By Xavier Lee
There is no new structural narrative in Crypto in 2024, and memes can be popular. A big reason is that there is no market innovation. The narratives, gameplay, and even market players are repeated over and over again, and everyone is feeling aesthetic fatigue.
Recently, many Degen friends have paid attention to Tabi's Tokenomics. There are countless questions in the community every day. I think it is necessary to sort out what we should do and why? And what problems have been solved. I hope this article can quickly help you answer your questions.
1. Refer to Curve War / ve model
As the largest stablecoin market, Curve uses the bribery mechanism to macro-control the supply and demand balance of the market. The project party gives rewards to bribe users, and users need to vote to obtain rewards. At the same time, they need to consider the reliability of the project, the apy of the project rewards, and the triangular balance of risks.
Take the game publishing industry as an example (of course, the broader market still applies):
At present, all chains and application layers are decoupled. The cooperation between games and chains is more of a business-level development. The economic model does not play any role or incentive. The official decides which chain to grant Grant based on its own subjective judgment. There are too many non-project factors here, such as:
a. Relationship level
The founder has a good personal relationship with a certain BD.
b. Subjective factors
Sam is the BD of a certain chain, but he is more familiar with RPG. Unfortunately, the project he talked about happened to be a business simulation project (I am a senior business simulation enthusiast)
c. Scheduling
This sentence applies to any industry, and many similar products have been launched recently.
In short, there is a common feature here, that there is no direct relationship between their decision and the community. But it cannot be ignored that it is well known that there are many good works in the game industry every year that are unknown at the beginning, such as "Stardew Valley", "Kenshi" and even the recently popular "Phantom Palu". Countless examples can prove that the community is the first here.
So what will we do?
We have introduced the "Curve War" mechanism to Tabichain for the first time. Before the game goes online, it needs to be publicly introduced and what rewards will be given to the community. Users holding $veTabi choose to vote for projects, and users also need to balance the triangle balance of project quality-reward-risk mentioned above. Which projects rank at the top can get the support of the community, and the emission of $veTabi is the so-called "Grant" to some extent.
But the point is, this is not an official decision, this is a community decision.
What are the benefits of doing this?
a. Chain and application layer coupling
In a true sense, the bottom layer supports the application layer, and the application layer feeds back to the bottom layer.
b. Reduce costs and increase efficiency
A chain team has 300 people, 70% of whom are BD teams. Their task is to communicate with different game teams, 2-3 people for each game team, and they have to hold multiple meetings. I won’t give a detailed example here. The team’s annual salary may be 15-20 million US dollars, which is not only inefficient but also unable to achieve the goal.
c. Decentralization
The community decides who gets support, and everything is on the chain. With the recognition of the community, the project owner does not even need to know the team members.
d. Really introduce users
Various web3 game task platforms cannot bring real traffic to the project. Most of this traffic stays on social media, and these are not real users.
e. High moat brought by super flywheel
Regarding b, I would like to add some thoughts about Pdd and Alibaba. First of all, the conclusion is that Pdd is attacking other e-commerce companies by dimensionality reduction. The so-called dimensionality reduction attack means that I want to destroy you, and your efforts will have little effect.
Alibaba's model has 10 million SKUs and 100,000 people managing them. How can these 100,000 people manage 50 million SKUs? They can only manage merchants through the store clerks, which means that the merchants make a profit from the price difference. Therefore, the core of Alibaba's model is to pursue more categories and sacrifice some efficiency. Of course, this is much more advantageous than traditional retail, so cheapness is the core reason why tb was able to succeed in the early days. There is no other way.
So how does Pdd do it?
It does not pursue 10 million SKUs, but only 1,000 SKUs. But it must be extremely cheap, how to be cheap?
Pdd hired 10,000 people to make these 1,000 skus as cheap as possible. Since Pdd has few skus and directly connects with manufacturers, these 10,000 people go around the world to negotiate supply chains and directly connect with manufacturers to make single products as popular as possible. Because Pdd's strategy is to concentrate all traffic on 1,000 skus, the size of each skus is quite large. Some people are even willing to lose money to cooperate with Pdd. I won't go into the specific reasons.
Back to here, so we think we are truly reducing costs and improving efficiency, delegating power to the people, and truly practicing Mao Zedong Thought, "from the people, to the people."
2. Refer to the pricing model of Dutch auction and POW
Gala has to be mentioned here, it should be the pioneer of node sales. This model is very simple, the cost of early users is low, and the cost of later users gradually increases, and the later users are likely to lose money. It is understood that Gala's Node sale is 500 million US dollars (it has been a long time, the amount is different) but please remember that this is the model of 2020.
In 2024, following Xai/Aethir, a series of Node sales emerged one after another. We can see that these projects all adopt roughly the same model, using the ideas of 4 years ago, and there are still users willing to participate. This can only show that the market is irrational. From the recent market perspective, this model and gameplay has been very weak. I don’t think it’s because the market has no money, but that the market is tired of similar themes.
So how does Tabi do it?
Here, I refer to the pricing model of the Dutch auction and POW. I have been in contact with BTC since 2013 and am also a mining participant. Every time a new generation of mining machines appears, the computing power of the new models increases, resulting in the new mining machines crushing the computing power of the old mining machines. If you no longer buy new models to increase computing power, you will naturally be eliminated. Therefore, whenever a new mining machine appears, the computing power on the market is in short supply, so people are willing to pay a higher price above the official guide price, because this can get more computing power dividends and mine more BTC. It is obvious that the market determines the supply and demand relationship, not the subjective wishes of people.
Therefore, I referred to the experience of Pow mining machines, and I think it is more in line with market economics, rather than users who bought early making huge profits and users who bought late suffering huge losses. Today, users have been educated by the market many times, and this model is no longer applicable to the market. I think the system itself is selfish, because it obviously takes advantage of people's Fomo psychology and is of no help in other aspects.
The core logic of this model:
Early entry = higher cost = more tokens
Mid-term user entry = medium cost = medium token acquisition
Late-entry users = pay cheap costs = get a small amount of tokens
If you study it carefully, you will find that the balance and game under this system are everywhere, and no one is absolutely at a disadvantage.
3. Original NODE rating system
Gala, Xai and other nodes only differ in price but not in computing power. This is very unreasonable. You must remember that users are getting smarter and smarter. Users are not fools. If you still treat users as fools today, then you must be the fool.
Why introduce levels?
Under models like Gala and Xai, there is bound to be an unsolvable problem, that is, the early users have low costs and huge advantages. In this case, users will only mine, sell and withdraw until no one has the motivation to buy tokens. Recently, we can see a series of node projects released, and no one has really thought about this problem carefully. Who will buy the nodes later, and why can they be bought later?
Tabi node is sold at 5 levels. Each level of mining machine has certain advantages over the previous mining machine once it is launched. In addition, new projects in our Tabi ecosystem can provide airdrops to different user levels according to their own needs.
But this is not the point. The most important thing is that Tabi node can be upgraded!
As mentioned earlier, users can obtain veTabi by participating in Tabi node and vote to get rewards, but this does not solve the core problem: why should users participate in ecological projects?
Because participating in ecological projects can improve the node level, this truly introduces users into the ecological projects, thereby truly combining the chain and application layer ecology.
Let’s take the game as an example. Here the user process is:
In order to obtain more veTabi (income) - play games to gain experience - upgrade the level and computing power of mining machines - get more veTabi - games to gain users and income - exchanges and more web3 users join - veTabi's early voting reward assets become more valuable - more users join - there are more games (and other ecosystems) to form an absolute advantage. This flywheel effect enhances Tabi's influence on game distribution.
4. Reference Canto
The current situation is that most of Layer1 exploits all application layers downwards. It should be noted that all Layer1 income comes from users in the ecosystem, and user interactions are actually interactions with the application layer, not the chain itself.
Tabi refers to Canto to share gas revenue with application layer developers, which means that the revenue sources for developing applications on Tabi are richer, including business revenue + community voting emissions + gas returns.
5. Symbiotic Relationship
80% of the revenue of most games comes from 20% of the players. These users are the whales that any game wants. As mentioned earlier, Tabi node is an upgradeable level model, which is equivalent to 200,000 node holders.
Tabi encourages game developers to give various rewards to node holders of different levels according to their project types. This is equivalent to the early cold start asset holders being the whale community, so that the binding relationship between the community and developers is sustainable.
Not only that, based on this set of Tokenomics, we will guide ecosystem developers in the future, and protocols similar to Convex will gradually emerge, and even include Mundus, which we are incubating at the same time. It will serve as an important infrastructure on Tabichain, similar to Roblox, and its role is like a middle layer, helping users quickly build their own small games, a UGC developer community.
I have been thinking about what is the core moat of L1? Is it faster? Or more decentralized? Or cheaper?
There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people. There is no absolute right. We provide more business possibilities from the perspective of developer commercialization. At the same time, the characteristics of PolyVM (link) are more friendly to web2 developers and reduce the entry cost of developers.
Please allow me to subjectively think that we put developers at the forefront of priority. We have given full consideration to the business side, from the revenue structure to the design of user paths, and we have made sufficient preparations in terms of technology to meet the future mass adoption.
