I wish I had a good answer for you but I don't. There are just too many unkowns, but I'll do my best to lay out what I consider "fair" and some of the unknowns

I wish I had a good answer for you but I don't. There are just too many unkowns, but I'll do my best to lay out what I consider "fair" and some of the unknowns that I think play into the calculations: 1. Longevity - will people buy into the concept and the token or whatever? will the project even be completed? For established projects with many participating people / developers / companies - This multiplier might only be 2,3 or 5x... i.e. Ethereum has many owners of eth, miners, pools and technologies that rely on it like token coins, etc... whereas mySuperUnknownCoinThatDoesntEvenExistYet might not even have a whitepaper, in fact it might only exist on the back-of-a-napkin or the creator/inventors own mind... multipliers up to 1000x come to mind. 2. Value - What's the value proposition and why is that valuable? Do/would people even agree that it's valuable and want it? Can people exchange real currency for it? Is there a way to cash out? - consider a well known crypto like bitcoin or ether where so many people have assigned value to it, that other companies have sprung up to participate in the idea, and even financial institutions are creating products around it... then observe that even in that case there's still so much volatility in its perceived value you couldn't be sure that getting paid 10k worth of tokens today would be worth 10k next year/month/or week. again multipliers from 2x to 2000x seem reasonable... ( possible solutions/mitigations? payments in "credits of value" or something maybe where you'd credit 10k of value to a person, and someday if the project doesn't go to hell, they can cash-out 10k worth of whatever. ) 3. Early vs late participation - this goes back to how well the thing is established and how much work is left to be done. Just like any other startup if I'm employee #2 vs. employee #200 there's a big difference in the amount of upside I should be looking at. ( anything goes here for multipliers - this is more of a negotiation point, but maybe set something up for the 1st 1-5 employees to get 500-1000x upside? 6-20 100-200x ? who knows ) Anyway you'd have to take 1,2, and 3 into consideration, add up all the multipliers then lets say you were going to pay someone like me 100k of value as your 1st coding hire ( let's say employee #2 or technical co-founder) for a person/year of work...if I worked for you for 10 years with no raises I could expect to get paid 1 million. ( realize I can take part of that cash and invest it, making perhaps at least 10% a year ) Now if you wanted to pay me like 10k in cash, and 90k in "credit" or "stock options" or equity-whatever... that 90k of value today can't be invested, and might be worth ZERO in 10 years, so I think it should have something like a potential upside of 100x-1000x or 9million-90million in 10 years on a successful exit... which could be getting bought or even going public. which is exactly like going to las vegas and "investing" in the roulette wheel of startups... you put one dollar on a number and spin... with any luck you win 36x your bet :) but mostly you just waste time and money...