Now that things are a little calmer after HF 23 we can settle back to normalcy a little on the Engine team.
We're currently working on three projects:
- Logistics of the BEE/WORKER BEE airdrop
- Implementing a Market Maker smart contract
- Deploying NFT markets to a new site: tribaldex.com
Airdrop Logistics
We're prepping for an airdrop to occur for holders of staked ENG and Staked EM to award them BEE and WORKER BEEs (EM equivalent).
The first thing that should happen is that EMFOUR will be airdropped. Anyone holding EMFOUR will receive 4 EM. EMFOUR will be discontinued and delisted.
The second thing that will happen is that users that have ENG and EM staked (and not in the unstaking process) will receive airdrops. In my experience airdrops that go all at once lead to dumping. In order to avoid that we're going to space the airdrop over time.
As mentioned before for every ENG you hold you'll get 0.12 BEE. This will occur over a period of 12 weeks with each week giving you 0.01 Bee. At the time of this writing that approximately quadruples the value of what you hold.
For EM you'll get 12 WORKER BEEs, 1 per week, for each EM that you hold. Note, a WORKER BEE costs 1 HIVE where as EM costs 100 STEEM.
Starting this Monday I'm going to enable WORKER BEE mining on Hive-Engine. There's 100k BEE per year that goes to miners. I've put 50k miners up for sale on the market. This is in addition to miners that will be airdropped and or converted to WORKER BEEs. If you'd like to receive any of the platform inflation, or vote for witnesses after the upcoming system upgrade (separate 100k BEE/yr mining pool) you'll want to own these.
Note, the Engine front ends will still be private and separate as a stakeholder in the governance process.
If you'd like to trade your ENG/EM for BEEs or for WORKER BEEs that's currently enabled through this link: https://converter-api.hive-engine.com/convert/
Start with small values before you sell the farm to make sure you understand how it's working.
EX: If your account owns 10,000 ENG and 100 EM, and you don't buy or sell anymore and you keep it staked for the next 12 weeks you'll own 1200 BEE and 12 EM. 10000 EM is worth like $200 right now. 1200 BEE is worth ~$576.
If you buy more ENG/EM along the way and stake it you'll be able to get additional airdrops. If you sell some or unstake it you'll get less.
If you don't care about the airdrop and want to get in before everyone else you can use the converter and go from ENG/EM --> BEE or WORKER BEE.
Tribe staking requirements start in June.
Market Maker Contracts
Many people use trading bots to help them make money as money sloshes around in markets. One subset of trading bots are market makers. A market maker puts in a buy order and a sell order at the same time. There's typically a "spread" in between them.
Imagine something on average costs $1. A market maker would always be willing to buy it for $0.99 cents and always be willing to sell it for $1.01. You'd make one percent every time someone chooses to buy it from you or sell it from you. With enough volume and enough time that can become a very profitable venture.
For the exchange it's critical to have these as they can serve to provide an incentive to leave liquidity on the exchange (it can passively earn money). As there's more liquidity the exchange can get used more frequently and it creates a nice upward cycle.
Also, the market makers will end up being the true beneficiaries of the fee structure of Engine. On nearly all platforms you get fees taken out with every trade, which can screw with market makers. Here, market makers have feeless transactions and get to keep 100% of the profit until they cash out.
Progress
We've fleshed out the design of an MVP market maker smart contract for Engine, and are beginning to code it now. It will function on both Steem-Engine and on Hive-Engine.
We're planning on offering a basic version as well as a premium market maker bot for those that get into it.
You'll sign a form with keychain, and it will authorize the smart contract to place buy and sell orders for you. Those won't live on the steem/hive blockchain but they will live on the side chain as they'll be stored in the blocklog of the side chain.
The account that signs will then start seeing market orders placed on the exchange on both sides of the token(s) that you choose.
Rough sketch of the form
- What account do you want to authorize to trade using the market maker?
- What token do you want the market maker to trade?
- What is the maximum price you're willing to buy the token for?
- What is the minimum price you're willing to sell the token for?
- What is the maximum amount of STEEM/HIVE you're willing to buy with in a single order?
- What is the maximum amount of tokens you're willing to sell in a single order?
- What's the minimum spread between bid and asks before the bot won't place orders any closer?
Answering those questions will ultimately create a list of settings for the market maker to use. You'll click authorize, it'll burn a small amount of ENG/BEE and it will start placing orders.
We'll have a separate form to send to adjust settings (for a small fee/burn) or disable (free).
We'll add premium features as well. We envision staked ENG/BEE being used to power this smart contract. Tentative cost structure:
Basic service: 100 ENG/BEE burn to enable service, and 200 ENG/BEE staked. Basic service allows trading on only a single market pair at a time.
Premium service: Another 100 ENG/BEE burn to enable the premium version, 1000 ENG/BEE staked as a base amount, and an additional 200 ENG/BEE staked for each trading pair configured (you are no longer limited to just a single pair).
We can't allow unlimited processing for free as it eventually erodes a smart contract platform's ability to operate, so these fees are designed to be both fair and sustainable for the platform.
More detail will come with the premium features, but basically finer control over how the market maker will function.
If you'd like to see a market maker in action the STEEM/SBD internal market has one (or several) operating though these days the action is a little slower than it used to be.
https://steemitwallet.com/market
NFT Marketplace work
We started with steem-engine. Then we made next.steem-engine.com which has some additional features particularly around the ability to create NFTs (and a better market view). We have since added hive-engine. We're working on next.hive-engine.com, but we're going to move it to a new site: tribaldex.com.
Tribaldex.com will start as next.hive-engine. But we're implementing new features that we're been working on for months. Most notably we're starting down the road of implementing the NFT markets.
If you're unsure of what an NFT marketplace might look like check out https://splinterlands.com/?p=market.
So, we'll offer a big catalog of all possible NFTs for sale, but we're also going to enable our users to register themselves as a shop, or register new groups (social or business). Any group will have a shop as well.
So, you'll be able to go to the whole catalog like shopping from amazon or ebay or you'll be able to go to just one user and be like "oh, what shirts are my hip friend Lilly selling today?"
Users (including groups) will then have the ability to make a listing for something to sell and additionally be able to actually sell it via an NFT. Why the distinction?
A listing is just like saying "Hey guys, I have a litter of puppies. I'd like to sell them. If you'd like to buy them please contact me by my skype id: dogbreeder82@skype.com."
An actual sale includes the listing and additionally offers NFTs. It's more more like: "Hey guys, I have a litter of puppies for sale. You can see attached 8 NFTs. Each NFT is named after a dog, I've included a picture of each: Snuffles, Spike, Lorax, Pingu, Headbutt, Lacey, Peanut, and Lilac. Please purchase the NFT and then we can arrange pickup. If you have any questions contact me at dogbreeder82@skype.com."
It's an aggressive goal, but I'd like to see elements of the different markets working in May.
Market million dollar question:
Why would anyone use these markets? Why not just use Amazon?
Well, first off the fees will be waaaaay less. I'm currently targetting 5% market fees where as major marketplaces are typically between 15-30%.
Also, the ability to accept crypto and your token, especially for tribe owners, I think will be a game changer. Hand out small amounts of tokens for blogging about you and your products, get new customers, and the blogger builds an audience and gets paid. What's not to love?
Engine million dollar question
isn't all this shit doomed the second that SMTs/HMTs come out?
No, two things. Numerous improvements have already happened making Nitrous even faster and better. Loading time is down, pricing is down, and functonality is up. With higher priced tokens and the halving around the corner I think it'll be a little easier to see why you might want a tribe.
Secondly, you may not want your token living on the base layer. If it reprensents something physical or something you're planning on suporting you may not want it to automatically fork just cause a group of people decide to make a fork of Hive.
Thirdly, I imagine the market for SMTs/HMTs is going to be pretty rough to start. You'll want multiple currencies, market makers, and a few other things, and I'm not sure there's going to be volume to get started.
Distribution is like 10% of tokenomics, but the majority is "what are the sinks?" If you want the token to have value it needs to be useful. For social media sites it has to get you eyeballs. For everything else there has to be product(s) or service(s) it's tied to. Building a giant marketplace for tokens is all about enabling utility for your token out of the gate. you won't find that with SMT/HMTs.
Upgrades. Upgrading the layer two doesn't risk halting the chain, and if we design the smart contracts well may not even include having to upgrade the central node, but just individual contracts. Layer 2 platforms are by their very nature substantially more agile than layer 1 blockchains.