Where it gets strange is if your tokens are picked up by an exchange. What happens if someone buys your tokens with the expectation that they can sell them to someone else? Then the price of your tokens might rise, and they've made a profit. Does that count as expectation of profit?
If I understand it right, your hypothetical is just a kickstarter project where a funding level reward is a "virtual token" and just as say a reward of a t-shirt this token doesn't represent equity in the project? Would anyone expect the value of the t-shirt to go up? Is it possible, yeah actually, imagine if Apple originated through crowdfunding, I bet that original crowdfunding t-shirt might sell on the secondary market, so it all boils down to if there was a subjective belief of a profit or a reasonable personable would have expectation of profit.
In other words NINJAs (no income, no job applications) were being rubber stamped for million dollar plus homes with $0 down and 103% financing. And so prices continued to go up because the next NINJA would be approved to buy yesterday's million dollar house of 2 million today.
The same conditions don't exist with ICO tokens.
Why would the supply of money/loans increase unless people were taking out loans to buy houses more than usual, and why would they do that unless they expected the price to increase? The increase in supply of loans happened because people bought houses expecting a profit. So increase in credit supply is a secondary effect that occurs when people are more willing than usual to buy houses on credit. And people are willing to this when they expect a profit.
Because the regulations that limited supply of loans disappeared.
Consider that many more people want a million dollar home than can qualify for the loan (afford it).
Think about how much a single change in regulation would effect the number of people who can qualify for the loan/afford the $1M, example: cash down payment. How many more people can afford a $1M if the regulations for the loan approval require cash down of: 100%, 20% or -3% where the bank pays you $30,000 cash to take the $1M loan to buy the house.
Allowing people to finance 103% of a $1M home significantly changes the number of people who can act on the want (demand), to the extent supply of the homes drops and as a result their prices artificially increase supported by more bad loans.
if the token is part of or essential to a yet-to-be-developed app, but not themselves traded, I cannot see why there would be any sense of an investment. but I would in such cases never market the sale of such tokens as an ICO or crowdfunding. I would offer them up for sale, as a product pure and simple. buy now. use later.
i see it as selling an atari 2600 with no game cartridges, and then selling games later when available.
where does it say that exchanges and trading are required? (serious question...is there any such requirement?)