Richard Chen of 1confirmation made this wonderful dash outlining CAC / CLV for some protocols with large airdrops/incentives over the last few years.

Obviously tokens need to get distributed, and there’s an argument that a wide distribution is a good thing. Personally do not think it should be at the expense of efficiency. From my experience, most teams are not thinking about efficiency today, and to be fair, most investors do not push them to especially in growth stage rounds. Closing the awareness gap, improving tooling for folks to understand user loops, and pushing incentives continuously as opposed to discretely can make a big difference here.

A friend described these numbers as “not great.” Not great is an understatement.