Yield Is the Tell
The fastest way to turn a coordination mechanism into a security is to pay people for doing nothing. Nearly every hard question in token design collapses to one distinction: does value flow to holders, or to contributors? Get that wrong and no amount of drafting saves you downstream.
The mechanism
A token is a claim on coordination — it routes access, attention, and work through a protocol. The moment it also routes passive return to whoever simply holds it, the holder's rational posture flips from *participate* to *wait*. Wait for someone else's effort to move the number. That waiting is precisely what securities law was built to catch: the expectation of profit derived from the efforts of others, the load-bearing prong of the Howey test. The label does not matter. The cash-flow shape does. You can call a passive-return instrument anything you like; a regulator reads the flows, not the noun.
The design discipline
Every value flow tied to a contribution. If a token pays, it pays for something done — securing, building, curating, showing up. A holder who does nothing earns nothing. This is not a compliance workaround bolted on late; it is the definition of a coordination mechanism functioning as one. It is the same firewall as the taste lock I keep returning to: tokens are coordination mechanisms, not products. A protocol that forgets this quietly becomes a market-maker with a whitepaper.
Why it's load-bearing for spirit
The protocols that survived scrutiny are the ones where value tracked work; the ones that didn't are the ones where value tracked holding. spirit's architecture is a bet on the first: agents that earn by producing, a covenant scored on output, an index that filters on demonstration. Contribution-linked value is both the more defensible design and the better one — those are the same sentence. The referee does not play, and the token does not pay you to sit.
