Discussion with Stormy Contracts(Typhoon Network) — PART 2
Carrying onwards from PART — 1, we dive into my queries about Typhoon Network’s plan to build its anonymity set and future marketing steps. Stormy also answers my questions on governance and the incoming fee structure for Typhoon Network.
Anonymity set and roadmap future steps
Sicario: It’s great that you have SDKs and relayers in your incoming roadmap. I think that making Typhoon into a privacy layer where wallets and dapps can just integrate the typhoon layer to augment their privacy solution is going to be a gamechanger. If you can do it in a way where wallets can augment Typhoon and also play a role in benefiting from + boosting your anonymity set, can be huge for your token holders. Plus the larger the set, the greater the privacy benefits. So kudos for jumping in that direction.
My question now is about your prioritization of features vs the need to capture market share. You are developing community relayers, dont see others on BSC doing it yet. But your weakness right now is a lower anonymity set compared to Swirl who gained that because of their buzz from launching on Wault Finance, a launchpad hyped by big Twitter influencers like @TheCryptoDog and @overheardcoffee.
How do you plan to get that massive liquidity into your anonymity set ?
SC: Anonymity set building is a difficult topic, yeah. I think we managed to get a good set together so far mostly organically, but I agree that we have to do better.
This needs a proper reward system in place to incentivize people supplying those funds, and seed the pools, so likely some sort of “anonymity mining” (a term coined by Tornado). You can’t really bet on people just supplying those funds because they’re nice — everyone wants something in return in crypto, and we need to build that something with the token (try to find a different way to get someone to supply 100BNB, that’s around $50,000 currently)
SC: The SDK and integrations I mentioned aren’t planned for anytime soon and come much later, so no they don’t make sense at the current time at all without having a solid anonymity foundation first. I brought them up earlier as examples of what we want to do in the future .
We had to first focus on getting the baseline of features ready, which included relayer v1 to fully allow people to withdraw to wallets without BNB (Typhoon felt like an incomplete product without it). The next step is to expand and make the token more desirable by supplying token functionality (relayer v2), then provide a way to get said token by helping the service with anonymity (“anonymity mining”).
We have a few other things planned that’ll (hopefully) drastically increase the anonymity set on the bigger pools, but that needs a bit more thinking and planning before it’s sharable
Your roadmap priority (focusing on relayer v1 +v2 while simultaneously focusing on anonymity set building is critical) makes sense.
Sicario: My thinking is that a good anonymity set comes from two things — making it whale friendly and creating a genuine technical love + bond with the project. You have a limited supply of tokens (20 million), so you’re forced to make it feasible enough for the long run along with making it yummy for liquidity providers to jump in now
SC: Yes, exactly. I agree
Sicario: There’s a need to create an enthusiasm for your project so that even in a bear market, when liquidity is taken off in fear (I remember that happening a lot for dpos validators and dash), they will put their skin on the line for the project. So how do you plan to 1) market your project and create awareness about the project & 2) develop enthusiasm needed for the long run ?
SC: I think the most important phase is the one we’re in right now to build awareness (like you said). We have a few marketing pushes prepared for the current crunch-time that I can’t go into right now, but the goal is to get most of our initial roadmap and feature-set released quickly, which includes having more token-related ecosystem functionality (including reward system), and get the name “Typhoon Network” known and associated with ‘privacy’ and ‘private transactions’.
I’m not too worried about a bear market to be honest — privacy will stay an important topic independent of market movement, and we want to be here and available whenever someone needs it.
Marketing
Sicario: Glad that we’re on the same page regarding marketing awareness to be the utmost priority for both the token holder and the anonymity set ! I know you dont want to reveal much but may I know the mediums you’re targeting tho for marketing ? What’s the current effort you’ve going on marketing mediums like Reddit forums, Twitter Influencers, TG groups ?
SC: I think a proper marketing campaign involves all of those channels for crypto. There are a lot of people to reach in either of the channels you mentioned, and leaving one out for something else doesn’t sound like the right move. I’m not sure what specifically I can tell you, but we’re having things outlined (and already did) for most social channels
Maybe not so much on the influencer front, because proper influencers in crypto are (hopefully) not so easily buyable and have some integrity
One problem on the other end we faced is that we got so many offers for social media promotions that it was hard to fully filter out what is real and what isn’t. A handful of bigger accounts we checked out were mostly facilitated by bots, with interactions being full of generic, similar messages
Sicario: If you have a limited budget, it doesn’t make sense to go on an all out front. You focus on the areas which give you the best marketing ROI. Example, it doesn’t make sense to go for a sponsored article for certain publications because of the completely poor engagement it has. And focusing on specific influencers with a genuine community can go a long way
SC: Yes, you want to be very careful who you give you money too and of course do some checks before closing a deal. But it’s also important to get the name of a new product out when it just launched. You want people to have at least heard of you, so when they think about privacy or sending an anonymous transaction to a friend, they might remember
Similarly getting linked from decent online publications will boost your SEO score and increase the chance of the name “Typhoon Network” popping up when someone searches for something related
Sicario: Makes sense on the SEO front and choosing the right publications.
Fee structure
Sicario: Moving on, TYPH’s fee distribution from service to holders is a major USP compared to the rest of the services. So when will the fee structure be released ? Will you be able to provide a basic gist of it
SC: I don’t want to give too much away because of the big amount of other services in the space, but it will involve participation in the service (and/or community) to qualify for the claim. It does not include passive holders that bought the token and just keep it in their wallet
Sicario: I’m glad that you focus on active holders for fee distribution. Necessary to build an engaged community. And it allows me to segue into a very critical topic:
Governance
Stormy, DeFi protocols including yours have launched a token citing governance as your main feature. I’m keen to know how your token facilitates active governance
SC: Governance is a good topic. There are many approaches to take, but the great thing about it is that it can potentially expand the way a project develops greatly. For example, if we go on opening up to community proposals, it allows us to gain insights on needs and ideas from the community directly, which could differ from what we had initially envisioned.
I saw that you edited the word “active” just now in, so I’m guessing you are specifically asking about how to keep the participation in governance active, am I right?
There are different subgroups of people that have an incentive to join governance: There are people that just genuinely want to drive the project forward. Then there are people that are looking to get more value out of their token holdings by introducing new features that could drive the price up, or wanting to raise fees (to get a bigger share). Lastly there are just normal day to day users. I think the biggest groups we want to catch are the first 2 because those people are the ones that can drive the project by bringing up changes and ideas. But if that set ends up being smaller than anticipated, we could steer people from group 3 over to governance with other initiatives.
I think you can already guess what I’m going to answer based on previous replies, but the fee claim system we have outlined is planned to play a role in governance down the line.
We don’t want to just throw rewards at people to vote on random things either — we want that the token holder community gets involved because they want to get involved and have an incentive at the same time to do so. Some holders might want to be more on governance, some other holders might want to lock their tokens and setup a relayer (to earn through relayer fees) — we are hoping that the ecosystem we are trying to build encourages participation
Sicario: Absolutely, I’m not happy about the current route of staking, holding and voting as a form of governance. I think that it is a disaster for new projects unless there is an ENGAGED community. forget new projects, it has failed for the big fishes like Uniswap.
It becomes a whale vs minnow game which demotivates genuine minnows from even participating. I like your thinking about focusing on the genuine portions of the community. The fee structure as a governance incentive makes sense, however what other concrete steps of engaging the community have you put in place ? Especially the steps necessary to capture group 1 and group 2.
SC: I’d agree with you that keeping the token functionality to just “governance” is not a good way to do things and there needs to be utility as well. As you probably know, our voting system is not built yet so we’re lacking the necessary data to decide on future approaches and strategies. This is a very good question, but I’m afraid I can’t answer this at this point without data to back it up.
Sicario: I understand. I think it’s time to wrap it up. Thanks for being such a real sport, Stormy ! You’ve spent hours answering my questions, massive patience from your side and a negative mark on my time management, lol ! The way you and your team deal with the community along with the sleek UI, incoming token features make me very positive about your project ! I’ll be following the project closely !
SC: Alright! 🙂 Hope I was able to provide some insights into Typhoon.
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