I reached a certain zing milestone today that I'm happy about so wanted to talk a little zing as usual, hope ya'll aren't getting bored of that.
This milestone means a lot to me, not because of the amount compared to current distributed supply (~20 million zing) but mostly because of the way it was distributed and launched and me being happy to be in a position where I can invest in my own project for long-term.
Believe it or not, but a lot of people told me it's quite foolish to launch zing the way I did. Things like "that's pretty unnecessary, everyone gives themselves a share, it's just the way it is and has always been" and "what's the point? You've put a lot of work into this, it'd only be fair to get a fair share in your own project". Now I don't wanna make myself out as an angel or as if I'm pulling these semi-quotes out of my ass, there's of course also some who play devil's advocate and have said things like "you're just doing it to sound unique and you can afford to buy into your own token", "you know hivers are dumpers and they'll sell it back to you for close to nothing", etc. And while they may be right with some of that thinking, it's still better to do it that way in my opinion than to just give yourself a share "out of nothing".
Let's dive into some other things here for a bit.
There's also some who say "it's not really fairly launched cause you're getting a lot through POSH" which is also a fair assessment but most of the time not thought out properly. Even though I own POSH as well the project is quite stand-alone in the regard of what it does with its funds and how it'll operate, sure it has Zing's best intentions in mind and won't mind giving away some Zing it's earning through giveaways, promotions, etc, but eventually it will look to take some profit to get some of the Hive back it has placed into the Zing project. Another thing to keep in mind, is that the Hive POSH earned hasn't all come from curation rewards, a lot of it has also come from post rewards. While that is something controversial and in general I wouldn't support any project or entity "farming" post rewards through automated posts just to get the value themselves (unless I know what the funds are being used for and can trust the person that they'll be used for the greater good of Hive - which is what POSH was always set out to do).
POSH was also launched with no premine and founder's share. The only way to obtain it for the first year when no token existed yet was to share Hive links on web2, mainly twitter at the time. All those shares then amounted to an airdrop when the token was created and eventually to become a bit more selfsufficient and be able to hold value to keep people sharing and being able to exchange POSH for Hive it pivoted into giving out half the tokens to delegators as well which gave it value in Hive through curation rewards. So all the POSH claimdrop in Zing is doing now, is giving back value to POSH holders, half as promotion to those already involved in POSH and half to POSH itself which owns close to 50% of the POSH supply it has bought back. On top of it all it even owns a big share of POSH I sold back to it because when I started planning the launch of Zing I didn't want it to seem like this has been something I've been plotting all along, so I got rid of about 70% of my POSH holdings so I wouldn't get too much Zing claimdrops compared to other bigger POSH holders like theycallmedan or vcelier among many others.
Since POSH had to pivot from being about sharing content on web2 and that currently being a small part of it only functioning on Reddit with the automated tracking and reporting, I wanted it to do more instead of just relying on web2 which showed us how quickly they can pull the plug on such projects through raising API costs to unmanageable amounts. Mind you, POSH wasn't just a "leech" in terms of trying to bring people from Twitter over to Hive, it also encouraged and incentivized usage of Twitter itself and I believe is a big reason we have quite a decent presence on Twitter these days, even though one could argue a little echo-chambery and that we're too decent to play dirty with fake attention through bots and paying people to shill us which most other projects do. We're still there and active which is great for Hive, even after POSH stopped working at its full potential it had by using API's. The best thing I could think of POSH to do is to continue to provide value to its holders, those who either earned it by bringing traffic over to Hive and helping our web2 presence increase, or those who selflessly bought the token knowing the only thing it was good for at the time was to incentivize people doing the former. When I launch projects I look to keep them up and maintained for a long time, after all I know Hive will go on forever so I'm here for as long as I can and I want to see to it that my projects do the same and didn't want POSH to just fade into nothingness cause the walled gardens kept rising over web2. POSH having been fairly launched and distributed also made it easy to do something else with it and more.
While POSH will continue to work on proof of sharing and maintain the current working options such as Reddit, it will also continue to kickstart by providing starting capital to projects it believes will do good for Hive long term. While Zing also belongs to me it doesn't mean that it will only look to invest in projects I lead or am a part of, it's just doing it now cause it needs a lot of trust and knowing the value it gets back won't be 0 from having spent a lot of Hive kickstarting projects. It also needs to know those projects have potential and won't just fade away like many others we've seen happen on Hive either cause of bear markets or founders going AWOL.
Lastly about POSH and Zing, yes, zing could've started without POSH's funding and this would've made it a bit fairer. The reason we didn't go that route is because there's so many projects that promise a lot and have close to nothing to show for it. I'm not considering the artwork as "something", even though we're spending a good amount on that because we want it to look good from the get-go, I'm talking about the game dev side not even having been touched at all or the logic and mechanism's not even being tested if it can even become a playable and enjoyable game. This is what we wanted to avoid and that's why POSH took a risk by investing tens of thousands of Hive on the gaming aspect first before we ran with an announcement and token distribution. If it had been for me I would've announced it even later and started distribution the same day beta launched so gamers could've earned it at the same time, but posh's funds ran dry and I had even borrowed it more Hive than I knew it could earn back eventually through curation rewards. So we needed more funding and as we came closer to being certain the game could work we decided to announce it and start raising funds through the very limiting way of powering down curation rewards which can be quite annoying at times but is quite amazing how people can invest with inflation without risking their main funds on delegated proof of stake coins like Hive and on top of it being able to take it back whenever they want if they're not happy with the progress.
Alright so why am I going through all of this?
I'm a gamer at heart, I've been gaming for decades, some of them an unhealthy amount and majority of them less so mostly cause of an unhealthy love for Hive. The way I see Holozing becoming is unlike any game and ecosystem in the space. While I'm a big fan of splinterlands and regret having sold it for 10x more steem because "there's no way shteem can dump another 90% so I can buy the alpha cards back later (it did and I didn't)" I have a big respect for the way they run things and the value they bring to Hive. They're undoubtedly one of the better projects in the space but underservingly don't get the attention they should (probably cause the space is still filled with getrichquick schemes and fake attention). While there are some great projects on Hive, this game and idea has been something itching me for years, even before aggroed mentioned to me that he's planning to start a tcg it was something building up in the back of my mind and I'm happy to finally get it going and hope I've learned well enough what mistakes to avoid from other gaming projects in the space and what to do right. One of those important things I believe is the way token distribution is launched and how founders should buy into their token and project. It's weird in many ways, daily I'm investing in the project I've been working hard to start through delegations, buying tokens on the market and awaiting the starter sale to get me some cards and items and I know not many can do it this way. I'm not saying don't start projects if you have good ideas and the will to see it through just because you don't have the funding to buy into your own thing, I'm just personally more interested in seeing it through this way compared to the usual web2 ways where they give themselves and insane amount of value, salary, and whatnot while they may not even always be an integral part of the project. That's not real web3 to me, but more about that in another post as I don't wanna side-track too much here.
Zing is and will remain quite unique through the way token distribution is being issued, there won't be many projects in the future starting off the same way for the same reason there's no other project doing things the way Hive does. They want control and most of the value or else they just move on to something that'll get them as much of that as possible. Most projects aren't really interested in what's best for the gamers and consumers of it, most projects just use the web3 shtick to get funding and quick money while not caring what the end product will be, either through short term gains or longterm drainage. I'm interested to see what a project can do when its main priority is how to keep growing itself, how to fairly reward everyone in its ecosystem without a few founders/CEO's or shareholders getting the most out of it and how to reward longterm thinkers rather than a quick hype and fade/pump and dump leaving majority with a sour taste in their mouth as we've seen with most projects and cycles in this industry.
So that's why I'm excited for the amount of Zing I've managed to collect so far and what it'll enable me to do with it in the future and hopefully everyone else thinking longterm. I'm hoping that the project will also bring much needed attention to our layer 1 and am quite excited to see them both grow and hopefully change the world for the better a little bit cause I don't see much of that having happened with this technology so far.
Anyway, not financial advice, etc, just some freewriting of some deeper thoughts. I'm heavily biased in my project of course so take it with a grain of salt. Hope ya'll had a great 2023 and am excited to share more developments of Zing with you in the next year! Thanks for reading!