I passed a milestone in my Zing holdings recently and I'm quite happy about it so I thought I'd share.
In other places it seems normal for creators/founders to just give themselves as much equity or tokens as they want. Feels like we've completely shifted away from checking early distribution on new tokens and just ignoring it.
For example coins like SOL that were sold to VC's early and cheap, then probably offered to exchanges as launchpools as well. This is the norm these days and there's very little information on most tokens distribution by design.
Naturally, these tokens get manipulated and retail, i.e. regular users get taken advantage of.
Of course, not all of them turn to dust straight after the first pump, but many of them do.
All you need to show is one unique solution you either solve or attempt to and have connections in the space and money. Feels like instead of spending that money to buy into their own tokens, they use it to matchmake trading pairs or pay exchanges to list them or pay influencers with reach on web2 to shill them.
I like that hive is quite different, at some point I've even wondered if projects like the above would want something as transparent as hive - my guess is that they wouldn't.
Here people can track the distribution of my tokens Zing and POSH for instance and verify that at no point have I given myself coins just because. I've earned it alongside others by putting some skin in the game, either in the form of hive power delegations or by purchasing alpha vials.
Somebody contacted me on Discord recently and had this to say, I'll censor the username cause it's a DM and I didn't ask permission to share before writing this impromptu post:
If they want they can let us know in the comments who it belongs to. Either way-
We've tried to be as fair to people helping crowdfund the project and I've personally tried to make sure that early and long term supporters don't feel cheated on. I've been doing this by supporting the price of Zing over time which has not been easy to say the least during these rocky markets.
Some may argue I'm doing this to manipulate the delegation APR offered by the project, but for many months now it's been underperforming curation rewards, i.e. I haven't "pushed" it past just to attempt to lure in short term delegators with some quick and easy profits. I also haven't really taken part in the liquidity pool which currently offers the highest APR compared to staking and delegating:
While this may change at some point, what I'm trying to say is that I've been going the long-long route in investing in the token.
Our focus hasn't been on Zing doing well, it's been to build a game people may enjoy and a universe unique to itself with many unique characters and creatures that people may like participating in and being part of.
While market conditions have definitely made things difficult for us, we're still standing and with the help of the DHF are continuing to progress on our game.
Before the DHF proposal, I've mostly spent hive on buying vials because that was something that directly benefited the project and brough funding to our developers. Delegations are nice but with a declining price in Hive it's been rather unstable and there's not that much delegations one can amass for many reasons.
I have to admit buying vials with the price of hive hovering around 20-25 cents hurt, because like many of you I also love Hive and would like to see myself as a whale at some point in the future, but I've tried my best to diversify into Zing and make sure it keeps going even if it hurt my Hive wallet.
Eventually however the price of hive dropped so low that it's becoming quite impossible to keep funding the project while at the same time building your hive stake. It's also taken a mental toll on myself seeing the biggest of the few crypto eggs in my basket become so small, but it is what it is. Hopefully we can only improve from here on out and that our countless efforts come to fruiting eventually.
Anyway, I'm thankful to the people who've supported projects I've started and while I still have to continue to grind it out, I do hope they become bigger over time and make it worth everyone who participated, or at least ended up having some fun playing the game once it's launched.
I know it's hard to trust people these days, the "web3" space definitely makes it hard, but I like that on Hive we can hold people accountable and somewhat better trust in them with our value and hopes and dreams.
Either way, I reached 100 million zing recently on all my accounts which is roughly 25% of the total distribution. Before you call it centralized, remember that there's no governance voting with it and I've had to buy into it much like anyone else could and has the opportunity to. That's something 99% of the rest of projects can't say the same.