And yet, for all the promise of DeFi, it can sometimes feel like a carnival side show. Shiny prizes (upwardly spiking APYs) entice, but the house always wins. But coupled with likely incentive structures particularly around token emissions this has set up an ultimate recipe for short-term wins and long-term dooms. It’s a sugar high that inevitably leads to a crash, with many of the projects and participants getting burnt out in the process.
Is DeFi Building or Just Borrowing?
The root issue? A lot of DeFi builds aren’t really building anything permanent. They’re borrowing growth, driven by inflationary tokenomics that enrich a few at the expense of all others. It’s a Ponzi scheme with a few more steps included. You're incentivized to bring in new folks and keep the music playing, but when the music stops, someone's left holding the bag. This is neither sustainable, nor is it how you build a strong financial system. We need to stop thinking in terms of extracting value, and start embracing the idea of producing value.
Core DAO’s Rev+ initiative, at first glance, appears to be just another revenue-sharing program. But scratch the surface a bit, and you’ll find a pretty profound change in philosophy. It's not about endlessly printing tokens to attract liquidity; it's about rewarding genuine contributions to the ecosystem. By distributing gas fees among Bitcoin developers and stablecoin creators, Rev+ ensures that hard work pays off. This is a crucial distinction.
Stablecoins account for over a third of DeFi revenue, yet traditionally, the issuers themselves don't directly benefit from the transaction activity their assets generate. That would be equivalent to a landlord failing to collect rent from her tenants! Yet it’s a deeply broken system – one that Rev+ goes right to the heart of fixing. It’s similar to an employer deciding to give bonuses only to their hardest working employees. These are the people who actually add value and should be paid from the profits accordingly.
Aligning Incentives, Like Shareholders Do
The genius of Rev+ is in its alignment of incentives. Attracting capital is a worthy goal, but attracting the right capital is critical. We have to entice the dreamers, the disruptors and the future-minded investors. That’s just how traditional business works. Demand for their shares Shareholders gain when the company does well, which gives them a strong incentive to push for its success.
Consider it a business collaboration, not an altruistic grant. Participants get paid to participate and have a chance to learn and explore the full ecosystem. As such, their success is inextricably linked to the success of the Core DAO platform. This brings about improved collaboration, innovation, and, most importantly, sustainability. It’s a real cultural change from “me first” to “we do better, together.”
This has important ramifications for the CORE token as well. Rev+ further strengthens the demand driver for the token by sharing transaction revenues with holders and developers. This is much more sustainable than being buoyed by speculative hype. Holding the token would be like owning a dividend-paying stock. You get rewarded because it acts as a claim of the platform’s success.
Beyond Temporary Price Boosts, Real Value
Now, let's be realistic. We’re familiar with models like this, which produce a short-lived governance token price pump and subsequent crater. This is a risk. The big difference with Rev+ is that it’s designed around long-term value creation, completely avoiding short-term price manipulation. The program's success will be measured by on-chain metrics like transaction volume and new address creation, not just the price of CORE.
The real test will be whether Rev+ is able to attract and consistently keep high-quality developers and stablecoin issuers. If it can, it would be an excellent model for how to incentivize communities and industries to adopt the most constructive blockchain use in the space. By adopting these principles, Core DAO is setting the tone for a new standard of DeFi’s economic architecture. It focuses on sustainability and value creation, moving beyond the speculative hype. Hopefully, this can be the beginning of a deeper and healthy DeFi landscape. Only if we make it equitable and truly deliver on its promise of democratizing finance.
This is where the “unexpected connection” has provided a blessing. Rev+ It’s not really about DeFi. So Rev+ isn’t entirely about DeFi. It’s about understanding that growing sustainably means you can’t solve a problem by just paying someone to do it. It is all about tuning incentives, properly rewarding contributions to the network and loading a system that works for all players. It’s a return to sound money principles, updated for the digital age. And that, my friends, is the kind of thing that everybody should get excited about. If Core DAO succeeds in doing so, they won’t just remedy DeFi’s incentive structure. And they can lead the industry as a whole to a better place.
