Omg all tokens on Hive are shit!
Okay, all jokes and clickbait aside, let's talk about tokens on Hive for a bit. I'm going to be honest, aside from a few of them (SPS, LEO, (posh :p) and very few others) I would never put a single hive into them. You may ask me why and yes that is what this post is going to be about but also about some other things and something I would like to help with in the very near future.
Although hive-engine brought us the ability that Steemit never managed to and everyone was very hyped about being able to create proof of brain tokens (no, not the very unoriginally named PoB token with a very unoriginal supply nor any real innovation behind it), it seemed that not many took the opportunity to create some real value behind them. There have quite frankly not been any that have caught my interest where I'd be "oh wow, I really would like to earn and invest in this token (with the above mentioned being the exception)". This might just be me who used to hunt altcoins back in the day on bitcointalk and became quite strict in terms of distribution and premines, etc, but goddamn do many of those tokens have really awful distributions.
Hey, I get it, it cost quite a bit of Hive to create the token and front-end and enable staking and all other costs associated with hive-engine (don't get me started on deposits and withdrawals still being 1% each way), but are you really going to give yourself 20-50% of the supply from day 1? and no, putting some aside towards "curation accounts" doesn't change the fact you are giving yourself an ungodly amount of a premine. Who would want to invest in something like that? I'm not dissing all of them, I realize some of them have some solid plans on what to do with the premines that would possibly go back to making the token and ecosystem better, but there have been very little proof of that happening with a majority of them.
You may say that the Hive ecosystem is too small thus not enough value has gone into the tokens to give them a fighting chance to prove themselves and you may not be completely wrong there. I do think, however, that if distribution was better more serious investors would have taken it more seriously. There is plenty of proof of that with LEO and how well it did and is doing and even more proof with SPS and all the other tokens involved with @splinterlands. It wouldn't just be @azircon and @onealfa interested in investing in them if they showed some more promise, there would definitely be more bigger stakeholders but also medium and smaller stakeholders if things would seem a bit more fair all around. I know I would be interested but that the initial distribution has been something that has pushed me off very hard.
Distribution
You know what would be cool? More airdrops.
Not many of the tokens I have looked at have even bothered doing airdrops aside from the ones mentioned, they all seem to want to give themselves a huge chunk while having the community work for them, there's nothing wrong with the other but the former I do not agree with.
It is one of the reasons I respect what @3speak is doing with their 1:1 airdrop to hive holders, same goes for @ragnarok.game and something I need to again mention without seeming like I'm making this post about POSH as well, to actually buy into your own token. Is that too baffling for some of you? Is it blowing your mind?
But acid, why should I buy up my own token I spent 500 hive to create when I can just give myself x% of the starting supply, silly.
To show us that you are truly invested in it and want it to do well? The old saying of "put your money where your mouth is" fits rather well here and I don't see many doing it. Just paying for token creation is not enough in my opinion.
Tokenized communities
There are so many ways you could distribute a new token to authors it hurts when I think about how no one does it so let's talk about communities for a bit. I think one of the biggest reasons why no one is even attempting to create tokens for their communities is either that they've seen how unsuccessful and uninteresting most tribe tokens are or that they think it is too expensive to either create one or having to pay 1% to deposit and withdraw each time. 1% may sound like a lot but deposit 100 Hive back and forth 50 times and you'll be down 100 Hive. (yes I know, the 100 Hive will keep decreasing thus 1% will be more like 0.099 Hive after the first deposit, etc so it's only correct if you deposit and withdraw exactly 100 Hive each time).
I don't think it's the latter that is stopping most people, though, I think it's mainly how so many have not been successful and I believe unfair distribution is a big part of it so it has gotten me into thinking. How come no one has used this immutable database we have to distribute tokens in other ways than "earn it or buy them"? I realize the way that one coin did their distribution on Steemit back in the day was rather stupid and reckless if you remember which one I'm talking about that only cared about what your reputation number was which determined how many tokens you got. Surely there most be better ways, though?
As many of you know we at @ocd run a community incubation program where we support different communities to not just curate and reward authors posting and socializing in their community but also monetize curation and moderation which is something unheard of on Reddit but made possible on Hive.
So how could someone tokenize these communities and at the same time make sure they are distributed properly?
One idea I had in mind that I would like to try out with willing communities, is to distribute the initial airdrop based on authors, commenters and voters on posts submitted to your community. This is something that would make sense on many levels and retrospective airdrops are becoming quite popular in the crypto space. It fairly rewards those that who have made the community more active with their posts, and engagement and at the same time those who have voted posts in said community to help it grow. Naturally the leader of the community must have posted there as well and spent most of his voting power there too considering that's the niche he is interested in thus he is running the community and same goes for the moderators and helpers.
It also would not be difficult to track this data and determine what kind of airdrops everyone would get.
Let's take as an example the Architecture community ran by @storiesoferne and what you would query to get the data.
- Who has posted in the community
- How many posts has each of these users posted in the community
- How much rewards in total has each of these users earned in the community
- How many comments has each of these users posted in the community
- How much post rewards has each of these users earned in the community
- How much curation rewards has any hive account earned in the community
Now all you do is look at the data, determine how much % authors would get, how much % comments would get and how much % curators would get. Remove some muted accounts or known and unanimous bad apple accounts like haejin from the airdrop (or accounts that are curating with delegations of others such as @ocdb (unless they agree to distribute the airdrop with their delegators)) and you've got yourself a pretty good distribution from the get go.
Now of course with a market tied to the token you will have to expect quite a lot of sell pressure from suddenly airdropping a ton of tokens to everyone but at the same time you don't have to airdrop too much of the total supply initially or have a higher inflation to reward those that hold on to their tokens.
I am sure that not only would it get more people interested in investing into such tokens knowing they may be oversold due to the initial airdrop and depending on the plans of the community with the token, but it also removes the "premine" from the equation giving investors relief that there won't be a sudden owner going rogue and just dumping all his tokens either instantly once it hits a certain price and liquidity or that they keep selling consistently over time pretending to be putting it to work or whatever while others may be buying a token with no future in sight and maybe the intention was to always just make the most out of selling it after initial buildup. This also gives the creators/owners of the community a chance to not just earn the token themselves but also buy into it to show their community and other investors that they want it to succeed. It is way harder to sell stake you've put effort into earning compared to just having given yourself 50% of the supply a year ago for having created a token.
Future plans
OCD would like to help communities wanting to tokenize with funding and distribution help but similar to our requirements to joining the incubation if you are a tribe (very strict most often due to the distribution) we would reserve certain requirements of what you do with the token as well. This can of course be discussed but we believe that starting tokens the right way will bolster the community and the ecosystem of Hive a lot more and we would like to be part of it in an advisory way.
If you reading this are running a community and have thought about wanting to create a token for it but aren't too sure how to get started or if it is legal in your location to do so, feel free to get in touch with us on our Discord. We are of course going to prefer doing this with a community already in our incubation first because we know a lot more about the community and owner and it would probably be best to give it a try first but we also wouldn't mind incubating communities that do this kind of fair distribution of their niche community on their own - that would have to go through our community incubation application channel in that case.
Please let us know your thoughts regarding this, though. Before you start typing out a really long response about a certain token I would like to let you know that I have not been all that up to date whith what tokens exist nowadays and how they work or have been distributed so don't feel like I'm calling them all out for being "unfair" in this post.
