Some things I wanted to discuss in this post will be regarding Holozing and the way it works to fund the game's system and maybe advice on newer projects being built on it.
I've "invested" in quite a few hive projects I deemed worthy of some Hive/delegations over the years before we launched Holozing, aside from it being fun such as Terracore where you didn't really think too much about the returns and projects like Woo where you knew the token distribution but liked the idea and what it does apart from the token to want to invest anyway, there's some takeaways from the way they worked which I've wanted to implement into Holozing.
One thing from terracore for instance was the fair launch of the in-game token where none would go extra to the team or founder. The other thing from Woo was that delegators could get part of the inflation which has worked quite well for Holozing, especially with Hive (hopefully) appreciating in value over time it'll make development cheaper as we liquidate the curation rewards.
The current, starter phase, won't last forever, though. While currently delegators are earning most of the issuance, there'll come a time where they'll start competing against collection rewards and then we'll also introduce player rewards.
Now to the point of this post, the cost to the development is of course coming from Hive being sold. To some that may seem like a bad thing and it's understandable as Hive itself already has so many usecases and many would like to use it and see it being powered up and held instead. The bet here is not just that Holozing does well, but that it also empowers Hive and brings in a lot more people or keeps people here and powered up/delegating.
I believe that so far, it has done that last part extremely well. Of course it's hard to measure how many or how much Hive it has kept staked compared to it being liquidated and sold off in terms of people who've chosen to delegate, but what can be measured is its continues success in terms of price and APR given to delegators, staking rewards and liquidity providers.
As I'm writing this post the price of Zing is at its lowest (0.009 hive/zing)
Some may look at the price going down and think it's bad, but it's actually quite good. There's been a lot of sell and buy pressure and that the token is still offering 2x higher returns to delegators than curation rewards while Bitcoin is at all time high and Hive is moving up by 25% in a week, I'd say it's a good sign. Though be warned that it might drop lower from here so don't take what I say here as a reason to buy into unless you're in it for long term the way I've been.
Back to the point, I'm very happy and glad how things have gone with zing so far, the best part is that not only does it give devs a coin they can cash out of (hive), but the LP also give people the option to make big trades either short or long which can't be said about all tokens on hive-engine/hive's layer 2's. I noticed a few days ago there was a token I had divested I wanted to buy Zing with, but there was literally no liquidity, the spread was something like -60% and even then there weren't enough hive in buy orders to fulfil my sale.
I don't want to point any fingers as to which tokens, but instead, show that people can launch tokens in other ways utilizing hive properly. Naturally you can't assume the same launch success as Holozing cause Hive is quite limited, especially powered up ones. The uniqueness of Holozing is also that there was no team or founder share which many may not easily part with which may have caused it to do better.
Token for HP delegation. This is something that to us should come quite easily but outsiders may not understand. Trust me I had some discussions with some lawyers recently and it took quite a while for them to understand the concept. Aside from receiving funding to continuously fund a project you can also use it to "market" or "promote" the project. The lawyers eyes opened up when I mentioned we have so much fanart and already 2000+ accounts from a project that's yet to even launch a playable game or tradable nfts. All in good time, though!
This is something unique to Hive and it's one of its strengths and also why we're showcasing the amazing fanart created by our amazing community on holozing.com/fanart. There's ways to delegate on other chains, like eos or cardano but other than giving kickbacks for block producer rewards there's no value being created in the forefront.
Hive's layer 1 is mostly going to the community, not only can't you find this anywhere else but it also won't be re-created in my opinion. All these "friend.tech" and "podsters" or whatever they're called will try and run with the "DeSo" name but they're neither decentralized nor fairly distributed. They have debt to their investors and shareholders and it'll be the pitfalls of web2 social media all over once controversies start to occur.
Okay, I'm side-tracking again.
While Hive surely could be doing better, in the end Hive can take the extra sell pressure to fund the project, pay devs and scale the project up later. That was one of my main points of this post. Not everyone will like it but it defeats having devs that can't sell your token because it's not worth anything when they need the pay or expect new tokens to just keep performing well all the time and assume there's enough demand in this small community that will most likely sell your token off for its L1 especially when it's finally moving up a little. :)
It's like if people were mad at Bitcoin core devs for selling their Bitcoin or ETH devs selling their ETH foundation grants, you can't get mad at people selling a token if they're providing something in exchange. If the exchange is net positive for both is of course to be seen, but with the founder (myself) and many team members being long hive you can bet that the project will always have hive's greater good in mind.
Lastly, Zing, similar to Hive, even though they share many similarities, needs to be said that they're long-term focused. So don't FOMO into anything expecting to see returns, it's still quite a small community similar to Hive on the grand scale of things. The important parts are that we are taking things slow and steady and have started things as well as we could have, to some it has even exceeded expectations (me being some, which I'm grateful for).
I hope we can soon share news on the starter sale date, which, if the price of Hive keeps up, means will come with an additional discount to hive holders. ;)
Thanks for reading.