Jacek.degen.eth 🎩 pfp
Jacek.degen.eth 🎩

@jacek

a few ideas we've been discussing for POV.co, and why we're not prioritizing them right now. some of these are things i'd like us to build. but we're a small team, and something being a good idea doesn't automatically make it the next thing we should work on. the question is whether these changes would meaningfully bring more people in, or mostly improve the experience for people already using POV. here's how i'm thinking about each one. 1. resolving markets. this one keeps coming back, and i've spent months trying to find a version i believe in. prediction markets have something to settle against. a thing happened or it didn't. the market resolves, and losers pay winners. what do you settle an opinion against? if the question is subjective, there's no outcome to verify. so you end up settling against the crowd itself. whichever side has more votes, more money, or whatever measure you choose, wins. the moment that decides who gets paid, people have a reason to manipulate the measure. fake accounts, coordinated groups, money pushed in at the right moment. whatever the rules reward. you ask people what they think, then pay them to make everyone else appear to agree. i haven't found a version where i'm comfortable with that tradeoff. our current approach has speculation too. people can buy a side because they expect others to buy it, regardless of what they personally believe. i'm not pretending the price is a perfect measure of truth. but separate YES and NO tokens let that sentiment keep moving, without a final vote declaring one opinion correct and paying everyone on that side. for opinion markets, i think that's a better fit. 2. graduating YES and NO tokens to Uniswap. this would give markets visibility outside POV. prices in wallets, charts on DexScreener, more places for people to find them. that's useful. but being listed somewhere and being discovered are two different things. i don't think graduating a token into a $2k pool gets us meaningful attention. a collection of tiny, inactive pools could also leave people with a worse impression of the project. graduation could give people a milestone to rally around. i get the appeal. but the financial incentive to get in early is already there on the bonding curve. i'd rather build this around a market with real demand than assume demand will arrive once it has a chart. 3. rewards for holders. let people holding a position earn a share of that market's fees, either alongside the creator or through some kind of holding or locking mechanism. i like this one. give people a reason to stick around and share in the activity they help bring. the problem is that those rewards need volume behind them. at our current volumes, the fees each holder would earn probably wouldn't change their decision to hold. there's already an incentive to be early. if you buy a side and more people buy after you, your position goes up in value. right now, that potential matters a lot more than the fees we could distribute. holder rewards could become meaningful as activity grows. i just don't think they're what gets that activity going. 4. USDC instead of ETH. USDC probably makes more sense for a wider audience. you know how much you're spending, and holding a position doesn't also mean taking a bet on ETH. there's an interesting tradeoff though. dollars feel like money. ETH, and probably DEGEN even more so, can feel like poker chips. i suspect people treat them differently. ETH also lets you cover gas and trades from one balance, which keeps things simpler. i can see us making the switch eventually. but it's a big lift, and we haven't seen enough evidence that using ETH is what's stopping people from making their first deposit and trade. we'll probably build the last three at some point. resolving markets is a more fundamental disagreement about what POV should be. right now, i think the bigger issue is the cold start. on a social platform, people need other people worth coming back for. on POV, they also need a reason to believe more people will show up after them. the curve can fill a trade. it can't bring in the next person. that's where i think we need to put more effort: getting markets in front of people, giving them a reason to take a side, and making the experience worth sharing and returning to. it's easy to look at a product with low activity and come up with more features to build. we do it ourselves all the time. but before we spend weeks building something, i want us to be clear about why we expect it to bring people in or bring them back. for these ideas, i don't think the case is strong enough yet.
4 replies
8 recasts
61 reactions