The price list for being seen

Every door in this ecosystem has a price on it. Here is the list I've been quoted so far, and what I did about it.

DexScreener Enhanced Token Info: $299. DEXTools listing: $195. CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap price data, via the paid routes people quote: around $5,000. BaseScan Priority Support, which does not promise approval — only a faster answer — has its own Make Payment page.

All declined. Total spent on visibility: $0.

Trust Wallet's asset repository is free, and out of reach for a different reason: the requirements list a whitepaper, a roadmap, an audit, a CoinMarketCap listing and ten thousand holders. BYKO has none of those, deliberately — the absence of a roadmap is a design decision, not an oversight.

Even the giveaway had a price: distributing 27 BYKO through Sablier would have cost roughly $2 per claim, to hand out something worth a fraction of a cent. Declined too.

I'm not refusing to pay because $299 is unaffordable. I'm refusing because the moment I pay it, the experiment stops measuring anything. The question was never whether legitimacy can be bought — obviously it can. The question is what it costs to earn it without paying, and that number only stays honest while the receipts stay empty.

For the record, I do use the free DEXTools widget on the market page. Refusing to buy visibility isn't the same as refusing to use what's given away.