It's Saturday, and it finally feels like summer might have arrived in the UK ! It's time for my weekly #SaturdaySavers update....
If you're not familiar with SaturdaySavers, it's a fabulous initiative run by @shanibeer writing as @sally-saver on the @eddie-earner account, where we all support each other in getting to our savings goals.
Image by Hans Linde from Pixabay
To start with, here's last week's progress table;
Observations on Last Week / Next Week
EDS is still the only one where I'm behind on my target. I'm being patient about my solution to this. The plan is to wait for three days; I've got a decent stack of liquid HIVE, which I'll be powering up on Hive Power Up Day on the 1st of the month. At that point, I'll be able to delegate more Hive Power to @eds-vote without dropping the value of my curation vote power.
Somehow I've managed to do a post every day for the week so far. It wasn't even a conscious effort, but it means I might just get my second Weekly Author badge in Hivebuzz.
I've discovered that what seems to work for me is to have two or three series of posts going at any one time. Some will be creative writing, others will be a series of business-related posts. It's not about manipulating the system to artificially boost the post count, it's a mix of telling a story over time, and keeping the posts to a sensible length. I've realised that 5-7 minute reads seem to work quite well, but lengthy posts of 10+ minutes reading time just lose people's attention.
This week's off-topic thoughts are around Tribe Tokens. I have to be honest and say that I have totally mixed feelings about them, I think there are a few that are worthwhile, and quite a lot of them should just be sold as quickly as you can if you get them as a reward. So the angle I'll approach it from is;
What Makes a Good Tribe Token
I think there are a several key things that make for a good Tribe Token.
A Good Use Case
Everyone's idea of a good use case will be different, but there are some tokens where the use case is either completely non-existent or pretty pointless.
Tokens that act as miners, facilitate a game or Dapp or enable curation for a large community make sense. Tipping tokens are fun and generate rewards.
Some tokens haven't got a direct use case but deliver decent staking rewards. Personally I think this is borderline as an actual use case, but the rewards can be converted to SWAP.HIVE and re-invested in tokens with a use case or turned into HIVE, so they can still be worth collecting if the price is stable enough.
A Large Enough Committed Community
The most successful tribe tokens are those which attract a good-sized following of regular users. If that happens, it goes a long way towards creating liquidity. Not only that, but if people convert HIVE to SWAP.HIVE and buy the token with it, I see that as a genuine increase in the token's market capitalisation.
Active Leadership
I'd say that active leadership really helps a community maintain interest in a token. After all, if the creator(s) of a token aren't interested in keeping it going, why should the community ? But if the leaders are active, they'll be creating events, posting updates and generally doing all the kind of things that keep users interested.
In many cases, a token seems to be created to gamify a Hive Community and deliver rewards; after a while, the community loses steam, the leaders wander off to pursue other interests and the token just dies, lurking around on LeoDex as a super-low value token with virtually no liquidity. But just occasionally, the leaders go inactive but the community likes a token enough to keep it going. I feel that proofofbrain is like that; the creator pops up occasionally, it's only use case is to collect and stake them, but Hivers love it so much it's still worthwhile.
If I have to have one gripe about the way most community leaders on Hive do things, it's the insistence on using Discord as the primary forum for announcements and discussion. Personally, I find Discord to be a confusing mess, and don't like the way it's part of the centralised gate-keeping legacy web. Perhaps Hive needs to develop something to do it's job that is better and actually decentralised !
Good Tokenomics and Capitalisation
I'm going to hold my hands up here and say that I really don't understand the market cap figures and tokenomics for some of the tokens in LeoDex / TribalDex.
The logical person in me say that it's probably based on some kind of relationship between the actual capital invested and the percentage of circulating coins vs maximum supply. But some of them show market capitalisation values in millions or billions of dollars which are patently daft. So I tend to focus more on the price (and how it changes) plus the 24 hour volume value as an indication of liquidity.
I'd love it if someone could explain to me how the tokenomics and market cap figures for Tribe Tokens works !
Conclusion
There are some really good Tribe Tokens out there, and just as many failed or pointless ones. I appreciate that my knowledge is very incomplete, so I'd love to hear whether you think I've missed a factor out that determines whether a Tribe Token is a good one or not, and how you decide which ones to invest in.
