The Problem
The crypto industry has a trust problem. Traditional token launches create fundamental misalignments between project teams, early participants, and the broader community — and everyone knows it.
The Predictable Pattern
Watch any token launch closely and you'll see the same story unfold: initial excitement drives prices up, insiders and early participants sell into the hype, and later buyers are left holding depreciated tokens. This isn't a bug — it's a feature of how most tokens are structured.
The problem isn't greed or bad actors (though those exist). The problem is misaligned incentives built into the tokenomics themselves. When teams can sell immediately, when there's no mechanism to support token value, and when treasuries operate in the shadows — the outcome is predictable.
Four Structural Failures
No Lockups
Team tokens and early allocations are immediately liquid. The moment price rises, insiders can — and often do — sell. Later participants absorb the selling pressure with no warning.
No Buyback Mechanism
Revenue from token sales goes directly to the team with no programmatic support for the token. There's selling pressure from unlocks but no corresponding buy pressure from operations.
Centralized Control
Teams retain unilateral control over token contracts and protocol parameters with no oversight or timelock. "Rug pulls" aren't just possible — they're architecturally enabled by design.
Opaque Operations
Treasury balances, team selling, and fund allocation happen off-chain or in wallets that aren't publicly tracked. Participants have no visibility into how their money is being used.
The Trust Deficit
These structural failures have consequences. The vast majority of tokens launched never recover their initial trading price. More importantly, this pattern has created a trust deficit across the entire crypto ecosystem. Experienced participants approach new launches with justified skepticism, while newcomers learn expensive lessons about tokenomics the hard way.
The result is a vicious cycle: projects struggle to attract genuine long-term participants because everyone assumes the worst. Even well-intentioned teams face an uphill battle against this reputation.
What If Tokenomics Worked Differently?
What if the mechanics that typically extract value from participants were reversed? What if lockups applied to everyone equally? What if revenue automatically removed tokens from circulation instead of enriching insiders? What if transparency was enforced by code, not promised by tweets?
That's exactly what The Candidate Protocol was designed to do.