Will Manidis wrote that the most underrated factor in the success of firms is whether they're legible to capital. Crypto protocols have been structurally illegible for a decade, and the window to fix that is open right now.
Illegibility as a feature
Much to the frustration of many of us in the industry, the rational move for a new protocol was to make their token as useless as possible - even Vitalik wrote that the regulatory environment rewarded uselessness. Securities laws weren't designed for global permissionless infrastructure, but they were the only framework that existed, and a developer in their bedroom raising capital for internet-native financial infrastructure had no choice but to work around them. The SEC acknowledged that the previous administration refused to recognize that most crypto assets are not securities - but for years that distinction didn't exist, and the more guarantees they offered investors and the more that tokens looked like ownership, the more likely they were to be sued. Fee switches were built into protocols and set to zero, and revenue was directed to protocol treasuries instead of token holders.
Tokens opened up something fundamentally different - anyone in the world could participate in the growth of internet-native infrastructure from day one, no accreditation required, no broker, no permission from anyone - but because they were structured to be maximally illegible, the access never translated into real ownership of economic upside. You could buy the token, it just wasn't guaranteed to mean anything.
Underneath all of that, projects began to create financial infrastructure that was faster, open and more useful - lending markets, stablecoins, cross chain bridges, all running 24/7, processing billions of dollars a day for years without interruption. Infrastructure that is now being adopted by the financial systems it set out to compete with.
Access = upside
Private tech companies stay private longer, and the real value creation happens before most people can participate. You can use a product every day and have a genuinely informed view on whether it's going to be worth more in a few years, but you can't invest unless you're an accredited investor. Even the ones who can are often buying into paper valuations marked up over multiple rounds, waiting years for liquidity, and then watching IPOs reprice everything lower. Figma went public 40x oversubscribed, opened at nearly 3x the offering price, and fell 75% while early investors were only required to lock up 5% of their shares and could sell the rest immediately. The justification for accreditation has always been that regular people can't evaluate complex investments, but that argument is harder to make as information asymmetry shrinks.
What's changing
Projects are starting to restructure. The labs/foundation split that projects took made things harder to understand from the outside - Miles Jennings at a16z argued that nothing holds a project back more than a foundation, and that when the development company and the governance body are legally distinct and nobody is running an investor relations function, institutional capital can't evaluate the business even if the business is good. He's proposing ordinary development companies with milestone-based token vesting and clear accountability.
Uniswap passed its UNIfication proposal and activated the fee switch, burned $590 million in treasury tokens, and unified Labs and Foundation operations under one entity so that revenue now flows to holders through programmatic buybacks and burns.
They also established DUNI - a Wyoming DUNA that gives the DAO legal standing while preserving its decentralized governance. Proposals passed through Uniswap governance are now legally binding on an actual entity that can sign contracts, appear in court, and provide limited liability to its members.
Across Protocol took a different approach. Their "Bridge Across" proposal would abandon the DAO + token structure entirely and convert into a US C-corp, with the new company holding all protocol IP, contracts, and treasury. Token holders can either convert ACX to equity 1:1 or take a USDC buyout at a 25% premium over the trailing 30-day price. The token repriced 85% on the announcement alone. Where Uniswap made a DAO legible, Across is saying the most legible structure is just a company.
These are different answers to the same question, and both are possible now because the regulatory environment finally allows it. The SEC and CFTC jointly issued an interpretation that explicitly states most crypto assets are not securities and that investment contracts can come to an end. The interpretation isn't binding law - it signals how the SEC will treat things until Congress acts - but the Clarity Act advancing through the Senate would codify all of this into statute.
What the Clarity Act would actually enable is specific. A token can graduate from SEC oversight to CFTC oversight once no single entity controls more than 20% of the supply and the network is functional, open-source, and sufficiently decentralized. Secondary market trades of tokens that pass this test are explicitly not securities transactions, which means fee switches can be turned on and revenue can flow to holders without triggering a new securities offering. New projects can raise up to $75 million under a conditional exemption while building toward decentralization. And the Act focuses regulation on centralized intermediaries rather than code itself, so developers building open-source protocol infrastructure have explicit protection.
The ask
If you're running a protocol with real revenue and a token that doesn't reflect it, the window to restructure is open. Institutional capital is entering with over $100 billion in ETF AUM and growing, but that capital expects to understand what it owns and how value flows.
Dean's written about the buyback fallacy - that returning capital before exhausting growth opportunities destroys value. Not every protocol needs to flip a fee switch tomorrow, but the structures need to exist so that when the time is right, value can flow to the people who own the tokens, and right now for most protocols those structures don't exist at all.
Becoming legible doesn't mean abandoning what makes crypto different. Permissionless participation and global markets that run around the clock are real advantages, but they only matter if the token actually represents a claim on the value being created. Otherwise you've built an open market where anyone can buy an asset that doesn't do anything.
The ambiguity that justified staying illegible is gone. The protocols that restructure will attract the capital, and the ones that don't will keep trading at a discount to their own fundamentals.