I have been closely following and holding the token since ICO and I can say “Link” post is amazing. She completely summarised the main issue of 0xProject. Call after call, email after email, I’m trying to explain this to the team.
A network effect can’t gain traction if you can’t start the wheel.
Why People care of Uniswap and others except 0x today? Because of their beautiful Github Repo and API saving 30% gas less?
Nope they attracted users and ton of free press coverage because of the free money they gave away. This created a word of mouth that boosted usage of the protocol. And when you have users, MM arrive by themselves, and when you have all that the wheel turn exponentially and you become #1.
The mistake you made and you keep on doing is to think volume and users will come by themselves only because of the cheapest gas cost you advertise. But users don’t care of that. If they care of gas efficiency they go to trade on Cex or L2 Dex.
Remember, at the end, the one who always win are the ones with users. Once you get users, you can do everything and hire a ton of dev. to improve your tech and become the leader network with a beautiful tech. (Facebook, twitter…). Talk to any VC, they’d tell you the same. At the time back in 2007, they were more beautiful and advanced UI than Twitter… But all of them lost the game and closed because Twitter got the user traction than the other didn’t have. A network as beautiful and advanced it is, but without a well dynamic user acquisition can’t work and become a network.
Everybody know that the best marketing in crypto is money. Uniswap, now a 20B market cap project is making huge volume with a shitty product. You could win 200 times. But you are blocked on the idea to inceltivize in a clear way your token holders. That would have given you a huge press and gave you the chance to put fuel to your rocket ship and start the network effect and get your brand on the medias and users.
1inch, Uni, Bake, Sushi… All of them might be pump and dump, but they are used and noticed by users and press. Matcha is barely noticed. It’s unfair but that’s crypto.
I also made the mistake to build my previous startup in a proper technically and well dev. before launch but when others have the mic to talk to users/press and you don’t have the mic, then you can yell as much as you want to say that your product is the best…
At least, rewarding the users with the duration of staking or deflationary mechanism would help to make any random holder believe today their token and investment will be worth much more in case you succeed later.
More time goes, and more the risk to hold the ZRX token is higher due to competition getting bigger. More times goes, and more the other projects are in the front line and less people would be inclined to put their money at risk holding or staking for a few %.
Put yourself in an investor shoes (why put my funds at risk) when I’m getting 15% APY staking ETH that is a secure asset less inclined to competition, delisting, failure, SEC… or Compound USDC at 6% if I’m being very risk adverse…
There are absolutely 0 interest to risk betting on you for such a low reward vs. risk. If I put $100K at risk, I want to make sure that this risk = exponential reward.
Now with Uniswap, risk is getting even bigger, and reward is not to a point where capital make sense to be locked.
I would like to know that the fact that I stake now, give me privilege in terms of APY, deflationary mechanism… compared to someone that will enter only if they see the project is taking off.
If nothing is done to retain remaining holders and increase new holders to stake now, this is going to be difficult once we enter the bear market…
One note, I disagree with the post saying that we get a 10% APY. This data is extrapolated from 1 month of extreme bull market on a full year. The full 2020 APY on the few month Matcha was live - gas cost would be more around 2%/3%.
90% of the time, crypto market is in bear and trades reduce considerably specially that all pump and dump tokens are ERC. I’d be curious to know the exchanged volume during that period and hence the APY 90% of the time.