Hi all. Thanks Grand for starting this important look at Rewards. To center how I look at this, I see Creator Coins as a mutually beneficial economic system for creators and their fans. Where rewards for building value through holding are equally as important as rewards for commerce activity. We’ve built a foundation to allow creators to own their own economies through fan clubs/memberships and marketplace creation/extension. With Campaigns, soon NFTS, and the ability to tip creators in their own coins, we are clearly not just a HODL business.
Right now, I certainly see how much Creator Coin economic activity is tremendously overweight toward holding coins, with farming rewards as the main play versus a more balanced approach of rewarding holding activity AND spending activity (ie, Commerce).
From my own study of use cases to write a weekly blog, I’ve seen how excelling in Commerce is at odds with accumulating rewards. Case study: $WALLS. Without giving out their data, Emery (the band behind $WALLS) has excelled at getting their fans to buy a wide variety of merchandise via $WALLS coin. They are by far and away the best Commerce oriented economy on Rally.io. Given how merch must be fulfilled - customer info collected including shipping address, then plugged into the actual fulfillment vendor website and paid for in cash, they can’t necessarily hold the coins they’ve collected, thus are not often not eligible for Rewards as they choose to focus on the Commerce side of their business, and $WALLS constantly moving in for merch buy and then right back out to cover commerce expenses.
With CAR being a mass incentivization program for Creator Coin adoption, I would certainly advocate for a system that sees some significant portion of Rewards reserved for those Creators who are driving Commerce through coins. We definitely need to focus on true utility aspects of coins; that is, a marriage of active holding (eg, Discord) and active commerce. The “Hold and Re-buy with Rewards” meta is a smart/shrewd use case, but it shouldn’t be the only use case being rewarded.
Coins that lead in Commerce activity should return rewards to the creator and to coin spenders to enhance their long term value and revenue generation activities. We need to reward Commerce based activities.