Why Multi-Token Models Add Unnecessary Complexity to DePIN

Splitting utility and governance into separate tokens creates competing liquidity pools, increasing volatility and user friction.

• Example: A user must hold Token A to pay for service and Token B to vote, forcing two separate capital allocations.
• Impact: Each new token requires its own DEX liquidity, staking contracts, and oracle feeds, multiplying attack surfaces and operational overhead.
• Result: ~30-50% of a project's initial runway is burned on bootstrapping liquidity for secondary tokens instead of core infrastructure.

Every additional token is a new mental model for users, directly contradicting DePIN's goal of seamless, real-world utility.

• Friction: Users must understand staking APY for Token A, service pricing in Token B, and governance power in Token C.
• Onboarding Barrier: This complexity excludes the mass-market users DePIN needs, reverting to crypto-native insiders.
• Precedent: Successful Web2 infrastructure (AWS, Cloudflare) has one unit of account. Helium's shift to a single IOT token for all network functions validated this principle.

Multi-token models decouple the value accrual of service providers from the long-term health of the protocol, creating perverse incentives.

• Attack Vector: A malicious actor can short the governance token while providing service, profiting from network sabotage.
• Provider Churn: If the utility token's value collapses, providers flee regardless of the governance token's price, destroying network capacity.
• Contrast: Single-token models like Filecoin (storage) or Render Network (GPU) align all participants: usage demand directly boosts the token securing the network.

Every new token creates a separate liquidity pool, diluting capital efficiency and increasing slippage for all participants. This is the primary reason DePINs like Helium and Render have consolidated to single-token models.

• Capital Efficiency: A single pool with $1B+ TVL is more resilient than ten pools with $100M each.
• User Simplicity: One asset for staking, payments, and governance eliminates constant bridging and swapping overhead.

Multiple governance tokens fracture decision-making and create attack vectors. Adversaries can cheaply acquire a niche token to hijack a critical subsystem, a lesson from early Cosmos app-chain experiments.

• Security: A single, high-value token raises the cost of a 51% governance attack exponentially.
• Coordination: Unified voting ensures protocol upgrades and treasury decisions align with the network's holistic health, not sub-DAO politics.

Hardware operators face prohibitive complexity when managing multiple tokens for rewards, fees, and slashing. This is a direct barrier to the mass adoption DePINs promise.

• Operational Friction: Requires managing multiple wallets, gas tokens, and price oracles just to run a node.
• Financial Risk: Exposure to volatility across several small-cap tokens, rather than one established network asset, increases operator churn.

Utility tokens that aren't also the staking/security asset suffer from high velocity and failed value accrual. This is the core failure mode of the "work token" vs. "staking token" split.

• Value Accrual: All network fees should burn or reward stakers of the primary token, creating a reflexive flywheel.
• Economic Security: The staked token's market cap must back the real-world value of the secured hardware, a la Ethereum's stake securing its $1T+ DeFi ecosystem.