Most protocol tokens decide what they want to be at launch and then spend years rationalizing it. Cleon picks the smaller scope on purpose: $CLEON does not gate any core action. Minting a persona, publishing a skill, calling an agent, and contributing to governance work without holding it.
What the token does coordinate is the long-running stuff a protocol can't decide for itself — emissions to skill publishers, weighting on registries, and treasury direction. That work benefits from skin in the game; gas-equivalent fees do not.
The fair launch posture follows from this. No private allocations, no team unlocks ahead of the community, no reserved supply traded as influence. The distribution exists to seed the parties already doing the work, not the parties closest to the launch.
This is also why $CLEON does not appear in the critical path of an integration. A team can build against personas and skills, ship a runtime, and serve users for months before it needs to think about the token at all. That is the test of whether the token is actually optional — and it is.