Crypto Investor Cobie: Airdrop Model Can Reshape AI User Value Distribution
In an English interview, crypto investor and host Cobie stated that there is a long-standing structural issue in AI and internet products: early high-value users contribute usage, feedback, and new user acquisition during the product's cold start phase, but ultimately receive almost no economic benefits. He cited early Facebook users as an example, pointing out that these users "provided immense value but gained nothing beyond using the product itself." He proposed a concept: referencing the current crypto airdrop mechanism, quantifying and recording user participation and contributions in the early stages of the product, and when the company goes public or experiences a liquidity event, returning value to users based on their contributions in a manner similar to airdrops, aimed at correcting the current value capture that heavily favors capital and internal equity holders.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Cobie addresses the structural issue of "value capture imbalance in AI and internet platforms": data, feedback, and social dissemination are contributed by users, while the vast majority of financial returns are captured by venture capital, teams, and later secondary market investors. In the AI context, this contradiction is even sharper—users not only provide data and usage time but also train, correct, and validate models with their workflows, yet still only receive a better product rather than quantifiable asset returns.
The "company-level airdrop" he proposed is essentially a new equity and income distribution mechanism: expanding the "option logic" that was originally only for investors and employees to high-contribution user groups. This is similar to the crypto model of "using is mining" and "interaction is equity," mapping users' early actions into redeemable equity certificates through on-chain or verifiable records, allowing users to gain a portion of the upside as the company's valuation expands, rather than merely participating as free labor in the cold start.
From an institutional and regulatory perspective, if this model is to be implemented on a large scale in AI and consumer internet companies, it will directly impact existing securities and corporate law frameworks: how to define these "user airdrops" as securities or consumer points, how to incorporate them into tax and disclosure systems, and how to prevent institutions and "professional exploiters" from plundering through scripts and bulk accounts. This means that true large-scale implementation must be accompanied by a complete set of new institutional designs around "users as contributors as equity holders," rather than simply distributing tokens.
In the long run, if similar mechanisms gradually become widespread, they will change the capital and power stratification in the AI era: platforms will no longer just be a one-way structure of "charging users and distributing dividends to capital," but will form a multi-party distribution—users, models, capital, and developers will share growth benefits together. Once this change establishes a model in leading AI or consumer applications, it will pressure traditional equity financing models, forcing more companies to consider "how to institutionalize users as true economic participants beyond the narrative" during the cold start phase, which may be the starting point for the crypto airdrop logic to penetrate broader economic forms.