Ownership Coin Monthly: June

Analysis, takes, and signals from the ownership coin frontier.

June was a packed month and showed an ecosystem facing challenging capital decisions. There was a messy situation involving the category's first buyout proposal, a $2M MetaDAO treasury deployment to fund Ownership Capital, and ecosystem projects closing premium to spot OTC raises. The theme is that decisions are getting bigger, and the infrastructure supporting it all is being tested in public.

The ZKFG buyout was a 3 part series where one proposal was voided, the next failed, and the third passed. It showed gaps at the mechanism, legal, and financial levels. All of the gaps are fixable and surfacing them now is how the ecosystem improves.

As the decisions get bigger and the ecosystem more important, so does the value of being able to actually analyze these organizations. That's what this month's Call is about. For the first time in crypto, there are tokens worth doing fundamental analysis on. This is a less talked about and large opportunity for the category as a whole.

Ownership Coins Make Fundamental Analysis Great Again

Imagine you're doing a deep dive on a token investment (written from past experience). You connect to some paid third-party data feeds, pull the numbers, and build a model. You also follow Telegram and X updates, check the team, and user activity. You model the unlock schedule, map the token utility for expectations of demand, and separate the value accruing to holders from the value accruing elsewhere. On paper the token looks fundamentally strong so you buy in. But over time, it trends to zero. 

So what went wrong? The analysis was good, but it broke somewhere. 

This month we unpack how fundamental analysis has rarely worked for non-ownership tokens, why ownership coins change that, and what a fundamental analysis culture native to ownership coins could look like. 

How Analysis of Non-Ownership Coins Fails

The first reason analysis of non-ownership coins fails is that the model inputs are discretionary levers a team can pull unilaterally and without warning, changing the market structure of the token. Here are some examples of this in practice:

• A buyback program changes from a high recurring amount to an inconsequential amount and is later abandoned.
• A team has an undisclosed side deal with a VC and KOL who buys tokens from the treasury at a discount and later dumps them. 
• Staking rewards get cut or ended at the team's discretion so stakers unlock. 
• A promised airdrop never materializes, or the allocation gets shifted elsewhere.
• The team takes a larger slice of protocol revenues for salaries, product growth, and hiring. 

Every model has uncertain inputs (also true in TradFi). The difference is that in crypto the team can unilaterally change the token market structure, with no disclosures or accountability. A model built on that isn't worth doing.

The second reason analysis of non-ownership coins fails is that even when the model is good, the value often accrues somewhere the token holder can't access. In an acquisition, the upside goes to equity holders because an operating company holds project assets, so token holders get nothing. 

So a terminal value forecast is meaningless. The further out you forecast, the more your return depends on an end game (ie. acquisition) the token has no part of.  Short-term trading can work on momentum/sentiment but long-term conviction can't, because there's nothing at the end of the time horizon you are entitled to. 

This isn't true of every token, but for a large share of the market, analysis is spent on unanalyzable projects. You can be absolutely right about the business yet wrong about the token. It's a big reason so much of crypto trades on short-term narratives instead of long-term fundamentals.

What Changes With an Ownership Coin

An ownership coin changes the nature of fundamental analysis of tokens by giving analysts something solid to analyze.

Most token projects bolt on utility to manufacture demand to give people a reason to hold (think staking, fee discounts, token weighted governance, etc.). Ownership coins make ownership itself the demand driver. The token is a claim on a treasury and on the economics of the organization issuing it. 

Although they can exist, there's no need for gamified token sinks, because the reason to hold an ownership coin is that the asset has value; project IP and revenues belong to a DAO that token holders oversee. So, instead of engineering tokenomics the team builds a product and reports to the people who own it.

That makes three areas of analysis meaningful for ownership coins.

The balance sheet. Ownership coin holders oversee an onchain treasury. At any time, anyone can ask whether the token is over or undervalued relative to the treasury value using NAV vs. spot price as a starting point. They can also study the treasury composition, monthly spend limits, and impact on the project runway and project these things forward.

Operating and growth data. Users, volume, revenue, spend, TVL, github activity, social activity, etc. which is the actual activity of the business. These data points can be looked at in many different ways, but overall they tell you whether spending from the balance sheet is translating into value or not. Projects that can't connect their spend to their operating and growth data get discounted for it, because investors increasingly expect that connection to be visible.

Decision markets / governance. Major ownership coin decisions run through a market where participants price it with capital on the line. This leaves a record of conviction, trader counts, pass edge, and comparables across proposals. These markets actually relay what people with money on the line think about a consequential decision.

Ownership coin fundamental analysis is the synthesis of the three categories above and it can expand from there. In isolation each one is not enough. The balance sheet is a valuation with no story. The operating data is a vanity dashboard. The decision market is sentiment with money behind it. All together they're the first time crypto has had the quality inputs to do real analytical work. 

A Fundamentals Culture

Compared to equity markets, fundamental analysis is barely done in crypto. Even though the dataset to do it is richer and more real-time than what equity analysts work with. Almost everything is onchain and available for analysis, but what's missing is two things.  

The work. Pulling, cleaning, and mapping data back to what it means for a project. Existing dashboards from data providers are a starting point, and there's already an edge there simply because few are taking the time to look at what it means. 

The culture. Non-ownership coins created the conditions for short-term trading. Ownership coins set the stage for long-term oriented investing. A fundamentals culture will form because ownership coins are worth analyzing and analysts reward that with coverage and conviction. And as the cost of holding unanalyzable tokens becomes more obvious, that flywheel should accelerate - Better data/reporting gets a project analyzed > analysis brings attention and capital > that pushes other teams to report well too. 

The Analytical Future We See

There is a bigger picture of what ownership coin analysis could look like. It starts with a shared dataset and real-time financial statements any analyst can build on. When this is available hundreds, then thousands, of independent analysts will run their own work off the same foundation. Analysts will combine treasury data, growth projections, and decision market history into an opinion. They configure their own analytical studios, increasingly with AI doing the presentation, and then share actual fundamental analysis. 

They post these opinions publicly on X and Telegram. These opinions deepen markets, sharpen the discussion, and give teams, products, and tokens visibility and scrutiny. Analysts dissect the decision markets and the proposals running through them, for better or worse. Everything gets better, because the discussion is grounded with numbers.

This is not far off... Within crypto, ownership coins are the closest to making it a reality because there is a growing financial record, operating records, and a decision market record worth analyzing. 

Final Thoughts

This is the world we're building toward at 01Resolved. A fundamental analysis culture needs a shared, verifiable financial foundation underneath it, plus operating and decision market records. The balance sheet is what OpenBooks produces. It's one input among the several that analysts need and what we are focusing on now.

Analysis on this month's resolved proposals. Complete decision market analytics can be found on 01Resolved.com.

The difference between spot price and treasury value is where ownership coin analysis begins. This month we look at two coins. One trading above NAV, one below it. NAV values are estimates only and nothing here is financial advice or an investment recommendation.

The market is currently valuing $META at multiples of its existing treasury value. So what does this mean? One way to look at it is the market believes MetaDAO's occupies the position as the primary platform for ownership coin issuance, a category many expect to expand sharply. As the first mover and current leader based on funds raised and number of launches, MetaDAO has economic participation (via AMM fees) on all the activity launched through it, plus the potential of becoming the standard for onchain organizational decision making via its implementation of futarchy. Yes, there are other things analysts may see outside of this, but generally this is the growth trajectory, potential, and story the balance sheet doesn't capture yet.

When looking at a NAV, it's worth asking yourself what kind of premium the market is implying, and what would have to be true to justify it? And what would happen to the price if ecosystem activity or value capture disappoints over a long enough time horizon.   

From the outside, a spot price to NAV discount can look like a problem. But to others it can be an opportunity. Savvy analysts try to identify opportune mispricings, especially in markets that don’t have patience.  

The Solomon team has spent past months on the unglamorous and slow moving work such as audits, legal set up, and regulatory positioning. In crypto it's not exactly the stuff that gets picked up in narratives or quick price action, so the market may discount it. 

As of late, the community has been waiting for the shift from a treasury holding USDC to yield bearing USDv. This will allow the treasury to generate yield from millions of dollars in idle stablecoin balances; which should offset part of the current monthly allowance. Secondly, Solomon is planning to roll out a yield-as-a-service product to other businesses who will also be able to put idle dollars to work, which compounds distribution. 

The opportunity is promising, but what lies ahead (and a current read) is that the market is currently pricing timing and execution risk. Investors may simply have expected more, faster, and now want to see traction, or some other catalyst, before further investment decisions are made. 

↗ Ownership Report #8 | @ownershipfm & @huntermmonk

8Bit sits down with Hunter from Laso Finance, the latest curated launch on MetaDAO to discuss how Laso Works. If you want to get up to speed before the ICO, this is a good starting point.

↗ Price discovery is not enough; why Futarchy needs gatekeepers | @distbit0

This article argues that futarchy is insecure without proposal gatekeeping. It explains that proposers can manipulate proposals allowing harmful or zero value proposals to pass. Distbit argues a trusted gatekeeper is required to screen proposals before trading begins, which solves the manipulation problem but reintroduces centralization and trust risks.

↗ A More Fair and Efficient Decision Making System Through Prediction Markets | @with_blockmedia

The article explains that Aerodrome is applying Futarchy in a narrow way through its new Predictive Allocation model (launching July), which replaces the existing voting system for distributing liquidity incentives. Instead of voting for pools based on current volume or vested interests, participants forecast and stake on which pools will generate the highest future trading fees and revenue. Accurate predictors are rewarded.