After the announcement and token distribution launch I finally have some time to breathe so thought I'd post a little about the thoughts behind the Zing token distribution for those interested. I keep saying I'm going to post more but things keep getting in the way, but now that the cat's out of the bag with @holozing I may have quite a lot to talk about the project so maybe there'll be a lot more posts about it in the near future while trying to also post about something else now and then. :P
First of all, I think Zing distribution is quite unique. If you look at other "web3" games and projects being launched in the space, they don't shy away from raising funds, spending a lot of it on teams of developers, getting the token out there and already trading on big exchanges by paying for it, etc. Something many may not mention is that the founders and people at the helm most definitely pay themselves a nice sum of salary with it as well along with getting a large allocation of the token for having launched it and the idea.
This was something I wanted to do differently with Zing. Inspired not just by @threespeak and @theycallmedan behind the SPK token and @ragnarok.game distribution to Hive Power holders but also the way I always have been interested in token launches back in the day when altcoins were new and popping up everywhere - fairness. I feel like a lot of that has somehow gotten been but I'm glad to see it resurface here on Hive primarily.
Hive itself has a pretty good distribution. I've personally worked quite hard over the years to see to it as much as I could, that it continues to be distributed well and wide with a focus on newcomers through @ocd and its curation initiatives. The community here is quite robust and uses the tools at hand quite often to fight unjust distribution and point out shady things like vote-trading, milking/farming or other unwanted activities. While it isn't perfect and in my mind no other project will manage to perfect it or even get close to Hive's improvements over the years, there's something that could be said about Hive's initial skewed distribution that may still linger on the chain even after all these years, which is Steemit's initial "ninja-mine" of up to 80% of the token and the way inflation worked at the time. While we did the best we could when we forked away from the centralized chain by sending all stake we knew belonged to the company to the DHF and while we're pretty sure there's not that much of that stake lying around as most unknown accounts have left the ecosystem over the years, the effects that stake had through curation over the past 7 years made me not want to choose Hive holders directly as the primary distribution of this new token.
Another token on Hive would suit better for it in my opinion, this is of course a biased opinion since I'm the one that launched the project behind that token but let me mention why I believ so.
POSH started as a simple idea, an idea meant to support the front-end of the "suffering" company behind the steem network during bear market times and lay-offs to bring ad revenue in. This quickly proved to be pointless as the leaders of that company had other plans all along after news broke out it had been sold off, but once we migrated over to Hive it made even more sense to pursue the "proof of sharing" activity. We were now finally free from any dangerous stake that could centralize our governance and change rules at a whim, force us to censor accounts, content and even their balances. There was no central authority or single entity mostly profiting off of the success of Hive, instead any and all front-ends had their own reasons to succeed and that's what POSH attempted to help out with. Other than helping curation and stake distribution by seeing which posts & authors managed to bring more visitors to our ecosystem from the outside it also gave authors a reason to not just become more active outside of Hive but also build a presence there to amplify the reach of Hive and most of its users.
For a year or so POSH was mainly unrewarded, people shared their posts and got automated notifications that the bot registered their share without any direct incentives behind it. After a year a token was created. No pre-mine, no team allocation, and the only airdrop that occurred was to the users who had been collecting points all year by sharing their or other users posts on Twitter. It evolved over time, offering delegation in exchange for tokens in an effort to keep the price of POSH worth something so those sharing Hive links would get some value for their efforts.
Until the day Twitter and other web2 platforms decided to cut most apps off from using their platforms through unrealistic API costs. To try and keep this post a bit shorter, let me get to the point. POSH was thriving before this happened, it had over 3500 registered accounts with over 1500 of them holding some amount of POSH which was mainly earned. The reason I thought POSH would be a much better token to airdrop/claimdrop Zing to was because POSH wasn't something people attempted to cheat in similar ways they've for years attempted to cheat Hive through sybil attacks and the sort. POSH was never worth much and gaining it wasn't easy, it had a cost surrounding it where people had to pay for bots and whatnot on web2 to fake performance of their tweets which most of the time would stand out easily to curators which then got those users banned from the program.
At the same time POSH needed to shift, basically have a few more baskets than leaving all eggs in the same one. Seeing Reddit do something similar but not to the extent of Twitter it seemed obvious that relying on web2 for your main idea and usage wasn't going to be a good idea moving forward, but calling it quits on the project altogether was also quite a waste after all these years. Instead I decided that POSH adapts and does more on Hive than just proof of sharing which led me to combine its new focus with an idea I've been working on for years to connect them and bring value to Hive in a different way.
Starting the gaming project wouldn't be easy and it wouldn't be cheap. Even though Hive is great for startups and you aren't required to put a lot of money up front, have an amazing community here waiting to check your product out, etc, it still requires a decent amount, especially if you're aiming for it to be special and not just a tic tac toe game. I could've put money into it of my own but I'm not really a whale in that sense where it wouldn't hurt me and I was already planning on spending countless of time on seeing that this gaming project comes to life as it's been something I've been wanting to see exist and play for years now. The other conundrum was that if I funded it, it wouldn't be easy to also keep it pre-mine free. POSH on the other hand, had some extra funds now after Twitter removed 99% of its automated activity and we decided to stop buying up tokens for sharers since it was impossible to track all the shares without API automation. That's how the connection was made if POSH funds the kickstart of the gaming project, the project could in turn not just give that value back in stake/zing, but also allow other holders of POSH to participate. This would partly also work as marketing to attract POSH holders to the game and check it out.
Holozing logo in progress by @rubencress
That's where we are now.
After the history lesson, I kinda wanna discuss why I think this is a better method of funding compared to some other ways projects run.
In case you weren't aware yet, the Hive Power @zingtoken collects will be solely used to pay team members, artists and maintenance of the project along with future growth, scalability, and everything else involved in that ecosystem. (It will however not be spent on my own efforts within the game). While it means sell pressure on Hive, we believe that over time the value Hive will receive from having another popular game here will be tremendous as we've already seen with Splinterlands in the past and present. We are of course not comparing ourselves to Splinterlands, they're as big as Hive itself in many people's views but it doesn't hurt to aim for the stars!
Projects that allocate themselves a certain amount of tokens from the start either put in a lot of funding themselves or rely on investments, it's not something I deem to be "web3". Especially not when they do "funding rounds" and those kind of schemes where they give early investors cheaper tokens then keep raising it every round. This is what Zing does differently primarily, 1 zing is x hive based on your delegations and how long you've delegated for.
Then there's the version I think I like the least personally, where team members are allocated tokens rather than Hive (or something with solid liquidity directly). Especially in smaller economies (pretty much any chains outside of the big 10) this makes life for team members hard because they are forced into investment with the game. If there's no liquidity they also can't exit or "get paid" for their work but have to hope the tide turns eventually and are practically working for free until then or their sales place a lot of pressure on the price which hurts the project. It's quite a big risk compared to say giving them liquid/stable currencies more often and that way giving them the choice to invest in the project themselves if they so choose, which if they do and on transparent chains like Hive where others can notice this boosts the confidence of investors/players.
Anyway, those were really the main thoughts I wanted to convey in this post but I guess it was time I gave a small rundown on POSH's history and involvement in Zing now that the project is announced and there's a lot more people involved and introduced to both.
I'm thinking of posting a bit more often here in the coming days, might even drop some more details on certain parts of the whitepaper and how I envision those aspects to work when the game is launched, so stay tuned and make sure to subscribe to the Holozing Community where I'll be posting this into!
PS! What do you think of my new profile pic? ^^
