In the recent run up of the RLY token we have seen the Creator Coins [CC] vault higher. As this happens some users/supporters might be concerned about buying a coin at that price. Have we looked at some type of splitting or diluting the CCs to get the price to a level, a supporter would be comfortable buying? I know there has been a lot of activity in the CCs as of late but I am just thinking forward. Do we come up with a solution where people can purchase different denominations as in $1 coins, qtrs, dimes, nickels pennies… we need to look at this now before we onboard a lot of Creators and find ourselves facing this question with 500 creators.
i cant read you , can u be more simple to me
A dime is 0.1 dollar. A penny is 0.01 dollar. This already works natively with crypto, as you are not required to buy an entire coin. It allows fractional ownership at a much finer level than USD. There are 6 decimal places that I see, meaning you could purchase at least 0.000001 coin, if not smaller.
yes that works fine and dandy for the crypto world and the users of defi. When you buy something in life, you want the whole thing not a piece of it. This a way to help the user/supporter attain a good feeling after the purchase. We tend to think crypto all the time, when in fact we have to take a step back and think of our target audience. I think buying a whole of something is better than a fraction just has a better sound and might make a difference. It will be our project one day so now is the time to throw 1000 ideas and thoughts out now before we cannot change things. I encourage everyone to comment positive or negative. Communication is best way to get ideas out.
4 Likes
While we can buy fractional portions of a CC because of how crypto works, there is something to be said about naming certain denominations of a creator coin. Branding is everything, especially in a social space like this with content creators, artists, musicians, you name it. Could there be a system implemented where creators can name their own smaller denominations? $CC could have $microCC’s or something along those lines. You could even tier your coin like many games do, 10 coppers = 1 silver, and 10 silver = 1 gold and the like. But let it be branded to that creator so it still has their own personal flair embedded in the coin.
And like Six is saying, there is a psychological aspect to people looking at a price of 1 coin that is like $10 or $15. Especially if you want to let people buy certain perks you are providing. It feels weird to say, “Hey buy this coupon for a thing I’m offering. It only costs you a quarter of my coin!”
And you don’t want to say, “Hey buy this, it’s the equivalent of $2 even though my coin costs $12 so its only a sixth of my coin…” You get lost in the weeds of pricing and at that point the supporters are looking at the economy in terms of USD instead of the coin. If you are trying to establish your coin as a currency, it kind of defeats the purpose if you are referencing the price of things in dollar and cents.
This could be a very important issue in regard to the optics of the micro-economy being built by the community. If as a supporter you feel you are priced out of a creators coin its going to feel bad. And if the creator keeps referencing the pricing of certain perks in USD then what is the point of using the coin? (Obviously there a lot more points to using the coin, but you get what I mean.)
2 Likes
Thanks for kicking this off @sixmofo, and for honing in on the psychological fan perspective and potential consequences @RainRaith.
I agree and we all understand why games aren’t pricing in fractional gems or that casino games give rewards with lots of zeros. I think the current Creator Coin economies tap out at 210k coins or so, and I don’t know if @delphi is playing with that cap (for new TBCs) alongside the new token bonding curves they are developing to complement the sigmoidal curve that has been Rally’s single offering to date.
Either way, beyond the psychology of owning 100 coins vs. 10, or 10 coins vs. 1, there’s a practical challenge in that Creators have gated their offerings based on certain holding thresholds. Those thresholds are often established early on when they first adopted Creator coins, and so they could and many may have updated these numbers to remain more inclusive as the price of RLY and their CC’s have gone up. And as you put it nobody wants to be talking about a 6th of a coin.
It could be worth exploring moving the decimal on Creator Coins to offer 2.1MM cap, and just 10x everyone’s holdings in CC and leave the underlying RLY the same. Creator’s might find this as an opportunity to further engage their fans in the community around the tremendous utility and value of using the Rally network and why they’ve made this change as a result of how successful it has been. All the intended network effects of the sigmoidal curve design remain intact with this change.
On the other side, given the volatility we’ve seen in the short term it begs the question if we wouldn’t find ourselves needing to repeat this exercise again - or alternatively needing to revert it should the price fall. Where do we draw a line in the sand in terms of price stability to say that we want to make such a meaningful change to improve the fan experience? I don’t know. A few thoughts to add to the discussion.
Cheers,
Grand
2 Likes
Quick afterthought. You could move the decimal on a specific coin facing a challenge but not others that are new or haven’t sustained the growth for a long enough time. Not all creator coins created equal would be a big change now, at least until new curves are introduced.
3 Likes
Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say we would even need to mess with any of the algorithms. Currently when you go to buy or convert a coin, it will either prompt you to buy $10, $20, $50, or $100 of a coin, or a certain percentage of your rally. Why don’t you just adjust the front-end UI to a slightly different display?
Consider when someone is buying a creator coin; instead of selecting a dollar amount, shouldn’t they be prompted to purchase x amount of that coin instead? That would help generate a greater sense of immersion into the market they are entering. Let the amount in dollars be an afterthought listed during the summary of the transaction, or a less prominent data point on the selection screen.
I personally think that could be a beneficial change regardless of the denomination issue, but at that point, maybe you go a little further. You could allow the creator to personalize their purchasing screen. Say instead of a screen that prompts something like, 1 $CC, 5 $CC, 10 $CC, 100 $CC, it could be, 1 CopperCC, 5 CopperCC, 1 SilverCC, 1 GoldCC. They might see they are buying a GoldCC, but they are really just purchasing 100 regular CC’s. I don’t quite know how that would work the other way around with smaller denominations, because I’m unfamiliar with the holding threshold issue you mentioned. Honestly, I could just be spouting nonsense from a development point of view here, hopefully I’m not. These are just some thoughts I’m throwing out here, I like thinking about this problem!
Back to the other math though. If you did just 10x everyone’s CC, that could be interesting, but I am thoroughly uneducated when it comes to stuff like bonding curve algorithms. However, it reminds me of something that really stuck out to me when I was first introduced to the IOTA project. When you bought their token on an exchange, they listed it as 1 MIOTA, so you are already buying 1000 IOTA when you purchase the 1 token. It’s a nice psychological trick, cause it makes you think you own way more coins already. If we could recreate that experience somehow, that might have some positive impact in how people perceive the creator coins they are purchasing.
1 Like
I think Grand and Rain have articulated the need for a “feel good” moment. A supporter/user of CCs is vital to the Rally ecosystem. When they then choose to purchase a coin it has last to last and encourage them to come back to make another purchase if they have the means. Look at how loose candy is sold. One can go into a store and buy 1 piece of candy for 5cents, its not displayed as you are buying 1/64th of the bag of candy your get a whole piece of candy and its made affordable for everyone. The human mind is complex… but very simple at times. When you buy that candy you have a “feel good” moment and we need to make that moment repeats itself for the creators and our platform.
3 Likes
+1 for lower CC prices (even if supplies are larger)… consider the initial ADA retail interest because it’s “cheaper” per unit than BTC/ETH
We’ve already started talking about this external perception and why it’s important considering movement we’re seeing right now.
I like Grand’s idea of moving the decimal in the short term, to have a single unit of a coin be an exchangeable thing helps perception tremendously, and avoids having to support tiers of coin denominations “Silver Falcons” later on.
1 Like
Great discussion here. Only thing I’ll add is that I have talked to some creators who have an explicit interest in more premium price points where they actually would prefer BTC-like price points and are okay with small fractional ownership.
I only offer that to say that I agree that aesthetics and psychology are important considerations and our current bonding curve, price range on that curve denominated in RLY, six decimal places, change in price of RLY, etc… all come together into an aesthetic that’s probably okay for some communities but not hitting the mark for others. Immediate term solutions like moving decimal points could help; indeed, like other ethereum based tokens, the underlying implementation is all in integers and where to place the decimal point is simply a choice based on desired precision and display aesthetics.
That said, I think the right longer term solution here would be to focus on giving creators control. Establish templates and choices that are easy to understand and allow this preference to emerge at the creator level as opposed to trying to define it globally.
5 Likes
I would be very interested to hear from our Marketing department on this issue. They have better knowledge on the psychology of the consumer and the "feel good
they get from a purchase like this???
I think creators could have the option to request a “split” of their coin, like listed stocks do, in order to keep the price perception friendly and ease usage for lower priced transactions. It has no effect on the fundamental value of the coins held by supporters and should happen infrequently - perhaps through a quarterly approval process.
2 Likes
This discussion has gone stale but as the growth of Rally continues … we do need to address this issue. If we see Rally at $2 or $3 we will have some crazy prices for creators. I want to make sure a supporter feels gratification if they decide to buy a coin. I am still in a belief of owning .25 of a coin may not be euphoric for the owner.
1 Like
The psychology aspect of this is called unit bias. It’s almost been proven that, as a whole, humans perceive more value in getting a larger quantity of something then a smaller quantity even if the sum value of the quantity is the same. Not trying to shill this coin or anything, but one of the most used DeFi projects YFI noticed this unit bias and decided to do a massive 1,000,000:1 split of their YFI token by creating a secondary token called WOOFY along with a feature to allow users to easily exchange between the two. Even though people were just buying the same percentage ownership of the entire YFI economy by purchasing WOOFY, and maybe there was some buy pressure from the marketing of the whole thing, it drastically increased the price the day they launched the token.
It’s hard to figure out the exact degree of implications from unit bias but there are other examples we could look at. Take Shiba Inu coin and Safemoon for example. These coins have reached massive multi-billion dollar market caps in incredibly short periods of time simply by creating 1 quadrillion coins and going to town on marketing. Users purchase millions of coins for less than $100 in the hopes that one day the coin goes to $1 and they’ll be rich.
Personally I don’t like the idea of appealing to unit bias. I do, however, agree that too high of an individual coin price could be bad for the ease of making creator coin gates. A coin gate of 1 or 10 coins feels like a normal feature. A coin gate of .00157 coins seems like a massive barrier to adoption. I think there is room to stock split to some degree from where we are today, but I don’t like the idea of doing it often, or of individualizing curves based on size of creator due to the confusion that can come from varying price to marketcap relationships.
1 Like