Offline, they’re kind of honest about the fact that the product worked just fine without blockchain and without a token, but the token is undeniably more popular and marketable than the original service.
Their company is one of the companies often shared as an example of a good blockchain company, but ironically the product worked just fine (better, even) without all of the blockchain and token stuff at the center.
Watching them has also exposed a lot of the darker sides of the space. It became trivially easy for them to raise money once they did it as a token that they got listed on exchanges, but of course the investors wanted to invest and get tokens in return, which they then could immediately flip on exchanges after doing a PR push about how they invested in the tokens. Who were they flipping to? People who wanted to buy the tokens because they saw that the big name investors had invested in the company. They basically bootstrapped the demand for the token.
My friends also receive a lot of their compensation in the tokens. They were briefly very wealthy, but due to lockups and vesting schedules they couldn’t immediately sell. The token price has been sliding ever since the initial PR push.