I have thought further about your questions, and I want to clarify the economic model I intend to propose.
The main connection between product adoption and PANDA would be membership through staking. Both dMsg and TokenList would offer two ways to obtain a membership:
- Pay the normal subscription fee.
- Lock a published amount of PANDA in an SNS neuron for at least the membership term, initially one year.
The PANDA remains the user’s property. Each membership would have defined service limits, and the same qualifying stake could not be reused to claim unlimited memberships. Requirements would be published before activation, with changes applying to new memberships or renewals.
This creates a concrete path:
Useful products → customers want paid services → some customers choose PANDA membership → they acquire or retain PANDA and keep it locked.
I expect dMsg to serve a much broader audience than TokenList, making it particularly important to this model. The objective is to give customers a continuing reason to hold PANDA because they use the services. Existing holders could also benefit, although their participation would not necessarily represent new token purchases.
I do not plan to introduce profit distributions to holders. PANDA membership would provide service benefits, alongside its existing governance role. It would not give holders a proportional claim on product profits or treasury assets.
The DAO also has relatively modest funding requirements: server operations and necessary marketing, without needing to fund team salaries. The team has committed to keeping 100 million PANDA permanently staked, with the staking rewards dedicated to DAO operations.
However, those rewards are PANDA, not external income. As product revenue available to the DAO covers operating expenses, we could reduce the need to sell those rewards. Rewards no longer needed for operations could then be burned through explicit SNS proposals. We should report actual issuance, reward sales, and burns together rather than present burns alone as evidence of reduced dilution.
The membership terms and product-to-DAO revenue arrangements still need to be formalized and implemented. These are proposed mechanisms, not claims about an already proven business.
Your original distinction therefore remains valid: product success does not guarantee investment returns. My intended answer is a measurable economic connection—growing demand for useful PANDA memberships, combined with disciplined handling of the rewards used to fund operations. We should judge that model by paying customers, active memberships, qualifying locked balances, operating costs, and actual supply changes.