It was with sadness that I read the recent announcement that the Creative Coin Fund (@cccf) has ceased operations.
At the same time, I can well appreciate founder @cliffagreen's explanation that the project had become an all-consuming time — and financial — hog. Sadly, that tends to be the way of many community projects: they require an extraordinary amount of time and energy... and often involve running "at a deficit" for 2-3 years before reaching that "Critical Mass" point where they develop a life of their own.
What's Next?
So, Therefore, Next...?
I have much gratitude, though!
The CCCF project served as a valiant "rescue attempt" for the previously foundering Creative Coin Community, and definitely helped revive the idea of a community for artists and creatives on Hive... as well as a way to offer some additional rewards for creative content.
Along the way, there was a partnership with @worldbuilder and the Worldbuilding Community as part of which the Writer's Token (WIT) came into being. Of course, there's a whole story of its own, there!
Of course, I had/have considerable interest in both the CCCF and Worldbuilding projects as a substantial stakeholder in both CCC (+/- 76,000 tokens) and WIT (128,000+ tokens).
The Never-Ending Challenge
The ever-present challenge of any community with a token that bills itself as "a reward" is that recipients of said reward often want to turn the tokens they are rewarded into "money," so they can buy bread, and cat food, and such things.
Consequently, there is a pervasive flow of sellers of the attached token. Absent a profoundly compelling reason to hold tokens rather than sell them, the market typically has to be artificially subsidized to prevent the token value from declining towards zero.
The argument could be made that the value of holding is in being able to earn curation rewards, but there's that word again: "Rewards." So now you may well have some people "holding," but they still want to sell their recent rewards, and the selling pattern resumes.
I like being under that warm lamp...
Standalone Equilibrium?
So we are still left with the question: "Why should I hang ON to these, rather than SELL them?" Moreover, how do we find something that resembles a buy/sell equilibrium? Moreover, how to we create a "compelling reason" to buy in, in the first place?
I don't have any quick and easy answers to that... but it's definitely something worth considering, at length, because it's an issue most communities wrestle with.
In the interim, I plan to hang onto my stash!
That's all for this update... thanks for stopping by!
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Curator Cat, April 17th, 2022