It's hard to believe that I have been in the crypto blogging game since July of 2016. Almost 9 years coming up. That is really trippy to think about. I'm coming up on almost 12 years in crypto. We have had some highs and lows and there are a lot of things I have seen play out in regards to game theory and keeping community momentum

The real ones will read this because we have all had this fear on some level because we saw the promise of these ecosystems from a freedom of speech perspective, an earnings perspective, and new ways to monetize and host content.

At times we feel like that is slipping away or the promise won't be fulfilled and we are back to the centralized models and don't really have true ownership of our accounts over there and can get the boot at anytime.

Each Cycle A New Mouse Trap Emerges

That is a shitty way of putting it because some of these chains made huge advancements over the legacy chains but if they can't keep their momentum it can really cost you. Sure we can look back and think that if we would have just focused fully on buying Bitcoin at certain lows and just stuck with that strategy maybe we would be ahead or maybe not. I got some huge wins in the alt markets at various times and it has been all part of the game. The game isn't over. It has just begun.

We had the ICO madness, we had the token farm, NFT craze, we have had the resurgence of memes and we have to think what is the next evolution. I have been racking my brain for a long time trying to really see what the next evolution is going to be. There is really more to be had with these blogging ecosystems. After you get past the initial "Raise" or initial excitement can the ecosystem perpetuate and support itself?

STEEM Was There And Botched It

Remember Ned Scott and Dan Larimer? It's like those guys don't even exist anymore which is pretty crazy to think about. @brianphobos is still here. STEEM had the most insane SEO funnel and if they just would have added the Ad Revenue model it would have had escape velocity. Once the tide went out various projects were looking to break away. We had DTube, DLive, Partiko, Steem-Engine, SteemMonsters. We had too many fracture points. Do you guys remember WEKU and Bearshares and Serey? I was on all that other stuff too. I was even a witness on VICE. Of course how can we forget Scorum. I still have some funds out there. Had to come back to add WhaleShares. Almost forgot. The stake weight voting was tweaked in various ways and the power down cycles were adjusted.

Notice how with Google Adsense and X everyone is always trying to figure out the algorithm? I tell you guys to remain a mystery with the women. Unfortunately the same applies for sales. You know why Tai Lopez was so intriguing to everyone? Everyone was like working fulltime to figure out what that guy's actual business was and how he supposedly made his money. HE WAS A MYSTERY.

Tough to do with an open system though. I have thought a lot about it because you want to be upfront with the creators of how the tokenomics work and how they could potentially earn from it right? Maybe you make it so complex that almost no one can really figure it out but they are getting paid. Enough pieces to the puzzle to where it is hard to really calculate the exact outcome.

Work and Revenue

People in Africa are out there mining Cobalt for our batteries. Fucking brutal. We could say they are a net positive to the electric car industry but if they posted a picture of their cat and got an upvote on STEEM or HIVE people might say it is a net drain on the system. Ultimately we need community to produce content to get the engagement but I don't like the premise that it is solely to invest in the token. It isn't generating revenue From Ads or software consulting or anything. As much as Block One ultimately was a scam a part of their business model was they built the EOSIO software and were customizing and consulting with other organizations on the implementations of that. Steemit INC really could have been in that boat too but HIVE isn't structured that way. It is super decentralized which has pros and cons.

Pretty much all centralized social media was VC driven and then Ad Revenue driven / Premium membership driven but you have to reach critical mass and drive A LOT of traffic to really make that occur.

Hosting video content uses up a lot of resources. Running AI engines can use up a lot of resources. All this tracks back to energy basically. People expect it. Suddenly the Arena added the ability to Live Stream video. Very resource intensive and costly. We have seen this play out with DLive and DTube in the early days.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/the-arena

It is less than 1/3rd as valuable as HIVE based on Marketcap and what if Avalanche starts funding it more but it ends up being a net drain on foundation funds? AVAX isn't doing that great. It went to $134 last cycle and right now it is sitting below $18. Other chains are taking a price beating as well.

Telos has the fastest EVM and the native EOSIO side and 0.5s block times and the price has been crushed. Same with WAX. Really focused on gaming and NFTs but once again the price has been crushed. They are both long tailing out and EOS has rebranded and is slipping down the ranks. https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/eos

All These Cryptos Round Trip At Some Point

The ones that make it out have kept the community going and people jump in and take that bet and speculate on the low price. I have had to deal with the round tripping with $ZENA. The over saturation of memes and at the time of the highs SOL was at $260. Right now we are at $145. That takes the wind out of a projects sails if it is traded against it.
https://dexscreener.com/solana/8scrvfvpruyhcguzbbeukn3pe9jmvzmirex51lbiify8

Poor little $ZENA round tripped along with all the other memes over on Solana. The price is rebuilding though and the market cap is higher than it initially started out at and the good thing is the peak price isn't unreachable because it went to around $60K market cap. The timing has to be right and everything needs to be in place.

A long with that the California Dogecoin NFT set has to have the right timing as well.

Bored Ape Yacht Club burned off and long tailed out.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club

Same thing with the Neo Tokyo Citizens
https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/neo-tokyo-citizens

One that has done well has been Pudgy Penguins. Owners are able to license their NFTs. All that being said that whole ecosystem has attracted a lot of money.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/pudgy-penguins

THE TIMING HAS TO BE RIGHT

What is going on with these various platforms?

I see tons of positives and some negatives though all the stuff I mentioned in the title. DTube is done because the Avalon chain is halted and we have been trying to talk through what to do to prevent this type of think from continuing to happen. The original founder left a couple years ago at this point and we have brain stormed some ways forward. There is no liquidity there currently as the former owner operated the bridge to the BSC and the one main centralized exchange Ionomy went down a long time ago.

The STEEM Backed Dollar pricing collapsed with a delisting and that really screwed the pricing up currently. It looks like they finally made an interface for the proposal system over there and there are a few proposals trying to get funding.

The Arena added LIVE Streaming and recently had a solid pump for it's token.

Blurt added a video site but the price is really getting pressed into a long tail. The Market Cap is down to around $28K but I feel like there are still some positives going on over there. Liquidity is low but they still have ProBit and Hive Engine.

DeSo really seemed to get it's teeth knocked out when the founder got sued by the SEC. I haven't checked up on that situation but I think on the original implementation of that social media tech they aren't getting any payouts anymore with it.

Appics that was on Telos which was originally by Mrs Steemit and that group seemed to have went down. That original ICO was back in 2018 or so.

InLeo which I'm posting this through initially has went to another revenue model seemingly based off of the fees generated by their LeoDex ultimately rebuying LEO tokens. I bought a bit to have a small bag. We will see what this mechanism is capable of but it is another potential route to various other assets. They seem to be moving LEO to primarily be on Arbitrum and it seems like they have a similar thinking with the premise of having NFT ability and having someone's profile picture be able to be the PFP.

The Arena did this but it organically happened and the Wide Boys NFTs that people sort of started doing that with weren't really created by the original team so they weren't really able to utilize it as a real revenue source for the team. Also the AVAX Got Nochill meme and COQ Inu memes became the official memes of the Arena but once again those weren't started by the team so driving demand to it doesn't really help the team. Also you can buy a "Ticket" for people's account but that is priced in AVAX and not in Arena so they just weren't driving the demand to their own assets efficiently. I'm going to have congruence with my assets. Arena has a really cool culture though and sometimes I have been on stages and these musicians would play LIVE and it was insanely good. I was like WOWWWW

HIVE

I saved her for last. People are in the dumps about the price potentially but when I take a step back it is honestly pretty insane what has been created on this ecosystem. When I look at Peakd and Ecency and the Hive Engine and other associated stuff it is pretty insane how good it is. When we started on Steemit we were having to host our own pictures.

Hive is the best Web3 implementation out there. Some try to say ICP is alien tech and is the most advanced and it is and has a lot of promise but it isn't built out like HIVE. Yeah you can store data on chain with ICP but files over 2mb aren't easy to deal with. That is part of the reason you don't see a video platform that is hosting the videos actually on chain in those canisters.

Conclusion

So you are wondering if this stake weight voting mechanism is old news? It's going to take the funding to market and build additional games that are really solid and bring in lots of users. I personally don't like the power down cycles and feel like everything should be liquid stake or a very quick unstake if security is being thought about. I don't think others like that really and it makes them hesitate at trying to engage in the ecosystem. Splinterlands being on Hive is huge and if there were 10 games of that magnitude on the platform and the blogging and the thing that people are hesitant to touch is gambling. I understand why people are hesitant with that one.

I personally think a combination of all these tokenomic game theories and value bouncing between the various assets can still work but then there has to be additional revenue generated by some outside funding source like Ads or a premium subscription that people can pay for with a credit card as an option for instance so they don't feel like the have to earn enough of the base currency to justify paying for premium features. It's outside money.

Also harvesting their power and energy from all over the world to create a super collector. The issue with the Coin App or Sweat Token is all that energy utilized isn't really generating anything. Electronium also did this with a mobile app "miner" that wasn't actually mining anything. There is no real work being done. My proposal is to have people mine Monero on their power and their computers which then gets converted to achieve another tier in the system adding value and another outside revenue source.

I had previously done a proposal to have a meme team pumping out memes on other chains and utilizing some of the funds from that to stack funds in a reserve. If there are kids just pumping memes on these launch sites why not have a sophisticated team doing it?

The other thing is merch and real world entertainment where as part of the ecosystem you get entry if certain criteria is met but also people can just pay for straight up tickets which is an additional revenue source. Obviously there is HIVE Fest but what if the whole ecosystem owned a sports team with a home stadium that generated revenue? Once again another outside funding source beyond speculation on the digital assets. I feel like we have just started to see the true power of these DAO as a funding source to launch real world businesses that are brining in outside revenue. It kind of becomes it's own VC firm in a way.

That's all for now. Easier said than done and everything I'm trying to do has to hit the right timing to get the proper momentum in a low of ways. Once there is more going I can add more people to the team and build out the vison.

Additional revenue sources from outside can create a flywheel effect for the assets