Market structure
Both businesses sell attention-derived demand for an object that costs almost nothing to make. Both are governed by acquisition cost, conversion rate and repeat purchase. Only one of them has to ship anything, and that single obligation is what caps its margin and slows its collapse.
The claim
Both businesses buy attention on the same auctions at the same price and push it through the same funnel. One of them has to ship a physical object. That is the whole difference.
Nothing here is promotional. No token exists and every brand, coin and venue described is invented. What follows is the argument, a teardown of both launches side by side, three working models you can check by hand, and a translation layer for the two vocabularies.
Where one order goes
The diagram could not load. The same split is in the comparator.
A token launch keeps $76.75 per buy against the brand's $32.98. $44.40 of the gap is goods, delivery and returns — costs that exist only because something must reach somebody.
Six stages, same order. Per million impressions the token funnel reaches 921 purchases against the brand's 832 — then ends smaller, because 14% survive week one against 30%.
At a Gini of 0.93 the top one per cent hold 24% of the supply. A base shaped like that has no customers: the small holders are not buying from the large ones, they are what the large ones sell into.
The funnel, either way
The same six stages either way. Only the coefficients move.
The interactive funnel could not load. The stage-by-stage figures are in the metric translation layer.
Anatomy
Eleven operations, performed by both businesses in the same order. Each row names the operation once, then shows how each side performs it. The claim is not that these rhyme — it is that they are the same operation running against different infrastructure.
DTC brand
The category is crowded and the same three manufacturers supply your competitors. What is chosen is not the object but the angle: who it is for, and what owning it says.
Token launch
The token is identical in every technical respect to every other token, so there is nothing to choose at the level of the object. The angle is the entire decision.
The DTC founder picks the angle first and sources the object afterwards. Same order of operations; one side has a step left to do.
DTC brand
Weeks to a first production run, a minimum order quantity that sets the size of the bet, and cash out before a unit is sold. Everything downstream is scheduled around it.
Token launch
Thirty seconds and a network fee. Supply is fixed at creation, there is no minimum order quantity, and no capital is committed to production because there is no production.
This is the compression the whole comparison turns on. Not a different business — the same business with a sixteen-week step deleted.
DTC brand
Landed cost, a target gross margin, and what the category will bear. The price is set once, posted, and changed reluctantly, because changing it tells customers something about the last price.
Token launch
The opening price is whatever ratio of assets is deposited into the pool. After that nobody sets the price: the curve does, on every trade, in both directions, with no announcement and no explanation.
DTC brand
A product page whose only job is conversion: photography, claims, reviews, and a checkout with as few steps as the platform allows. Weeks of work, iterated against the conversion rate.
Token launch
There is no store to build, because the chart is the destination. It is also the product photography, the review section, and the scarcity banner at once, and it updates itself.
DTC brand
Product goes out free to people with audiences, and early reviews come from buyers who have not owned it long enough to have a view. The cost is inventory.
Token launch
Early holders are given supply, or a low entry, in exchange for talking. The cost is supply, the timeline is hours, and the talk is indistinguishable from enthusiasm.
DTC brand
Creative into an auction, a CPM set by whoever else wants the same eyeballs, and a click-through rate that decides whether it was worth it.
Token launch
The same creative, into the same auctions, at the same clearing price. This step is not analogous between the two businesses — it is the identical step.
This is the rung where the comparison stops being a comparison.
DTC brand
Card details, address, shipping choice, and a confirmation. Every field costs conversion, which is why the industry has spent twenty years deleting them.
Token launch
A wallet, an approval, a slippage tolerance, a signature. Every step costs conversion the same way, and is being deleted in the same order for the same reason.
DTC brand
Pick, pack, carry, and absorb the returns. This is the step that caps the margin, employs most of the staff, and creates the only obligation in the business that somebody can fail to meet.
Token launch
The transfer is the delivery and it completes in one block. There is no parcel, no carrier, no returns desk, and no obligation outstanding once the transaction confirms.
Everything a brand is structurally worse at lives here — and so does the only promise it makes that can be kept or broken.
DTC brand
Spend more, watch CAC rise as the auction takes you further from your best audience, and hit the wall where CAC exceeds contribution. Inventory constrains how fast you can go even when the maths still works.
Token launch
Spend more, watch cost per buyer rise for the same reason. Nothing constrains the pace except attention, so the same curve is traversed in days rather than in quarters.
DTC brand
The audience is exhausted, CAC has risen past contribution, and the brand either has a retained base or it does not. Decline takes quarters, because obligations decay slowly.
Token launch
New buying stops, the pool thins as holders exit, and each sale moves the price further. Holding produced nothing, so there is no retained base to decline slowly.
A DTC brand collapses slowly because it is made of obligations. Remove the obligations and the collapse has nothing left to hold it up.
DTC brand
Stock is liquidated at a markdown, the customer list has residual value, and the name might be worth something to an acquirer. Value survives the business.
Token launch
The pool is left with whatever depth remains, the holders keep a balance that nobody is bidding for, and there is no list, no name, and no acquirer. Nothing survives, because nothing accumulated.
The residual value of a brand is the accumulated relationship — precisely what the token never built, and why its ending is so much cleaner.
Who actually holds it
Every comparison on this site assumes both businesses have something worth calling a customer base. Concentration is where that assumption can fail. Move either curve and watch the language stop fitting.
The concentration curve could not load. For the family used here,
L(p) = p^k, the Gini coefficient is exactly
(k − 1) ÷ (k + 1).
Economics
Every figure below is computed from the inputs you set. Nothing is quoted, nothing is sampled, and nothing is random — the same inputs always produce the same outputs, and the whole scenario lives in the address bar so you can send someone a specific one.
The arithmetic is in lib/models/ as pure functions with a test
suite that includes the worked examples, the invariant, and the behaviour at
zero and at the extremes. If you check it and it does not hold, the tests
are wrong and so is the argument.
Unit economics, side by side
Both panels buy the same attention at the same price and take the same amount from the same buyer. Only what comes out of the order differs.
The comparator could not load. Its inputs and formulas are listed in the translation layer.
The pricing rule
A constant-product market maker holds two reserves whose product stays fixed. Buying moves along the curve, so each unit costs more than the last, and the pool can never be emptied completely. Every term in it has a retail counterpart that behaves the same way.
The AMM explorer could not load. The formula is
out = base × in × (1 − fee) ÷ (quote + in × (1 − fee)).
Retention
A triangular cohort grid is the standard way a retail business reads whether its customers come back. A holder base fits into it without modification. Switch between them: the object is the same, and one curve is simply steeper and ends sooner.
The cohort grid could not load. The decay rule is
rate(age) = floor + (first − floor) × decay^(age − 1).
Metrics
Each pair has a one-sentence definition on both sides, and the formula where one genuinely exists. Where a pair is an analogy rather than an identity, the note says so.
The claim these make together is specific. Most of the list is not analogy — it is the same quantity, computed the same way, measured on different rails. The place where the two genuinely part company is what an order leaves behind, and it is one line item wide.
Both businesses buy the same thing on the same auctions at the same clearing price. This is the part of the model that is not merely analogous but literally shared.
Retail
The number of times an ad was served, whether or not anyone registered it.
On-chain
Identical, and frequently bought from the same platforms in the same auction.
Retail
Cost of a thousand impressions, the clearing price of attention.
On-chain
The same number, because the auction does not know or care what is being sold.
Retail
Share of impressions that produced a click.
On-chain
Share of impressions that opened a chart, a contract, or a group.
Retail
The page the click arrives on, whose only job is to convert.
On-chain
The price chart, which is the destination, the proof and the pitch at once.
Retail
The asset that buys attention: image, video, or copy.
On-chain
The same asset, distributed by unpaid reposting as well as paid placement.
Retail
Paying someone with an audience to vouch for the product.
On-chain
Paying someone with an audience to vouch for the token, often undisclosed.
Retail
Attention not paid for directly, earned by the content itself.
On-chain
The same, and the primary channel for a launch with no media budget.
Retail
Total acquisition spend divided by all customers, paid and organic together.
On-chain
Total promotion spend divided by all buyers, however they arrived.
Retail
The period after an ad within which a purchase is credited to it.
On-chain
The same problem, made worse because a wallet carries no campaign tag.
The funnel has the same number of steps on both sides and the steps are in the same order. Only the coefficients differ, and not always in the direction you would guess.
Retail
Share of visitors who complete a purchase.
On-chain
Share of visitors who sign and settle a buy.
Retail
The intent step: the item is selected but no money has moved.
On-chain
The allowance transaction, which commits nothing but must happen first.
Retail
The step where money actually moves and the order becomes real.
On-chain
The trade itself, settling against a pool rather than a card network.
Retail
Intent that did not become a purchase, and the single largest leak in retail.
On-chain
The same leak: a signature refused, a slippage limit hit, a transaction reverted.
Retail
Every field, redirect and delay between wanting the thing and having it.
On-chain
Every signature, network fee and pending block between the same two states.
Retail
Buying without creating an account, which lifts conversion and loses the relationship.
On-chain
Holding without an intermediary, which does the same in both directions.
Retail
Mean value of a single completed order.
On-chain
Mean value of a single completed buy.
Retail
The order size below which the sale is not worth fulfilling.
On-chain
The buy size below which the network fee eats the position.
Retail
Persuading a buyer to spend more at the moment of purchase.
On-chain
Persuading a holder to buy more at a higher price than they first paid.
This is where the two businesses diverge, and the divergence is one line item wide. Everything else on this list is shared.
Retail
Acquisition spend divided by the customers it produced.
On-chain
Promotion spend divided by the buyers it produced.
Retail
What the object cost to make and land, the floor under a brand's margin.
On-chain
There is no object, so there is no cost, and therefore no floor.
Retail
Share of revenue left after the cost of the goods.
On-chain
Near enough to one hundred per cent that the term stops doing work.
Retail
Picking, packing and carrying the object to the buyer.
On-chain
Settling the transfer, and the only delivery cost that exists here.
Retail
The card network's percentage plus a fixed fee on every order.
On-chain
The liquidity provider's percentage, taken off every trade at any size.
Retail
Revenue reversed when the object comes back, plus the cost of handling it.
On-chain
Not a return: a sale to the next buyer, at whatever the pool will pay.
Retail
What one order leaves after every variable cost, before acquisition.
On-chain
The same calculation, on a cost base with the goods line removed.
Retail
How long before a customer has repaid what was spent acquiring them.
On-chain
The same, usually inside the first purchase because contribution is so much higher.
Retail
Total contribution a customer produces before they stop buying.
On-chain
Total value extracted from a holder before they stop buying — by whoever sold to them.
Retail
The ratio that decides whether a business can afford to grow.
On-chain
The same ratio, and it governs a launch exactly as tightly.
Retail
Cash tied up in stock that has been bought but not yet sold.
On-chain
Cash tied up in a pool so that buying is possible at all.
Retail
Cutting the price to clear stock that is not moving.
On-chain
The price falling because holders are clearing stock that is not moving.
Retention is where the analogy is tightest and the outcome is furthest apart. Same table, same cohort maths, wildly different decay.
Retail
Share of buyers who purchase again within a period.
On-chain
Share of buyers who add to the position rather than close it.
Retail
Everyone acquired in the same period, tracked together over time.
On-chain
Identical, and the standard way to read a holder base honestly.
Retail
A customer who has stopped buying, whether or not they announced it.
On-chain
A holder whose balance is zero, which is unambiguous and instantly visible.
Retail
The loyal core that keeps buying indefinitely and sets a brand's long-run value.
On-chain
The curve decays toward zero, because holding produces nothing on its own.
Retail
Paying customers in kind to buy again rather than switch.
On-chain
Paying holders in more of the same asset to keep them from selling.
Retail
Revenue contracted in advance, the strongest form of retention.
On-chain
Supply that cannot be sold yet, which is retention imposed rather than earned.
Retail
Spending to bring lapsed customers back to a product they already left.
On-chain
Spending to bring lapsed holders back to a position they already exited.
Retail
Whether existing customers spend more or less than they did last period.
On-chain
Whether existing holders' balances grew or shrank over the same window.
An automated market maker is an inventory system with a pricing rule attached. Every term in it has a retail counterpart that behaves the same way.
Retail
Units on the shelf, available to be bought right now.
On-chain
Tokens in the pool, available to be bought right now.
Retail
How large an order the shelf can absorb without running short.
On-chain
How large a buy the pool can absorb without the price moving much.
Retail
Paying more because you are buying a large share of what is left.
On-chain
Exactly that, priced automatically by the curve rather than by a manager.
Retail
Every unit that exists, sold or not.
On-chain
The same, and fixed at launch rather than set by a production plan.
Retail
What can actually be bought, excluding what is reserved or committed.
On-chain
What is not locked, vested, or held by the deployer.
Retail
Making more units when the shelf runs low.
On-chain
Issuing more tokens, which most launches promise never to do.
Retail
The posted price of the next unit, before any discount.
On-chain
The marginal price of the next token, set by the ratio of the reserves.
Retail
How much demand moves when the price does.
On-chain
How much the price moves when demand does — the same relationship, read backwards.
Retail
Putting stock on someone else's shelf and taking a cut of what sells.
On-chain
Putting assets in a pool and taking a cut of what trades through it.
Concentration is the measurement that decides whether the retail vocabulary applies at all. Past a certain point the word 'customer' stops describing the relationship.
Retail
How much of a brand's revenue comes from how few of its customers.
On-chain
How much of a token's supply sits with how few of its holders.
Retail
A buyer large enough that losing them changes the forecast.
On-chain
A holder large enough that their exit changes the price for everyone else.
Retail
Stock sold to a distributor below retail, before the public sees it.
On-chain
Supply held by insiders at a basis the public cannot get.
Retail
The stake held by whoever built the thing, usually subject to vesting.
On-chain
The same stake, usually not subject to anything at all.
Retail
How stock gets into the hands of people who might buy more later.
On-chain
Free supply distributed to create a holder base and a reason to talk.
Retail
Your slice of a category's spending.
On-chain
Your slice of a finite pool of speculative attention.
Retail
Stock that leaves without being sold, through theft or loss.
On-chain
Value that leaves without being sold to the holder, through the deployer selling out.
Retail
Whether the business is expected to survive the next twelve months.
On-chain
Whether the pool still has depth, which is the only continuity that exists here.
Retail
Accumulated preference that lets a brand charge more than a substitute.
On-chain
Accumulated belief that lets a token hold a price with no cash flow beneath it.
The argument
Two businesses. One sells a ceramic mug for $38 to people who follow a certain kind of account. The other sells a token with a dog on it to people who follow a different kind of account. One of them is a legitimate consumer brand and the other is widely understood to be a scam.
The argument here is that this distinction is real but much narrower than it looks, and that it does not live where people put it.
A direct-to-consumer brand and a memecoin are the same business running on different rails. Both buy attention on the open market at a price set by auction. Both convert that attention through a funnel with the same stages in the same order. Both live or die on the relationship between what a buyer costs to acquire and what that buyer leaves behind. Both derive essentially all of their value from demand they manufactured rather than demand they found.
The difference is that one of them has to ship a physical object. That obligation caps its margin, slows its growth, and slows its collapse. Strip it away and you get the other one: the same funnel, running at a hundred times the speed, at a hundred per cent gross margin, with no returns department.
This is not an accusation dressed as an analysis. It is the other way round. The comparison is uncomfortable in the direction people do not expect.
Start with the mug, because its economics are not in dispute.
The brand does not manufacture it. Three factories make an almost identical mug and two of them also supply the competition. The landed cost is somewhere under a fifth of the retail price.1 What the brand actually produces is the reason to pay $38 rather than $9: the photography, the account, the founder’s story, the particular restraint of the packaging.
The operating model is arithmetic. Buy impressions at a CPM. Some fraction click. Some fraction of those reach a checkout. Some fraction of those complete. Divide the media spend by the buyers and you have customer acquisition cost. Subtract the goods, the shipping, the returns and the card fee from the order value and you have contribution. If lifetime contribution exceeds acquisition cost the business compounds, and if it does not, no amount of growth will save it — it will simply lose money faster.
The uncomfortable thing about this model, for anyone who has run it, is how little of the value is in the mug. Gross margin is high precisely because the object is cheap. The expensive part is the attention, and the attention is bought. The mug is not what is being sold. The mug is what makes the transaction legible as a purchase.
A DTC brand is a machine for converting bought attention into sales of an object whose cost is deliberately kept far below its price. That is not a criticism. It is the standard description of the category, and it is what the category’s own operators say to each other.
Now the token, described in the same register.
Supply is fixed at deployment, which costs a network fee and takes under a minute. Liquidity is seeded into a constant-product pool: two reserves whose product stays constant, so that buying moves the price up along a curve and selling moves it back down.2 Nobody sets the price after that. The curve does, continuously, in both directions.
Then the same operating model. Buy impressions at a CPM — frequently on the same platforms, in the same auctions, at the same clearing price, run by people with the same job title. Some fraction click through to a chart. Some fraction reach a signable transaction. Some fraction sign. Divide the promotion spend by the buyers and you have cost per buyer. Subtract the pool fee, the gas and the market-making cost from the buy size and you have contribution.
Two things are absent, and they are the whole of the difference. There is no cost of goods, because there is no good. And there is no delivery, because the transfer is the delivery and it settles in one block.
Those absences are worth about forty-four dollars on an eighty-dollar order, at ordinary DTC margins.3 They are why the token’s contribution per buy is roughly twice the brand’s contribution per order on identical inputs — a figure you can move around yourself on the model.
Put the two funnels side by side and the claim stops being rhetorical.
Both have six stages. Both lose most of their volume at the same two places: the step where attention has to become interest, and the step where money has to become real. An abandoned cart and a rejected signature are the same event, produced by the same hesitation, and both industries have spent their entire existence deleting fields to reduce it.
Both are governed by the same three numbers. Acquisition cost, which rises as you spend more because the auction pushes you further from your best audience. Contribution per purchase, which is fixed by the cost structure. Repeat rate, which decides whether a buyer is worth more than their first transaction. Every consumer business in either category is somewhere on that surface, and the surface has the same shape for both.
The vocabularies map term for term, which is not what you would expect of a loose analogy. Inventory is pool depth. A stockout premium is slippage. The payment processor’s cut is the pool fee. Total supply is total supply. Lifetime value is exit liquidity — the same arithmetic, computed the same way, over the same series. There are fifty-six of these pairs and the formulas are identical on both sides wherever a formula exists.
The one place the mapping is not merely close but literally identical is the top of the funnel. A brand and a launch bidding for the same impression are bidding in the same auction against each other, and the auction has no opinion about which of them is selling an object.
Here is the strongest argument against everything above, and it deserves to be stated at full strength rather than set up to be knocked down.
A DTC brand delivers something. At the end of the transaction there is a mug. The buyer can drink from it. If it arrives broken they can demand another, and that demand is enforceable. The brand has made a promise that can be kept or broken, and the whole apparatus of consumer law, reviews and repeat purchase exists to make keeping it the profitable option.
A memecoin delivers nothing. At the end of the transaction there is a balance, and that balance is worth whatever the next person will pay. The gains of early buyers are funded, in a way that is arithmetically exact, by the payments of later ones. The brand is playing a positive-sum game with a thin margin; the token is playing a zero-sum game with a fat one, and the fat margin exists because it is zero-sum.
This is correct. The cost that is missing is the obligation that is missing. That is why the comparator on this site labels the absent line as an absence and not as an advantage.
So the objection stands. And it is narrower than it sounds, for two reasons.
The first is that a great deal of what a DTC brand delivers is not the object either. The mug costs $9 and sells for $38. Whatever the buyer paid $29 for, it was not ceramic — it was something closer to a membership: the account, the identity, the small legible signal that one is the sort of person who owns this. That value is real. It is also manufactured, bought with media spend, and sustained only while the attention lasts. A brand whose customers stop caring has a warehouse of objects that are worth their landed cost, which is to say almost nothing. The object sets a floor, but the floor is a long way beneath the price, and the distance between them is the same substance the token is made of.
The second is that the object’s real function is not delivery. It is proof. The mug is what makes the purchase legible — to the buyer, to the tax authority, to the buyer’s own account of why they spent the money. It converts a payment for a feeling into a transaction with a receipt. That is a genuinely valuable service, and it is mostly a service rendered to the buyer’s self-image rather than to their hands.
Which gives the honest version of the difference: it is a difference of degree, not of kind. A DTC brand is a business that sells manufactured demand and encloses a small amount of real value inside it. A memecoin is a business that sells manufactured demand and encloses none. The second is worse. It is worse in the way that a 100% markup is worse than a 70% markup — on the same axis, further along, not somewhere else.
This is the uncomfortable part, and it is uncomfortable for the DTC operator rather than the trader. The trader already suspects their asset is attention with a ticker. The operator believes their business is categorically different, and the honest reading is that it is mostly further down the same road. The two are separated by a floor of a few dollars, some enforceable obligations, and the willingness to keep them.
Those things matter. A floor is not nothing, and an enforceable promise is not nothing. But they are a smaller distinction than the moral distance people place between the two, and they are not the distinction being claimed when a founder says their brand is about something.
If the comparison holds, three things follow, none of them comfortable.
For the operator: the part of your business that is genuinely defensible is the part the memecoin cannot copy, and that is not the product and not the story. It is the obligation — what you have promised, to whom, and what happens when you fail. A brand with no real obligations is a token with a warehouse.
For the trader: you already know the funnel. What you may not have priced is that the funnel is the entire business, that your cohort curve decays to zero rather than onto a floor, and that a Gini above 0.9 means the retail vocabulary of “customers” has stopped applying to what you are in. You can watch that threshold move on the concentration curve.
And for everyone: the reason this comparison is unsettling is not that memecoins turn out to be more respectable than they seemed. It is that a large and well-regarded part of the consumer economy turns out to be running the same machine with a small object bolted to the front, and the object is doing less work than the people operating it would like to believe.
docs/SOURCES.md for
every illustrative figure on the site. ↩x and y such that x · y = k. A
buy of size dx net of fees returns dy = y · dx′ / (x + dx′), which is derived and
tested in lib/models/amm.py. You can vary the reserves, the fee and the trade size in
the AMM explorer, where the working is shown for whatever inputs you set. ↩Glossary
One alphabetical list rather than two, because splitting it would reinstate exactly the separation this site argues against. Each term is tagged with the vocabulary it comes from and links to its counterpart in the other.
28 terms are retail, 29 are on-chain, and 10 belong to both because they are the same word doing the same job in each. For the metrics with formulas attached, see the translation layer.
Retail
An order started and not completed. The largest single leak in most retail funnels, and the reason checkout pages keep losing fields.
Retail
The intent step: an item is selected, but no money has moved and nothing is committed.
On-chain
Supply distributed free to a set of wallets, usually to create a holder base and a reason for those holders to talk about it.
On-chain
A standing permission granted to a contract to move a token on your behalf. The step before a first trade, and a step at which buyers drop out.
On-chain
Automated market maker. A contract that quotes a price from its own reserves by a fixed rule, rather than by matching buyers to sellers.
Both
Deciding which piece of marketing caused a purchase. Hard in retail and harder on-chain, where a wallet arrives carrying no campaign tag.
Retail
Units that can actually be sold right now, excluding what is reserved, damaged, or in transit.
On-chain
Mean value of a completed buy. The same quantity as average order value, measured the same way.
Retail
Mean value of a completed order. Revenue divided by orders.
On-chain
A rule tying price to supply sold, so each unit costs more than the last. A pricing policy expressed as code rather than as a decision.
Retail
Accumulated preference that lets a brand charge more than an equivalent substitute. The capitalised value of attention already bought.
On-chain
Permanently destroying supply, usually to signal that the remainder is scarcer. The inverse of a reorder, and not reversible.
Retail
A customer who has stopped buying. Inferred from silence, because nobody announces it.
On-chain
Supply that is actually tradable, excluding locked, vested, and deployer-held tokens.
Both
Everyone acquired in the same period, tracked together over time. The only honest way to read retention in either business.
Retail
Placing stock on someone else's shelf and taking a share of what sells, rather than selling it to them outright.
On-chain
The most common AMM rule: the product of the two reserves stays fixed, so price moves along a hyperbola and the pool can never be fully drained.
Both
What one purchase leaves after every variable cost and before acquisition cost. The number that decides what you can afford to pay for a buyer.
Retail
What the object cost to make and land. The floor under a brand's margin, and the line item that has no counterpart on the other side.
On-chain
Promotion spend divided by the buyers it produced. Customer acquisition cost, renamed.
Retail
Someone who has bought at least once. Whether they are a customer next month is the only question that matters.
Retail
Acquisition spend divided by the customers it produced. Usually rises as spend rises.
On-chain
The address that created the token. Frequently holds a large share of supply at a basis no later buyer can get.
On-chain
A fall from a previous high. Imposed by the market rather than chosen, which is the difference between it and a markdown.
Retail
What a whole business would sell for. Rests on cash flows and obligations that survive the transaction, which is what makes it different in kind.
On-chain
The buyers whose purchases let earlier holders sell. Arithmetically identical to lifetime value, computed from the other side of the transaction.
On-chain
A holder whose balance has reached zero. Unlike churn, unambiguous and visible to everyone at the moment it happens.
On-chain
A trade that did not settle: a refused signature, a breached slippage limit, an insufficient balance. The same leak as an abandoned cart.
On-chain
A launch claimed to have no pre-allocation, so that every holder bought on the same terms. Verifiable in principle from the chain, and frequently not true.
Retail
The stake held by whoever built the business, normally subject to vesting and to obligations that survive a sale.
Retail
Picking, packing, and carrying the object to the buyer. The step that caps the margin and creates the only obligation somebody can fail to meet.
On-chain
The network fee for including a transaction. Per-transaction and indifferent to size, which sets a floor on the buy worth making.
Both
A measure of concentration from 0 to 1: twice the area between a Lorenz curve and the line of perfect equality. Above roughly 0.9 the language of customers stops applying.
Retail
Share of revenue left after the cost of the goods. High in DTC precisely because the object is cheap relative to its price.
On-chain
An address with a non-zero balance. Counted the way a brand counts customers, and just as vulnerable to being counted generously.
Both
One serving of an advertisement, whether or not anyone registered it. Bought by both businesses in the same auctions at the same price.
Retail
Units on the shelf, available now. Capital you have spent that you cannot spend again until it sells.
Retail
A buyer large enough that losing them changes the forecast. The same concentration risk, managed by a person rather than watched on a chart.
Retail
Total contribution a customer produces before they stop buying. The sum of a geometric series in the repeat rate.
On-chain
Assets in a pool, available to trade against now. Capital parked so that a transaction is possible at all.
On-chain
Someone who deposits both sides of a pool and earns the fee on trades that pass through it. The economics of consignment.
On-chain
Capital deposited into a pool so that buying is possible at all. Money you have spent that you cannot spend again until you withdraw it.
Both
A plot of what share of the total is held by the bottom share of the population. The further it sags beneath the diagonal, the more concentrated the distribution.
Retail
Cutting the price to clear stock that is not moving. A decision, made by someone, who can be asked to justify it.
On-chain
Price multiplied by supply. A figure that assumes every unit could be sold at the current price, which is exactly what the price curve says is impossible.
On-chain
Someone quoting both sides continuously so that trading is possible. A cost of doing business, paid for in fees or in supply.
On-chain
The reason a token is supposed to be worth something. Performs the job brand equity performs, with nothing beneath it.
Both
How long before a buyer has repaid what was spent acquiring them. Acquisition cost divided by contribution per purchase.
Retail
A planned sequence of prices across sizes or tiers, set deliberately in advance.
Both
Share of buyers who buy again within a period. The single input that decides whether a buyer is worth more than their first transaction.
Retail
Goods coming back, and the revenue reversing with them. A cost that exists only because something was delivered.
On-chain
A launch whose operators sell their own supply into the demand they created, leaving holders with a balance nobody is bidding for.
Retail
Giving product away to people with audiences in exchange for exposure. Customer acquisition paid for in inventory.
On-chain
Closing a position into the pool. Not a return — a sale to whoever is next, at whatever the curve will pay.
On-chain
The transfer completing on-chain. Delivery and payment in one action, with nothing outstanding afterwards.
Retail
The physical or virtual place stock sits waiting to be bought, and the constraint on how much can be sold at once.
Retail
The posted price of the next unit, before discount. Set once and changed reluctantly.
Retail
The carriage cost of one parcel. Per-parcel and sensitive to size and weight, which is where it differs from gas.
Retail
Stock that leaves without being sold, through theft, damage or error. A cost of doing business rather than the business itself.
On-chain
The gap between the quoted price and the price actually paid, caused by the trade itself moving the curve. A stockout premium, charged automatically.
On-chain
The marginal price of the next unit, set by the ratio of the reserves. Not the price you get for any trade of real size.
Both
Every unit that exists. Fixed at deployment on one side; set by a production plan and revisable on the other.
Both
A schedule preventing a holder from selling immediately. Retention imposed rather than earned, on either side.
On-chain
A holder large enough that their exit changes the price for everyone else.
Retail
Cash tied up in stock bought but not yet sold. The constraint that stops a brand growing as fast as its funnel would allow.
Retail
Formally recognising that stock is worth less than it cost, or nothing at all.