I thought about this for awhile and I want to give an honest and long non-AI edited answer. I am wrong for being so bullish even after the call - that's ok we all get it wrong sometimes. Fundamentally this is still a good project, but as most of us know a good project might not mean a good token. Firstly, doubts surrounding the team and whether they are "trustable" are largely a product of crypto market participants getting rugged non-stop by other projects over the past few years. This has resorted to the industry thinking that buying back tokens are the best way to show alignment with HYPE as the gold standard. However, not every project can be like HYPE were revenues are so scalable at a low marginal cost - most projects need to keep revenue to continue growing the business. For example Collectors crypt needs to funnel revenues to consistently source for new inventory, money markets might need to use revenues to pay for more integrations etc etc. There is a lot of nuance to the use of revenues. We have also seen teams use large buybacks as pump and dump schemes to mask large sells - so clearly buy back and burn is a nice to have not a must have and BnB itself is no guarantee. Some of the anger in the industry is due to people not doing DD initially, some are maliciously misleading statements from teams and some are just a failure of communication. I believe the fault in Grass is a failure of communication to constantly build confidence. Secondly on DePIN models: yes I agree tokens are good for bootstrapping a network by allowing a young company that is cash poor to issue tokens to early participants as a reward for early contribution. If the token does very well - the distribution from early on is an outsized reward for faith (the tokens were distributed when the fundamental value was close to zero). That is the It should also be noted that the token is not an infinite mint or follows some kind of halving schedule where the last token will be issued many years down the line - halting token payments and paying USDC is a matter of time. Paying in USDC at this stage of the growth tells me that the team thinks the token is too cheap, hence they don't want to be paying out in tokens and they have the cashflows to pay out users directly. Paying out in USDC is net accretive to the token, not dilutive. If contributors wanted the coin, they can just buy it. 3: Grass holding all the IP means that it all goes to the token and there is no equity vehicle to siphon value - but if token holders cant use DAO powers to vote on things (e.g. rush LCR now, rug the node providers forever, pay the node providers more) and there is no commitment to a buyback then yes, people can say that the *appears* to have no value. But that is like saying a stock that is smaller in market cap that does not have a strong balance sheet to commit to large share repurchases that is majority owned by a family (so outside voters cant really vote for shit anyway) is worthless. It is worth(space)less, not worthless. They should have at least hinted at some small buybacks for signalling value, perhaps they can do it now after a -40% day. At least that gives the impression that the team doesnt view it as a second thought to the market. This is an impression that they will face alot of challenges fixing - thats where the bulls in here. 4. The doom scenario you described sound plausible if the team has a track record of doing wrong and borderline illegal things. So far it does not seem that way, and they are just very poor at communicating to their investor audience. This has been constantly raised and flagged to them. Perhaps a bi-weekly cadence would be better than what they have now. 5. An added point on payouts - from what I see there are some people that are paid around $100 for operating their nodes (just leaving their PC on) for nearly no marginal cost. The business model works for valuable IP addresses but fails for less valuable IP addresses. They paid 3m of cold hard cash out to tens of millions of users (many of them are farming from non valuable IP addresses) and I think thats actually a first for DePIN - they just really need some form of alignment signalling.