structural issue with token funding
The article’s sharper criticism is directed at how many token projects were financed in the first place. Baumann says a large share of token-based projects from the past decade would not have been financeable in traditional markets. They had no revenue, no enforceable claim on future revenue, and no credible plan to generate either.
In equity markets, he writes, that usually would have prevented funding. In crypto, the structure still worked because tokens made early exit possible. Venture funds could buy at private-market prices and then sell into secondary markets after a one-year cliff instead of waiting seven to 10 years, as equity investors often do. The other side of those trades was retail.
He cites Binance Research data from 2024 showing that only 13% of supply was circulating on average when tokens launched, while about $155 billion in locked supply was scheduled to enter the market between 2024 and 2030. He also references Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi, who described price discovery in those private markets as happening in conditions that were “manipulated, delusional, or both.”
Baumann’s point is not that the system requires fraud. His point is that the structure itself, fully disclosed and legal, pays participants in a way that does not force value creation before liquidity arrives.
Celestia and Polkadot as evidence that fundamentals do not bind price
The piece names Celestia and Polkadot as examples of a broader pattern. Celestia’s TIA launched with 8% annual inflation and reached nearly $20.85 in February 2024. Then, on Oct. 30, 2024, a cliff unlock released 176 million tokens, almost doubling the circulating supply. Baumann says early backers sold over the counter while buyers hedged with perpetual futures, and about 409 million more tokens are set to unlock through early 2027.
TIA now trades below $0.40, down about 98% from its high, according to the article. Meanwhile, in one recent 24-hour period, the network generated only $89 in fees, against a market capitalization near $370 million.
He presents Polkadot not as a separate story but as the same one. DOT was once a top-five crypto asset in 2021 with a valuation above $50 billion. On June 28, it hit a record low of $0.7993, six years after launch. The article says DOT now trades below $0.90, around 98% below its peak and even under its 2020 launch price.
That came despite a series of actions aimed at supporting holders. In March, Polkadot set a hard supply cap of 2.1 billion DOT and cut issuance by more than half. In the same month, it obtained a spot ETF listed on Nasdaq, while developer activity remained near the top of the field. The fundamentals improved, Baumann argues. The price still made new lows because the price was never truly tied to those fundamentals in the first place.
He then returns to Solana as the strongest counterexample to his own broader case and, for that reason, the most revealing one. SOL has real fee capture, real staking economics and some of the deepest usage in the sector. Even so, it has decoupled. If the strongest token cannot turn record activity into price performance, he argues, weaker ones have little case left.
Public investors can buy the layer that does not capture value
Baumann says the result is an uncomfortable asymmetry. The layer public investors can buy often does not capture value. The layer that does capture value is often trapped in private companies that get acquired by firms such as Stripe, Mastercard and Kraken before broad public participation is possible.
Even when crypto firms reach public markets, the market is selective. The article says crypto companies raised $3.4 billion through IPOs in 2025, with a 2026 pipeline forming. But public-market scrutiny has been severe: Gemini is down 89% from its opening price, BitGo is down 77%, and Bullish is down 71%.
By contrast, companies with recurring revenue that is directly linked to usage have held up better. Circle still trades about 110% above its issue price, and Figure about 24% above its issue price, according to the article. Equity is not magic, Baumann writes. It is simply a claim on cash flow, and where cash flow is real, that claim has held up better than much of the token market.
His conclusion: this bear market is repricing legal claims on real cash flow
The commentary describes the current bear market as a broad audit. Each leg down separates a claim on something from a claim on attention, Baumann writes, and that repricing has not respected asset-class boundaries. Exchange stocks tied to trading volume have also been marked down hard.
He says a decade of crypto capital formation is being repriced at market, and the mark is landing where legal claims on real cash flow actually exist.
The piece leaves room for a rebuttal, but not much
Baumann acknowledges that tokens are not necessarily incapable of regaining a tighter link to value. Fee switches, buybacks and revenue-sharing mechanisms could reconnect usage and price. He adds that Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade, combined with a real regulatory framework, could potentially help do that.
He also notes Haseeb Qureshi’s view that a 13% circulating supply at launch was normal in the previous cycle too, which suggests the structure itself is not new. What may be new is that the marginal buyer no longer shows up. The article adds one more market contrast: tokenized real-world assets are up 40% year to date, while the broader crypto market is down about 20%, so some of the divergence could narrow if the macro backdrop improves.
Even then, Baumann does not expect the gap to close by much. His argument is that the divergence is contractual rather than cyclical. The fat protocol thesis said value would concentrate at the protocol layer and that tokens were the ownership vehicle. What this cycle shows, he writes, is that value is concentrating in entities that hold legal claims, and those claims were on cap tables all along, not in tokens.