narrative - how could it possibly go so wrong?

I was introduced to narrative by some steemians about 6 month ago and while taking the chance to see the development of an new blockchain ecosystem in real time and in real live, I also bought a niche to be a small part of it and to experience it from the inside.

Hopes of the narrative community were high to create a new system that makes everything better, especially everything that lacked at steem and at the same time to get those early adapter profits.

Unfortunately IMHO it looks like a big failure now... Narrative native token's (nrve) marketcap is atm below 100.000 USD... less then most successful steem engine tokens.

at the same time their wefunder campaign looks like a big blow: https://wefunder.com/narrative

only a bit more than 100k collected so far and the 400k target looks far out of reach for many weeks now already..

On the wefunder page there is also a link to the balance sheets of the company... looks like they are running on the last fumes atm.. and they seem to have very controversial discussions with their own community about strategy, etc...

So how could this all go so wrong?

IMHO narratives biggest mistakes: 1.) token economics 2.) token economics
3.) token economics 4.) missing proper commenting comment's option 5.) wefunder campaign 6.) no proper spam filter 7.) no effective trading of the token

But let me elaborate a bit: Unfortunately most crypto projects still fail due to the lack of any reasonable cryptoeconomic system. If you have your own proprietary token there has to be utility to use, hold and STAKE it. Using it only as currency for your internal things won't do the trick, especially if there is nothing else in your system utilizing the tokens but receiving rewards in your native token. The tokens will just rush out of the system like spectators out of the doors after a soccer game..

So besides basing the internal payments on your native tokens you also need to enable people to spend tokens on items and services offered within the system and to give them incentive to stake or hodl them. The narrative community made many proposals how this could be achieved, but to my great surprise the management seems to have not taken any serious action.. just now after 6 month (and I fear 5 months too late) they started an open discussion with the community leaders about this and other topics..

At the same time - while their native token was rapidly loosing value - they started a wefunder campaign. At this point of time it probably became clear to the last supporter, that most if not all economic value and cashflow will likely be attached and distributed to the company and investors and not to the token holders. I fear this was the final blow to a great project.

So as a rule: If you already raised money by selling tokens to the public don't strip them of the economic benefits of your ecosystem. If you need more money look at your money generation engine again, share more possible future profits with your token owners - which should subsequently help your token price to some extent - and find new investors in the old and newly to be offered tokens to receive the required funding.

So to get back to the example of narrative: They should have revealed their different prospective revenue streams and made a clear and irrevocable statement to the tokenholders and prospective token investors how and to what extend they will inject the majority of those revenue streams back into the token. e.g. buying back tokens and BURNING them using 75% of all add revenues (and all other possible revenues) received, instantly, each month. This would have given people who believed in narrative's future vision, reason to invest / speculate by buying narrative tokens which subsequently would have supported the price which subsequently would have attracted more users.. more add revenue.. more money for buy backs... higher price... I trust you get where I am going with this.. its called positive feedback loop...

The necessity of token sinks and staking is luckily clear to every successful team behind a steem engine token - why not to the narrative management?

Looking at this I really feel sad, also for the team - as I believe this could have been averted by proper cryptoeconomics - but I just do not get how they could possibly miss this - as I did not get with many other failed teams and projects.

But even more I feel very very sad for all those content creators and the massively involved community on narrative. It seems as if many already have left narrative, but I just hope that the most active contributors will - if they leave - not leave for good, but return to steem.

Actually IMHO after the last hardfork it really got substantially better here on steem and I believe steem could be perfectly positioned for a next possible bull market in crypto.

Looking at @appics, @steemengine, SMTs, @projecthope, @nextcolony, @steemmonsters, @drugwars really gives me reason for hope!

Plea to everyone: If narrative users come (back again) to steem or @appics, lets all reach out to them and give them a warm welcome and new home here! There are many great content creators and writers that should have great benefit to the steem community.