[Discussion] How to Leverage the FOX Economy and Community

Workstream Discussion FOX Tokenomics
1

At the moment, the FOX token value comes mostly from its LP programs and DeFi endeavors. I am a strong believer in the utility value of a token. ETH 2.0 will eventually come, although the process has been painful and lengthy to watch. But sooner or later, the FOX gas cashback will no longer be necessary, and users will have no real incentive to use the ShapeShift platform unless there are new very enticing value-adds for the token. (Although I hear that some awesome things are going to be open-sourced soon, so definitely excited to see that!)

I’m also a huge believer in diversification. At the moment all the talk seems to be around financial diversification. This whole time I’ve been thinking, why isn’t anyone talking about value-adding diversification?

Ultimately, value provided by the token always outshadows value provided by staking or depending on third party DeFi programs.

Outside of my main job and my participation in the DAO, I’m currently in several other projects, which I truthfully wanted to leverage the DAO for the benefits it could bring me, and of course ultimately help grow the DAO’s treasury as well as increase token demand.

As I am preparing to launch a NFT mint/marketplace specifically targeted towards subreddits and communities that may not be very well versed in crypto to make it easy for them to get in the NFT craze, I thought to myself, how can this benefit FOX? How can FOX help this project? Because it shouldn’t be a one-way relationship, right? I mean, maybe discounted prices for FOX holders? Staked FOX needed for free minting? There’s a million ways I guess, but it’s a one-way relationship.

Same goes with my endeavors with game3.js – As we are converting old HTML5 games into tokenized, revamped games with NFTs, in-store purchases, etc., I kept thinking about ways to integrate FOX and leverage the community of the DAO. And yet again, I am at a brick wall. Why use FOX when we can create our own token and use Polygon or xDai which are much more suited for these types of things at the moment?

After a couple years in AI and dataset training, I saw the huge growing demand for residential and mobile proxies. While we’re still working out the kinks, we have a PoC (without blockchain, but the feasability) successfully run where people can rent proxies P2P instead of paying one of the 5 corporations that are controlling the enterprise proxy market. This system requires masternodes and resource providers, so that takes FOX out of the equation.

I’ve been waiting for a discussion on getting FOX on xDai (with liquidity) and Polygon, then maybe it would make more sense. But it seems everyone is too knee-deep and crazed over the DeFi world that they fail to realize that the utility function of a token is one of the main drivers of price, not the LP programs.

I truly believe in the vision, I will continue to contribute, and I will forever cheer for FOX. But if we want to really drive up demand for the token, we need new utilities, fast. Admittedly this DeFi revolution came as a sort of “whoah” moment for me as I missed out on its growth, so I may be biased. But relying the future of ShapeShift on the success and continuation of the DeFi world is, in my humble opinion, dangerous and foolish. Just like forking a coin and changing one line and rebranding it as something new, just like investing tens of thousands of dollars on now useless masternodes, just like relying on ICOs and then IEOs to 100x your wealth, sooner or later, the cryptosphere will evolve and change. I’m not saying DeFi will be gone or unprofitable, but there the landscape will look different in another 3 years.

And this ShapeShift Foundation that is to be formed soon – we have almost no idea what it is, how powerful it will be, and who the 12 members will be and and their roles/duties. Will ShapeShift be a “true DAO” with this foundation? We don’t know yet, cause we don’t know what it is.

So, how do we create an ecosystem where developers or projects can truly build on top of FOX? Does it even make sense? Would FOX support proposals that are not built with FOX embedded into its design somehow? If so, what would be the best way to mutually benefit? These are all sincere questions I am asking. Both for selfish reasons, as well as for reasons that concern me about FOX’s current value proposition.

edit: and now you can see why I only sleep two or three times a week 1f605

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Thanks for the thoughts ! Definitely agree with you on maximizing FOX utility. I believe this should be one of the primary focuses of the DAO.

Here are some links you should definitely check out:

Current fox benefits: ShapeShift | Where Crypto Lives

Proposed vision for FOX:

discourse-post-upload20231125-65354-zsozg2.png[Workstream] FOX Tokenomics

Tokenomics Workstream Kickoff call scheduled for August 16th at 2pm ET! If you’re interested in contributing to the Tokenomics workstream in any capacity, you should attend this meeting! Add to Calendar Hope to see you there !

Curious to hear what you think of these.

Re: FOX on xDAI, there are several active discussions about incentivizing FOX on HoneySwap, I’m pretty sure it’s come up multiple times per day and we’re talking with their team 1f642 I am in favor of this and really appreciate you making the connection and getting the ball rolling there.

Check out the discussion here too if you haven’t already: Proposal/discussion on next set of liquidity mining rewards

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I think these are great questions for the tokenomics workstream to consider.

I’m not too worried about this yet, because as of today fox has multiple value propositions, including governance, fox fuel, rainfall, and staking rewards etc.

I of course agree on finding additional utility for FOX in the short term, there are many things that can look like, including morphing some of the above programs like ’s idea for a decentralized like rainfall program which could add a lot of really cool utility even above and beyond the current rainfall benefits.

Overall through I think the most likely things to add value to the fox ecosystem over the next year or so are:

Getting revenue streams consistently into the DAO - this is already being worked on in multiple ways by the community like ’s validator proposal and

  1. ’s yearn proposal that would both create revenue streams for the treasury, any revenue streams adds value to fox by being an intrinsic vote how to use that revenue that lands in the DAO treasury.
  2. Open sourcing as much code as possible and get a whole developer ecosystem working on ShapeShift products. The more cool stuff that gets built on top of the ShapeShift, the more natural opportunities will arise to add value to the token.
  3. Assuming (1) - some sort of consistent plan like using some of that revenue for buybacks and/or burns of FOX
  4. Additional programs that can be run to add value to fox, including getting it bridged to other chains (like xdai, polygon, and the cosmos/osmosis/thorchain world - e.g ibc capabilities.)

We are only a little over a month into the birth of the ShapeShift DAO and we have some serious thinking to do on this front, but I am confident with the community growing and already working on a number of the above items, additional product and integration work of various legal pieces in the defi world, plus the focus of the tokenomics Workstream, there will be tons of places where additional utility value can be added to fox over the coming year.

Would love to hear thoughts/ideas on things we can do in the short-medium term but I am not overly concerned there won’t be a ton of additional value that can be added with all this going on and when arguably it’s already one the ecosystems’ governance tokens with the most utility already today for those willing to look.

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thanks for the response! And yes, the DAO is still very new, which was why these concerns were weighing heavily on me. But it’s definitely great to see that everyones on the same page re: diversification of utility.

In short, both of your answers are pretty much saying that the moment there’s not much that can happen until all these governance and proposals play out and then the execution from engineering or marketing is done. (Please correct me if I’m wrong on that)

But I politely disagree. ERC20 tokens can still provide new utility value, just need to think outside the box. That’s why I’m especially frustrated that the DAO doesn’t see the value in a central API. I’d also like to correct myself from my first post regarding FOX’s current value: there’s huge value added from ShapeShift’s past reputation, world-class professionalism, practically an open-door access to any major players in the blockchain space thanks to Erik, and a customer/user-base that’s been built up for almost a decade. There’s ways to leverage that, and there are a couple ideas I wanted to propose right after we can get a private/public API, but it looks like I’ve rushed it too much and failed to get the simple idea of the importance of organized information across – and I take full responsibility for that.

Hahaha if I knew how bridges even worked I probably wouldve already built it myself. Anyways, I guess thats what testnets are for 1f609 Excited to propose my next idea in a few weeks or months.

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I don’t think we are saying new value cannot be added immediately, quite the opposite. More so that the things we are pointing to are likely to be the most important/main drivers of value in the short term.

But we could be wrong, there could be all sorts of cool ideas to add further utility that could be executed on immediately that have not been discussed or thought of yet, and I know I am very open (and I assume much of the community is as well) to hearing such ideas and executing on them quickly if possible!

Look forward to hearing your ideas as you formulate them more and anyone else in the community contributing to the tokenomics workstream to help drive value for the token and DAO!

6

Yes, I think we’re actually all in alignment add max FOX benefits asap. We’d love to hear your ideas for how to do this too . But like the examples posted out above show, there are already many proposals in motion or passed to do exactly this, and it’s only been a month since the DAO launched. If we keep coming up with ideas at this rate I think FOX’s utility will be in great shape 1f680

You mentioned NFTs and how they could add utility to FOX. Another idea we had that would be awesome and could drive revenues to the treasury in the near-term (and potentially more utility to FOX in the future) that has been discussed in discord but not yet forum-alized is an NFT sale. Check out this discussion in the cord