We aren’t on the right path. Artificially increasing the volume will not position us in the highest places. This won’t be popular either, but rewarding creators who are already rewarded in secondary sales isn’t an efficient way to grow the ecosystem. I was recently introducing someone from Solana to Algorand, but when I told him we didn’t have a web wallet, he didn’t show any further interest (I know Defly is coming). If I show him our nft infrastructure he probably wouldn’t even have downloaded Pera Wallet. Why don’t we dedicate funds to building NFT infrastructure? We don’t have marketplaces that compete with MagicEden, Opensea or JpgStore. Why don’t we use those funds so that our markets can improve their service? Why don’t we use those funds to encourage and build new ideas? Even by artificially increasing the volume we aren’t in the first places. We have NFT projects that CAN compete with the main Solana or Ethereum projects, but we do NOT have NFT infrastructure that can compete with Solana or Ethereum. We urgently need these funds to be used to build and not to encourage purchases. We are in an important moment and if in the next period continue rewarding for purchases and not for building, we will continue to be in the last positions. Just my humble opinion.
Great points.
I think within this criticism of the rewards program the bigger question is raised of - How do we efficiently fund public goods and services that either have no business model or a business model that can only work at scale.
Marketplaces and dexs have very small fees that can really only sustain a team of developers if they reach a certain scale. (Assume 2.5% fee on $10m of vol and you’re still only netting $250k, maybe covering 1-2 devs)
I mentioned on twitter I like how optimism is doing retroactive funding, meaning delegates vote on funding requests after the public good has been shown to have value.
This approach takes the risk from the funder, making builders prove their worth prior to receiving grants.
This completely removes the possibility of grant farming, or receiving grants and never delivering anything of value.
This also would immediately put money in the hands of the best operators / projects, allowing those teams to expand and tackle more problems / offer more services.
Well said sir.
I agree with sherry that the NFT rewards program is starting to feel very odd. With no oversight, and community feedback not really mattering I think the initial plot has been lost.
The only time it really moved the needle for the ecosystem was attempt 1, but since then its had a really muted effect. The rules in place (ARC-49 ARC-49: NFT Rewards) have remained the same (Reward COLLECTORS and CREATORS), but its pretty clear most participants are not really interested in following these rules, and with no enforcement mechanism to make sure they do i guess you cant really blame them?
We will keep trying to have some fun with it (MEME’s, POAP Contest, Airdrops, Leaderboards) but its hard to argue that there are not way more important places to be spending this money within the ecosystem at this point.
I really think having dedicated rewards windows for the NFT program is hurting our NFT ecosystem long term. At least DeFi rewards cover the entire quarter, incentivising consistent liquidity. Rewards windowds cause peaks and troughs in trading activities. If we are going to keeo rewarding this behaviour, we should at least have it be consistent over the entire quarter imo
Imagine this - marketplaces propose their NFT incentive plans in advance with clear KPI/targets they are trying to achieve and we vote to approve/not-approve them via xgov or heck even regular governance. This would incentivize them to share the plans waaay in advance and actually take feedback seriously before commiting them to vote.
Going cold turkey(e.g. removing everything and starting from 0) is rarely good idea, especially in thsi situation where wheels are turning very slowly when AF is considered…
(see defi incentives, there was literaly no change in last period - so thats 3 months lost, because defi council and AF didnt manage to find a good way forward)
Just my 5 cents.