OriginTrail's Marketing
My personal take on OriginTrail's marketing strategy
This is a personal take on OriginTrail's marketing strategy from BRX, OriginTrail Community Admin. There's been a lot of talk about the team's marketing, or the lack thereof, and I want to clarify a few things with the community.
Trace Labs is a for-profit organization and the core development team of OriginTrail. Their business model is to market their platforms and/or solutions to other businesses in a B2B (business to business) fashion.
Trace Labs does not have any legal obligations towards the retail community. However, the core values of the team (neutrality, usability, inclusiveness) are very much aligned with providing a valuable open network to the community.
In fact, Trace Labs has a valid interest to see TRAC rise - they do hold about 100M+ in TRAC funds in the treasury for the DKG's development. The team has also built the project's tokenomics around network effects. In other words, the more the DKG is used, the more TRAC is valuable.
The place where the community's interests are aligned with Trace Labs' is a rising network activity, which in turn translates to a higher token value.
Trace Labs needs other businesses to adopt their solutions to remain profitable, and therefore their marketing funds will prioritize that. At the same time, in order to persuade businesses to onboard their IT systems on the DKG, OriginTrail must remain fully neutral, compliant and open source. Showing our logo on NBA or hockey stadiums, partnerships with UFC are counterproductive for the scope of this project.
Another big hurdle to OriginTrail is a lack of liquidity, daily trade volume and exchange exposures. There is a clear relation between tokens being easily listed on all tier 1 exchanges, having high trading volume and sustaining a high price and the involvement of VCs, Venture Capital, in a pay-to-play environment. OriginTrail did not have any pre-sales to Venture Capitals and will not pay to be listed on exchanges - it is against the neutrality of the project.
This is the chicken and egg dilemma - a vicious cycle of no VC support, low trading volume, no token price support, low retail marketing and a lack of speculators.
How do we break this cycle ? A price increase purely driven by tokenomics.
In other words, the best retail marketing tactic is having high network activity and profitable nodes.
Favorable situations going forward:
- Polkadot is one of the most VC funded project in the space
- Many locked-in partners who will be using the DKG (Swiss railways, BSI/SCAN/Aidtrust, OneAgrix, Ontochain, ...)
- V5 only had physical assets in the ODN, V6 will bring digital assets too (NFTs, DeFi) and a whole new set of tokenomics
- New partnerships with other parachains to look forward to
- OTP Community funds and governance / voting. We will be able to put marketing into our own hands with OTP funding
TRAC is not easy to sell - it is very complex just like TCP/IP protocols. However, it will become a core pillar of Web3. Bob Metcalfe said it's something that's extremely interesting only to a select few due to the complexity. Tracdeepdive is exactly the type of resource I am trying to build to make things easier to digest for new investors. However, profitability is key to said investors. If they see real profit, they'll start asking questions about the project and this is where they will find all info and external links.
The best way to increase retail interest is through yield % backed by real tangible assets. We must be able to show high network activity and node profitability, as well as being able to explain how these profits are backed by actual real world usage.
In short, the best retail marketing strategy that will market itself is having high network activity and great node returns, and the only way to have great node return is through business to business adoption - exactly what Trace Labs is focused on.
Bob likes money, Bob wants to invest in a token with good staking retuns, Bob notices DKG v6 nodes have good yield %, Bob makes money, but Bob wants money to be safe and not minted, Bob reads tracdeepdive and finds out about all these assets backed by real adoption, Bob is a new tracer.
Last modified 5mo ago