Token names have little effect on buyer profits or market value
Names without information: Attention allocation and rent transfer in a zero-fundamental token market
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Summary
Many new tokens share the same code and have no cash value, but can have different names that investors see. The authors studied over 458,000 tokens and found that while tokens with appealing names attract slightly more buyers, the names do not lead to higher profits or bigger token markets when other factors are controlled. Also, reusing a name causes it to attract less investment over time. Overall, competition for popular token names mainly shifts money among buyers without creating real gains.
What this means in practice
- •For cryptocurrency platform operators: Design token launch mechanisms focusing less on token names since names do not significantly affect investment outcomes under controlled conditions.
- •For digital asset marketers: Avoid strategies relying on token name appeal alone to attract meaningful or lasting capital in zero-fundamental token markets.
Authors
Dingding Cao, Han Wang, Yujing Zhong, Xian Pan, Rizwan Akhtar, Wei Yang
Abstract
Asset names are associated with investor trading and asset prices, but where names and issuer quality are formed jointly, information, preference and attention-coordination explanations are difficult to distinguish. We study a token launchpad on which tokens issued under the default template use the same contract code, have a fixed supply and carry no cash flows, while names can be registered at almost no cost, cannot be verified and may be reused. Using all 458,174 default-template tokens launched from February to June 2026 and a sample split by creator entity fixed in advance, we find that the share of tokens attracting an outside buyer rises from 34.9% to 52.8% across name-appeal deciles, but within creator and creation minute the effect of appeal is small and does not replicate in the validation sample. Conditional on early capital inflow and creator fixed effects, the residual effects of names on migration, peak market capitalization and post-peak drawdown are statistically equivalent to zero, and buyers who follow appealing names earn no economically meaningful premium. The same name attracts less capital with each reuse, names whose first token draws more capital are copied sooner, and competition over names mainly transfers wealth among buyers.