The podcast 《When Shift Happens》 invites Anand Gomes, co-founder and CEO of Paradex and Paradigm, for an interview. The discussion starts with how founders keep moving forward through illness, bear markets, and market downturns, and then expands to why Paradex chooses to build on Ethereum—its insistence on privacy and decentralization principles in the ecosystem—and why a Perp DEX could become core infrastructure for the future of network finance.
However, the most notable part in the latter segment of the interview is Gomes’ criticism of the crypto industry’s “TGE” culture. He bluntly says that crypto’s long-standing bad reputation for speculation, “harvesting,” and rug pulls owes much of its cause to many teams treating a Token Generation Event—namely the token generation event—as the liquidity exit for the team to leave the market. In recent years, the community has even started to reinterpret TGE in another way: not Token Generation Event, but “Team’s Gonna Exit.”
(Musk court testimony says: besides Bitcoin, most crypto is fraud)
TGE: From Token Generation Event to Team’s Gonna Exit
When the host asks about Paradex’s upcoming token launch, how should the community judge whether a team is doing a real Token Generation Event or a “Team’s Gonna Exit”? Gomes says this redefinition comes from Paradex community member Lazarello. He believes that although the phrase carries irony, it precisely captures a problem the crypto industry has faced for many years.
Traditionally, TGE refers to Token Generation Event—when a project’s token is officially generated and enters the market for free trading. It’s similar to a crypto project’s IPO: after the team has built the product, community, and users over the long term, this is an important moment when the market prices the token.
But in the crypto market, TGE is often distorted into a team’s exit tool. Gomes says bluntly that many teams will issue tokens at inflated valuations, then sell off through OTC, back channels, or other methods. After that, the team disappears, the product stalls, and the price chart keeps sliding for the next 12 to 24 months. He points out that this is one of the sources of crypto’s bad reputation: teams don’t need to truly build a product, achieve product-market fit, or generate long-term revenue like traditional startups do—they can instead quickly earn massive wealth through token issuance.
In other words, in the context of 2026, TGE is no longer just a neutral token listing event; it has become a governance and integrity issue that must be re-examined. What the market should really ask isn’t “When will this token be listed?” but “After it’s listed, will the team still be forced to stand on the same side as the community?”
Gomes criticizes: repeat issuers are instead praised by the market—a ridiculous phenomenon
Gomes further criticizes that the crypto market lacks sufficient regulation and accountability mechanisms, allowing certain repeat token-issuing founders to still receive attention from the market even if their projects performed poorly in the past—simply because they’re “going to issue a new coin.” In his view, this is an extremely unhealthy phenomenon. Some people’s real reputation doesn’t come from building useful products, but merely from “having issued tokens before.” What’s even more absurd is that when these founders launch new tokens for the third or fourth time, the market sometimes treats it as a positive signal.
He believes that this culture makes it difficult for the crypto industry to shed its image of speculation and scams, and it forces genuine long-term builders to prove themselves to an even higher standard that they are not here to “Team’s Gonna Exit.”
Paradex proposes the TAG framework: transparency, alignment, and governance
To respond to this issue, Gomes says that when designing tokenomics, Paradex internally developed a “Transparency, Alignment, Governance” framework—i.e., transparency, alignment of incentives, and governance. This framework includes four core principles: team and community alignment, investor and community alignment, radical transparency, and value accumulation.
Most importantly, the Paradex team ties 80% of the team’s tokens to performance milestones. That means that after the TGE, each year the foundation and board will publish annual milestones to the community. If the team fails to achieve these publicly stated goals, the related tokens cannot be sold.
Gomes believes this differs from the common “time-based unlock” approach in most crypto projects. Traditional time-based unlock only means a year has passed, so the team can sell tokens, regardless of whether that year truly created value for the community. Paradex instead wants the right to sell team tokens to be connected to revenue, product growth, token value, or other measurable outcomes. He even analogizes this design to Elon Musk’s performance-based compensation plan: it’s not that compensation is earned just because time has passed; it must be earned by completing specific milestones.
Not only lockups—also bans using derivatives and OTC to cash out indirectly
The host presses further: Gomes, having previously run an options business at an institution like Paradigm, should clearly know that there are many ways in the market to cash out without directly selling tokens, such as through derivatives, hedging tools, or OTC structures. How does Paradex ensure the team won’t take this route? Gomes responds that Paradex’s token grant agreements to the team include clear provisions banning the team from using derivatives, hedging tools, or other similar methods to bypass the restrictions. If the team does so, it would violate the agreement.
That is to say, Paradex isn’t just claiming externally “we won’t sell.” Instead, it locks the team’s behavior into a verifiable framework through contracts and agreements. Gomes says this is how Paradex wants to prove to the market that it’s a long-term builder. The real point isn’t to convince everyone to trust the founder’s slogans, but to turn commitments into structure—so the community can actually observe, verify, and track them.
Bear market token issuance? Gomes: what truly matters is the product, not the months
In the final part of the interview, the host asks whether launching a token in a bear market would be a disadvantage for Paradex. Gomes says that if you extend the timeframe to a five-year scale, whether a project ultimately succeeds won’t depend on whether the token was issued in February, March, or October.
He believes trying to time the market precisely is itself a mistake. If a team can really predict market highs and lows, then they wouldn’t need to start a business—they could just trade instead. For true builders, the core questions always remain: Is the product good enough? Do users like this brand and community? Does the project truly deliver value and utility?
Gomes also says that the market’s overemphasis on the timing of TGE comes from the fact that too many projects don’t have real products, no revenue, and no fundamentals—they only use the listing as the main stage for performance. But Paradex sees itself as having real revenue and a trading business, so it shouldn’t be measured with the same short-term token-issuing logic.
From runaway TGE to governance-style TGE
In the 2026 crypto market, the term TGE has already undergone a semantic shift. In the past, TGE was an important milestone for a project moving toward marketization; but after inflated-valuation listings, team cash-outs, long drawdowns in token prices, and founders disappearing again and again, TGE also became the most suspicious moment for the market. When the community mocks it as “Team’s Gonna Exit,” it signals that the crypto industry can no longer persuade investors using only vision, narratives, and FDV packaging.
If TGE is an event that creates wealth, then the team must design institutions that can prove it won’t exit first. Lockups shouldn’t be just time limits; they should be tied to performance milestones. Transparency shouldn’t be only marketing slogans; it should be implemented through disclosures of revenue and expenditures. Governance shouldn’t be only token voting; it should make the team, investors, and the community bear the same set of risks and outcomes.
Gomes’ core message is clear: crypto’s bad reputation isn’t because of token issuance itself, but because too many teams treat token issuance as the endpoint. The only thing that can truly flip TGE’s image is letting the market see that even after token issuance, the team still can’t easily walk away.
This article “Crypto’s bad reputation comes from runaway token issuance! New interpretation of old terminology: TGE is Team’s Gonna Exit” was first published on Chain News ABMedia.
