ScopeLift CEO: Regulatory Cover for Value-Free Governance Tokens Is Disappearing

The chief executive of ScopeLift, a company that builds tooling for decentralized autonomous organizations, said the regulatory justification for value-free governance tokens is losing force. The remarks were reported separately by Unchained and CryptoBriefing on October 13. For years, many crypto projects issued governance tokens that carried voting rights but no direct economic benefit, such as fee sharing or buybacks. Teams frequently cited securities law risk as the reason for avoiding such mechanisms. Tying token value to protocol revenue, the argument went, could invite classification as an unregistered security under U.S. law.