Giving away free tokens to early users, usually to bootstrap activity.

why it’s on this board · Produces a liquidity event, not a user: 88% of airdropped tokens lose value within three months.

A group of users grouped by when they joined, tracked over time to see how many stay.

why it’s on this board · Honest retention is measured per cohort — the share of a signup class still active in month three.

When apps can plug into each other like Lego, so one app’s output becomes another’s input.

why it’s on this board · The genuine crypto network effect — but a multiplier on a user base, useless if the base is zero.

Daily Active Users — how many distinct users did something on a given day.

why it’s on this board · Impressive and fakeable. DAU without a retention curve is a Tier-2 (mindshare) metric.

A product people would be genuinely upset to lose — not merely engaged with, but upset to lose.

why it’s on this board · The whole argument. A chain only retains users around one of these, and crypto has found exactly two.

Decentralized Exchange — an app that lets people trade tokens directly, without a company holding their funds.

why it’s on this board · DEX depth is liquidity hygiene; it follows volume, it does not summon it.

New tokens a protocol prints and pays out to attract liquidity or users.

why it’s on this board · The engine of the dead Rewards tier: you print yield to rent activity you don’t organically have.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine — the standard "computer" most chains run, so apps and tools port between them easily.

why it’s on this board · EVM compatibility hands a new chain Ethereum’s entire developer supply chain for free — which is why it was never the bottleneck.

A base-layer blockchain that settles its own transactions, like Ethereum, Solana or Tron.

why it’s on this board · Every chain on this board is an L1 (or an L2 acting like one) trying to grow an ecosystem.

A blockchain built on top of an L1 to make it cheaper or faster, inheriting the L1’s security.

why it’s on this board · Base and Abstract are L2s; their story is about distribution, not settlement.

Paying users in tokens to deposit their capital into your protocol.

why it’s on this board · The classic mercenary-capital mechanism — TVL that arrives in days and leaves in weeks.

The live, real-money version of a blockchain, as opposed to a test version.

why it’s on this board · A chain only counts on this board once it is live — Genesis is a real mainnet, not a whitepaper.

The total value of a token — price times the number in circulation.

why it’s on this board · A ranking everyone quotes; Hyperliquid’s ~$16.1B, around #10, shows a single app can out-rank whole ecosystems.

Perpetual futures — leveraged bets on a price that never expire, the dominant crypto trading product.

why it’s on this board · The vehicle for the Casino sink; Hyperliquid handles ~70% of all on-chain perp volume.

The real revenue a chain or app collects from usage — the hardest number to fake.

why it’s on this board · The two fee leaders — Hyperliquid and Tron — are the two sink owners. Fees follow demand.

The share of users who come back after some time has passed — and, crucially, after any reward has stopped.

why it’s on this board · The only number on the board that cannot be bought. It is the scoreboard.

A technology a chain is simply born holding, because of who its parent company is — skipping the tiers everyone else has to climb.

why it’s on this board · In 2026, who you are born as decides more than what you build. Base, Tempo and Arc all spawned with distribution.

A crypto token pegged to a stable asset, almost always the US dollar (e.g. USDT, USDC).

why it’s on this board · The vehicle for the Dollar sink — moving dollars cheaply is a proven, counter-cyclical demand.

One person pretending to be many, running hundreds of wallets to farm rewards meant for real users.

why it’s on this board · The adversary your incentive budget funds: LayerZero filtered 803,093 sybil addresses from one airdrop.

The map, borrowed from strategy games, of what you can build next from where you are now — each unlock costs resources and opens the next.

why it’s on this board · It is the shape of how an ecosystem grows, and it turns out to describe blockchains with uncomfortable precision.

Token Generation Event — the moment a project’s token becomes tradable.

why it’s on this board · 64% of airdrop recipients sell immediately at the TGE — the incentive leaves the moment it can.

Total Value Locked — the dollar value of assets deposited in a chain’s apps.

why it’s on this board · A headline number that can be bought with incentives; diffuse TVL signals composability, concentrated TVL signals hype.