24 hours since Alpha Vial Sale went live

We're off to a pretty great start!

I wanted to include some thoughts and upcoming holozing stuff in this post and discuss some questions that have arisen over the past 24 hours.

While we have all the graphics ready for the opening, there's still some optimization and further testing left to be done. We realize there'd be a lot more "fomo" and "fun" to purchase vials and at the same time open them, but it also encourages some "gambling". We hope that this "soft-launch" of the vial sale will consider people to be careful when purchasing and opening vials and not treat it as some kind of slot machine as we really don't want to encourage that.

That is why we have put most of the necessary items in one vial, with the capture device being the only item that is not guaranteed in each pack but a "must-have" to capture creatures once the game is live in beta. It just made little sense to give people a lot of capture devices when one can last a very long time before it needs some repairing ^^. One thing to note is that there will always be people trading on the markets, so if you only purchase one vial but don't receive a capture device you can rest assured they will exist on the markets at different price points based on their rarity.

This soft-launch also rewards users who have followed and supported the project from early on with some zing rewards until the opening is available. We expect it to take 3-4 weeks until that happens which means a lot of zing collection rewards for Vial holders. Current plans are to increase collection rewards from 1k zing daily to 100k while leaving 1k to the achievement as is. 99k daily zing at current zing price means roughly 250 hive daily rewards for Vial holders, though do note that price may vary as we're entering higher zing inflation at this time.

While our plan was to lower delegation rewards with the vial sale we are instead increasing the daily issuance for a short time forward as the team is in need of further funding and we don't want to shoo away HP delegations completely.

Without spilling the beans too much, there's two new achievements being finalized to be claimable on the website. The requirements to earn them will start off quite easy but become a lot harder with each tier. Once these are released and have their weights assigned we do plan on increasing achievement collection rewards from the current plans of 1% to approximately 10%. You can think of them as additional staking rewards which at that point we will also go back to reconsider the current issuance of staking rewards at 40k daily zing. More details and news about that soon.

Here's some stats after 24h since vial sale was launched!

13,123 hive and 331 hbd for the development fund raised since launch. That's approximately $3k in 24 hours for a sub $50k marketcap project with a no-opening soft-launch, not bad at all!

In terms of referral rewards, 315 hive and 6.75 hbd has been sent out to referrers! Quick maths tells me that's 2.34% of the total raised meaning over half of purchases have not used a referral (even though we gave you all a lot of time to set one if you hadn't yet :P, but we appreciate those that didn't go around to purchase from alt accounts just for the 5%)

A lot of first vial discounts have also been used which is great to see!

So why is the vial sale a big deal?

When you look at Hive Power delegations they're quite limited, for instance I'm not able to delegate more HP to zing than I personally have and the same goes for others. Furthermore staked hive might be useful in other ways such as curation but also a competitive space on Hive with other projects offering similar if not higher returns for it.

Thus being able to fund the team in different ways was much needed and that's what purchasing vials does. It gives people who may not have the ability to hold a lot of HP the option to earn zing by holding vials they've purchased directly with Hive/HBD and in the future other coins as well.

Our plans are to accept other coins with the release of vial opening and to make things easier for our referrers they'll receive the 5% in hive/hbd or zing if they prefer to keep tokens on layer 2 on hive.

Another thing to keep in mind is that purchasing zing itself is currently not that enticing, while we have used the token to reward contributions in different ways it has become apparent to people that we're not really that interested in what happens to its price at this point in time. However if it started going too low there's potential delegations that'll be revoked if their sole purpose is to trade the zing they earn for hive for the 3-4% APR profit compared to curation rewards.

What I mean by this is that our focus currently isn't to see zing go up in value as the competition for delegations isn't that important to us since HP itself is quite limited. Even if a lot of buy demand were to come for zing suddenly, it would quickly be eroded by delegators selling the zing for a hive profit so the price of zing is currently tied to Hive in more ways than you might think. That's fine as we're long-term oriented and we're still in the initial distribution and funding phase, however keep in mind that that may change eventually.

All in all it's been a great experiment to "crowdfund" holozing through delegations but we're excited to enter this new chapter with Vials and more methods in the future to contribute to the project and help us build out our vision. We're quite excited for what's to come and I hope you are too!

We hope to be able to start balancing and testing out the alpha version of the game soon and give people a preview of what we have so far!