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Getting more Atom doesn’t count as adding any value to Atom. Emissions are just practical means of payment for providing PoS. Emissions decrease the value of Atom by printing more of them.
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It’s not even validating ledger transactions that create value. That can be done much more cheaply by 30 yo tech running on a bank server.
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Governance itself isn’t providing any value unless it’s governing something of value.
So what is that something?
That something is the unique value of the services the Hub provides. That’s it. Any additional value isn’t value, it’s just speculation demand at best. Demand is not value (see meme coins, beanie babies, Franklin Mint “collectibles”, Thomas Kincaid paintings, etc). More precisely that value is what customers receive when they pay for Hub services with outside coin.
The way to pay for Hub services with outside coin is to buy service tokens. Aka ATOM.
Nowhere else is the Hub creating value. It’s all in how those services are valued in fiat over time. Great UX, secure as heck, fast, ubiquitous, safe, trusted, shared, reliable, easy, non-volatile, long lived, all that.
** The Hub is a service provider providing a service. That is the value. **
The Hub does not create new value any other way. Everything else is just moving that value around, controlling & managing that value, sustaining it, exchanging it, inflating it to spend away, growing the service that is the actual value provided, etc.
Therefore Atom can only ever be worth what consumers of Txs are willing to pay for the Hub PoS chain. (Unlike a liquidity service protocol where outside value denominations are held and leveraged toward TVL). Atom can’t be worth itself (inflation). Again it’s only worth what people are willing to pay in exchange for the value Atom confers. Even if an Atom was 60 usd right now, it wouldn’t actually confer that much value when redeemed for Hub services. People would just be speculating that it will eventually be worth that because they see the Hub as providing an increasingly valuable service.
Every time delegators & validators are paid with emissions they are removing value from Atom itself by way of “printing” more Atom. So how does that value get put back into the Atom token? By getting rid of some of those tokens elsewhere. By burning fees. Why fees? Fees are the only real value intake for the whole Atom market because they’re the only place where outside value is exchanged for the goods & services (created value) that the Atom token confers. That value is exchanged sustainably by “teleporting” it over to emissions.
This isn’t crypto stuff really. It has nothing to do with coding or tech expertise at all. It’s fundamentals of market dynamics, value creation & exchange.
The Hub creates value by providing a service. That value is conferred by exchanging an otherwise worthless token. Thats the p̶r̶o̶b̶l̶e̶m̶ s̶p̶a̶c̶e̶ opportunity space.