Securities law is losing its force as the reason crypto projects give for governance tokens that return nothing to holders, Ben DiFrancesco, founder and CEO of ScopeLift, said on Uneasy Money. He thinks that shift brings “increased scrutiny” for teams that could return value to their tokens but don’t.
ScopeLift took over the Tally governance platform in March and renamed it Cactus in June. In the episode, recorded Oct. 7, DiFrancesco said fear of regulators shaped a generation of tokens built with no dividends and no buybacks. Promising either meant “you were at serious risk of violating securities law,” he said. “Now, the good news I think is that that’s changing, right?”
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A Plan ‘Rooted in Something Real’
A large protocol that makes money, or could, and has or plans a token “ought to have a story” for sending value to it that is “actually rooted in something real,” DiFrancesco said on the show. His example was a protocol that charges a fee, then distributes it or uses it to buy back the token “in this, like, programmatic way.” He named Uniswap among big projects doing so. Uniswap’s protocol fees, live on Ethereum mainnet since late December 2025 and later on other chains, are claimed by searchers who burn UNI, according to a September governance proposal.
DiFrancesco framed the issue as one of economic security, calling a token’s price “a key component to why the system works” and pointing to the risk of its value falling below “what it would be worth to steal the assets that the protocol protects.” As for teams that say the token doesn’t matter: “I don’t buy that excuse anymore, right? The regulatory excuse is going away,” he said on the podcast.
A Sept. 25 SEC staff FAQ said a buyback announcement would not, on its own, be a promise of essential managerial efforts if a crypto system is functional; a Sept. 28 revision added that it must also have no central party, as Unchained reported.
The Safe Backdrop
The remarks came during a discussion of Safe, the multisig wallet. Greenfield Capital, a Safe investor, said in an Oct. 4 open letter that it has asked Switzerland’s federal supervisor of foundations to examine how the Safe Ecosystem Foundation is governed. Greenfield wants independent board members and a board-led strategy review, and by its count, Safe accounts held about $30 billion in August 2026, down from $66 billion in January 2024. A foundation spokesperson told Cointelegraph it had received no formal inquiry from the regulator and declined to discuss the complaint’s details.
DiFrancesco, who praised the Gnosis team where Safe began, said on the show that tokens having to explain how they return value is “a maturation of the ecosystem.”
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