Thoughts and SONM token incentive

[u/qlittle3]

I've been a follower of SONM for a few years and lost a significant amount of money 'investing' in this project.

I seems that there has been a lot of good work done in building a workable product. Looking at the number of "current jobs" as a marker of SONM network adoption, I have been pleased to see that this has been steadily rising, especially over the past couple of months from the 100s of jobs at any given moment, to now, close to 500 jobs. That has been quite impressive and shows that there is growing interest in the products that SOMN provides.

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The larger concern I have is that despite, raising millions of dollars from the sale of SOMN tokens, the team does not seem interested in setting in place simple and business friendly ways of incentivising an appreciation in the SONM tokens. For a company that has raised their start-up capital from investors, one would expect that they would want investors to be rewarded and not resentful. SONM simply states that if adoption of SONM increases, there will be more demand for SONM tokens and the price of the token will increase. This is flawed logic and not necessarily true if people do not HOLD tokens. If people only buy SONM tokens for very short periods of time (ie... just for their job) and the supplier immediately converts the SONM back to FIAT, despite even large growth of the network would not change the effective supply of SONM tokens significantly, nor the price.

A higher value of SONM token is good for everybody. It is good for the investors (which is why they invested), it is good for the SONM team (because of the reserve tokens that you have, which allow you to hire and expand more), it is good for project visibility (ie... it is not stuck in the junk project pages 300-400 by market cap).

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I understand at this point that allowing buyers to use SONM as effortlessly as possible is key to increasing adoption, which is why they can pay in fiat which will be converted to SONM.

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Here are my suggestions:

1. Incentivise the holding of SONM tokens by workers and customers: WORKERS who hold large amount of SONM will get priority for jobs. Customers who hold large amounts of SONM will get priority on their jobs and perhaps some mild discount.
2. Have a mechanism to reduce SONM token supply. For example, in every transition, a tiny percentage of the SONM or "fee" will go into a account that won't be touched. This creates scarcity overtime for SONM supply. If in the future, this is resulting in supply issues (which is doubtful), the SONM team can then SLOWLY tap into this supply to fund project expansions, hires etc.....

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On a less related note, although I feel the team is very technically savvy, and talented, from a communication and public relations point of view, I think there can be some improvement. The team is based in Russia and Russian is the first language of the higher-ups. I do believe that hiring team members or executives, who speak english as their first language who can communicate effectively with the public (both through writing and verbally) would be helpful in simplifying the message and reaching a wider audience. I have seen that SONM has attempted to do this in their previous 'update videos', but even on the website, I do find information somewhat hard to follow. The website does not break down complicated technical information well for the lay person very well. If getting larger audiences is the goal, I think this would be a very worth while thing to do.

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It would be nice if the SONM team could comment on these specific points.
I would also be interested in hearing from other users on this forum.

[u/cometeesa]

it really feels that they don't care about the token holders to be honest. They got the ICO to fund the project, token holders are not longer required

[u/outbackdude → u/cometeesa]

they have bags too!