During the launch of coins yesterday, there was some suspicious activity around the sale of a community grant which sparked some discussion in the discord channel.
To summarize what happened: TAFO coin launched and when the coin was being sold down during speculation, TAFO sold 1000+ of his own coins shortly after launch. These coins were allotted as part of the community grant.
Issues:
-There are currently no guidelines that I am aware of on how the community grant is to be spent
-The ability for a creator to sell off their grant for a quick profit is potentially bad optically and bad for the long term health of the rally ecosystem
-Due to the speculative nature of the first few weeks on Rally & subsequent weeks for weaker economies, it is in the creator’s best interest to sell their coins if they do not think that their true support volume can exceed speculation volume in the near future
Potential Solutions:
-Community grant can only be sent and not sold(not sure how feasible this is)
-Community grant is subject to certain flow controls(either 50% available or something of the sort)
-Stricter/ more clear guidelines on how the community grant can/cannot be used
Please feel free to weigh in I’d love to hear more about what people think on this
More than likely, the creator took the coins out of his economy to remove them from the feast, and will put them back in when the speculation activity on the auto-selling decreases or slows.
I posted in the discord, but figure I also write here.
For context, I have spent a good chunk of money getting money into the platform to incentivize many people in my personal networks to get into the space, often reimbursing people if they go into the platform. I feel this is in the spirit of what a community grant/disbursement would be going for. If I were to also give coins to others, they would likely feel strongly on also leaving $Tafo since it’s at the peak of it’s value, which I wouldn’t blame them to do. However, I have never bridged out anything, and I have some ideas that I’m kicking with my friends/community where giveaways will be done out of my larger wallet.
I think that having used your personal money to get people onto Rally is a great use of the community grant money!
I think that the bigger point that I am concerned about isn’t really this single case of you selling(notice I didn’t ask for any actions against you) but rather having an “honor system” that is easily exploited for what the grant can/cannot be used for.
Is it best practice to just trust that the creator who sells will reimburse the community at a later date?
Is there any way to ensure that the grant goes back into the community?
What other solutions are possible?
Totally possible and the economic incentives make it perfectly plausible. However, under the current system there is no way to know, as well as no way to enforce “proper” usage.
I actually thought it was pretty neat that @tafokints dumped some coin during the speculation phase of his coin release. Rally has such a positive community but lately, there has been some negativity around coin releases. If a creator doesn’t market their coin for the initial release, they should absolutely be able to make some profit on the ‘pump/dumpers’. Also, if you are upset about a coin dropping in value during the week of release you probably don’t believe in that creator and have no business purchasing their coin.
I mentioned elsewhere it could be interesting to show usernames on transactions. This way if a creator was dumping his own coin (after the coin has been marketed) the supporters would know. It would also be a way to reassure fans when someone is spam dumping by showing that it’s just one holder and not a mass exit.
So I think this gets back to a couple of important distinctions
The coins dumped were a part of the community grant.
Had the coins simply been the creator’s I see no reason why the creator can’t do as they please. Since the coins were a part of a grant, I think there needs to be some rules around this so that the creator is not able to pocket the money so easily that was given by the community
Why are coins launching with no marketing/true support?
It seems to be the case lately that there have been launches where creators either do not yet have use cases or have not planned to use their coins for several weeks. Is there some way that Rally can either support these creators in generating true support traffic or prevent these launches from occurring if the creator does not have actual support.
1k coins represents 2% of the 50k creator genesis grant. Let’s be very clear on the limited ability under the current design for the creator to have a material impact on the economy even when selling the full amount available to them.
The genesis grant is intended to give a creator sovereignty over their own economy. I don’t think there are any risks with unlocking such a small amount relative to their grant, and relative to the overall economy. I do see a risk if we don’t provide the creator with enough agency, and I think the current design has struck a good balance. I would be amenable to unlocking more, to provide creators more agency to combat early speculators who purchase their tokens sight unseen.
What most understand to be a “rug pull” simply isn’t possible with such a small percentage of the coins available to the creator after launch. You can dig into the wiki possibly, or otherwise in older forum posts for more details on Creator genesis grant vesting and flow controls. I think they go above and beyond to mitigate the potential threat of a rug pull. However, the biggest disincentive for such an action is that these creators have spent years and decades building communities around themselves. The risk to their reputation would be massive if they were to undermine the trust of their communities.
In general, a creator has a strong incentive to never sell their genesis supply and to use it to distribute tokens to their loyal community and beyond. However, it’s important that they also have the agency to sell at their discretion as Tafo did in this instance.
In short, I have no qualms with a creator profiting off their own economy that is built on their reputation and work.
I think 2%(closer to 1.5% once coins are purchased speculatively) is still a massive amount. That is the sort of amount that markets react to when you talk about shareholders in traditional assets.
I think when we are looking at flow controls, the creator is able to sell 1k coins at the end of their first month(I could be wrong on this so please correct me if this is the case). If the creator is only able to sell 2% of their coins at the end of the first month, then why are they able to sell that same amount instantly which is unfair to their fans that are invested day one.
I understand that there is a huge element of speculation here but I think that fighting fire with fire is not the way to build a sustainable model for Rally as a whole.
Additionally, I want to push back on the notion that all creators have communities that they have spent years building. There have been MANY creators that have joined Rally with not much more than an idea on how they would use their coin without planned marketing, distributions, or established community. I say this not to take away from all of the fantastic creators that are on the platform but to level this conversation in reality. The reality is that by launching more and more coins for creators without marketing and established community AND without a fair launch system, speculation will continue to occur and will be the overwhelming majority of transactions.
I think that have a more thorough vetting system would lead to the speculation effects being less dramatic. This would also not require fighting fire with fire by selling larger shares than speculators to drop the floor. Earlier this week I heard through some back channels that a different creator threatened a coin holder over email with selling all of the creators coins simply because that coin holder bought a lot of coins really early. This is not healthy behavior for the community and the root of the issue needs to be fixed instead of workarounds that are patchwork at best.
I also want to recenter this conversation away from TAFO specifically because while its his actions that sparked the conversation, the system in place is what should really be discussed instead of individual actors.
I think that you continue to push this narrative about people using bots to purchase coins that based on the evidence that I have seen is completely false.
In order to run a bot to purchase coins, you would need one of 2 things:
Ability to purchase coins through the API
To the best of my knowledge this isn’t possible. This is also a pretty direct violation of T&S and would be extremely easy to catch if someone was doing it. There are typically less than 100 purchases of a coin within that “botting” window. It would not be hard to catch the person doing this if it was actually happening.
The ability to swiftly use a bot to click specific places and purchase a coin through the website in an automated fashion that mimics human mouse-clicks
This is also not really possible and would not result in sales faster than humans. The rally.io website is nowhere near stable enough to build an effective program to do this.
I do think that it is reasonable to have actual discourse about the topic of fairlaunch but it is not truly related to this thread. Additionally, ranting about bots when there clearly are not bots is a waste of time and discourse on the forum in general and takes away from productive conversation. Unless you have actual evidence other than a bunch of sales that are done by many human actors I would prefer the discussion of bots not be here.
You have provided no meaningful evidence against what I put forth as prerequisites for bot activity. Please do some background before reposting something that does not address what I said.
Once again, I will ask that you keep discussion of bots out of this thread as it is not relevant to the topic of discussion. Please refocus your comments around the topic of what community grants are able to be used for.
As a creator I think current flow controls are enough of a limitation. The creator is rewarded for onramping their supporters to the rally network with the community grant, and they should be able to cash out what current flow limits allow, if they choose to. When they sell, the price of their own coin goes down for all their supporters, so the cost/benefit ratio is relatively balanced.
Creators are already incentivized to NOT sell due to the weekly reward program, as well as by protecting the value of their supporters holdings (this is good for business). If someone wants to dump their own coin at max flow limit, they are trading long term value for short term gain, and thats a trade off that is fair for the creator to make IMO. I personally don’t find it to be beneficial to do it, but I don’t mind if people do - especially considering the amount of speculators and bots who are already doing this to the creators themselves. If this is a creator friendly platform, creators should have more freedom, not less.
I have evidence of bots. I helped launch a friends coin and I knew exactly the time it went live. When I went to buy at the exact time I was the 15th transaction. The purchases before me were large, round amounts of RLY converted, and not from accounts related to the creator.
The difference between me and the OP is that I don’t mind this activity. Sure, I got in at a higher price, but those big bot purchases helped bring my portion a lot more RLY rewards over time.
I have been ready for coins that I knew were dropping due to social media and other posts and I have been able to get one of the first couple of transactions and I do not use bots.
It’s in the creators best interest to use the grant to kickstart their economy. If they sell the grant and manufacture exclusive merchandise for coin holders that’s fine in my book. I don’t think policing or limiting creators helps the cause, because use cases are still being explored.