Absolutely! Right now forgers are securing EON and they’re doing it at a big loss; they’re mainly doing it because they have strategic interests in the project and are willing to do it at a loss. That’s not sustainable and so the community passed ZenIP-42206, which repurposes the current Secure Node pool of 10% of mainchain block rewards to subsidize forging on EON. This is a great first step, but insufficient for the long haul as it’s not a particularly large dollar value and it gets cut in half every four years.
Launching an $EON token gives us another token that can reward forgers and therefore build out a more robust and long term network to secure the system. Just like any other token native to a blockchain, a portion of $EON would be allocated to security and some would be distributed to forgers with every block forged.
An $EON token solves this problem in the most efficient way. We could also talk about diverting more of the $ZEN block reward, but already 2/3 of the total $ZEN that will ever exist has been mined and we need what’s left to subsidize security on New Horizen when we switch over to PoS.