Marketing NEEDED for CARBON

Community Chatroom (DISCUSSION)
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First, I would like to congratulate the bancor team for carbons release.

However, carbons release was lack-luster, received attention from few outside of bancors inner circle and did not even make a splash within a tiny puddle. There was no PR related to its release. No influencers discussing it. Carbons release was not even a topic of discussion within the lobsters.

I have seen orders within carbons strategies on the buy & sell with exact matching prices not being fulfilled, and there is no good excuse for this. The one and only fear which I had during beta came to fruition, and it is disappointing. If I set a strategy, and if the prices fall within my ranges of sells and buys, will they get fulfilled? Because if not, then I should trade elsewhere because this product does not work as intended, and even worse, causes me to lose $, and causes me to lose opportunity… not because a strategy wasn’t well planned, but because the platform itself failed the user.

I was told that arbs need to come in and fulfill such orders… but even when there are separate competing strategies? the strategies cannot compete against each other and fulfil each others orders?

Carbon needs traction. Carbon needs users. Carbon needs arbs. If the product is good, this alone does not guarantee its success.

Carbon needs a marketing push. A consolidated marketing push within 1 - 3 strategy pools MAXIMUM so that all the liquidity & arbs is pushed together so that … hopefully… orders created will actually fulfill on a timely fashion according to their parameters.

wBTC/USDT or USDC , ETH/USDT or USDC, ETH/wBTC

We need to push all of the liquidity , arbs, and whoever else is needed, into these 3 pools and actually start to have traction. The only way to do this, is to incentives people to join, via a trading competition. The winnings should come from the foundation as this is a “marketing” expense. and the winnings should NOT come in the form of BNT which will ultimately get sold by the winners and will increase the deficit.

BEFORE THIS TRADING COMPETITION - Mark & team need to get on major crypto influencers youtube channels and start preaching the good word of Carbon. Sorry Zeno, we love and appreciate you, but we need the word to go out to the masses. The foundation should pay out of their pockets ( NOT with BNT) to get bancor onto a handful of major channels. Create the BUZZ and Push the competition at the same time.

Also, regarding the BUG Bounty for Carbon where the rewards are paid out in BNT… who ever wins these bounties will sell BNT and this will increase our deficit. So I am ashamed at the fact that those in charge would compensate in something that would further deepen our existing wound. The bug bounty should come out from the foundations pocket, not from the freebie tokens they gave to themselves and given out at the expense of each and every depositor already suffering from the deficit. Shame on you.

I hope that even if this suggestion isn’t acted upon, it will create discussion and conversation on things that can be done to draw further attention… and users… to carbon.

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as a side note, I would like to say that I know a LOT of time and effort went into explaining carbon / giving demonstrations via 1 on 1 calls with Jen and team , and I do appreciate the effort that went into that. But carbon needs the outsiders to see how amazing it is, rather than bancors existing community

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I want to clear up why this is happening. Carbon has, generally, 3 parts necessary to be considered fully functioning and only 2 of those parts are built right now which is why Carbon is still in beta.

The first part is the ability to post orders (limit and range) and this works.
The second part is the ability to take specific posted orders and that also works.
The third part is an active arbitrage trader who will close on orders which “should” be filled (like the example given in your quote) and this is NOT yet built.

The arbitrage trader is an open source bot which has been built by the Bancor dev team which interacts with the fastlane smart contract. The fastlane is, currently, working quite well and has burnt twenty thousand BNT (nearly 400 a day) since it was created 6 weeks ago.. This open source arb bot (which anyone can download and run) currently runs arbs between Bancor V2, Bancor V3, Uni, Sushi, and 1inch.

And soon it will be updated to also run arbs through Carbon which will address the issues in your post.

Thank you and I totally understand, but lets wait until the open source arb code is updated to include Carbon before we start trying to push a product which isn’t 100% functional.

Finally, I really want to stress that Carbon is still in beta. The purpose of launching Carbon as soon as possible was to provide transparency to the community and get the bug bounties live. Furthermore, Carbon does not yet have a maker fee because I agree with your sentiment makers aren’t getting the optimal experience currently.

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Fully agree, the metrics for Carbon since launch have been, being diplomatic, very disappointing in the first week. I get that it’s a beta, but it seems like a beta that nobody knows about. The problem is when people do find out about it, if they look at the lack of activity so far, it might dissuade them from using it themselves. Like “there must be something wrong with this, it’s been out for however many weeks and so few people using it”. Popular platforms are popular because by definition lots of people are using them, which means lots of fees. $0 daily fees/trading volume does not help LPs in deficit. Like you said, “if the product is good, this alone does not guarantee its success”, and thinking that it does would be the height of arrogance.

Okay, so let’s wait until that bot is built by Bancor dev team, but then Bancor really does have to be ready to spend big on marketing. Carbon is useless without users, and you can say “aggregator integration will help”, but a) there will always be more users when people actually know about your existence in addition to being funnelled towards it, and b) aggregator integration can’t do much for volume and fees without users knowing about Carbon and manually adding their strategies/liquidities for those aggregators to hit.

There is no excuse for Bancor Foundation not to spend big on the product literally designed to save Bancor. Marketing Bancor products is part of their raison d’etre.

Agree with you that trading competition is a good idea. We need fees, so we need volume, so I think it would make sense to split the competition into separate buckets, or have multiple competitions; like one competition for volume (where users hopefully wash trade as much as possible just to bring fees), and one for strategy effectiveness (i.e. promoting Carbon by showing the best performing strategy vs HODL in the competition timeframe).

If Foundation is happy to spend $1m on bug bounties, they should put at least as much towards trading competitions. Bug bounties are nice, but they don’t target/recruit people actually using the platform. Split prize pools across multiple winners of course, so that traders don’t give up if someone starts running away with it. Could always set some T’s and C’s (e.g. “you can’t win a trading volume prize amount greater than your trading volume”) to ensure it isn’t a loss.

And like you said, for god’s sakes don’t pay out the prizes in BNT, that’s literally just begging for masses of BNT to get dumped!

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So here is an update to my post.

I was fortunate to have a conversation with someone who gave me some inside scoops on whats to come in the near future and to a degree it did ease my nerves.

The arb bot is almost ready, and this will ensure that trades are facilitated when they should.

There will be a marketing push, both in terms of gaining exposure on youtube / podcasts / blogs etc , however, I am strongly urging the community here to reach out to influencers and see if anyone with a decent sized audience may be willing to interview the bancor team, throw out mentions, try out the beta ( when its ready ) etc… I have reached out to 1 person so far, but I’ve still yet to hear a response whether or not hes willing to have the bancor team on his youtube channel. Lets try to help the bancor team here and as a community, lets help push carbon into the spotlight ( when its ready )

There will also be a marketing push to incentives users to create strategies… I appreciate the efforts here, but from what I heard, the idea here probably wont be enough to get any users with actual SIZE.

A trading competition is … in the works … sorta… but before anything like this launches, the team will need to do quite a bit of work to make this happen. Nevertheless, its down in the pipeline and is something that we can all look forward to.

Also… something that I really did not expect… but was happy to hear… regarding the bug bounty and other rewards… they will NOT be paid out in BNT… but will be paid out in a stable coin. When I b*tched about that in this post, I was honestly thinking that this concern would simply get overlooked, but to my surprise, it wasn’t… the team here is listening… and they are trying…

But what the team is trying to accomplish is no easy task… and even though none of us are required to do anything… it will be in all of our best interests if we give them a helping hand.

Every one of us are apart of different telegram groups, discord servers, youtube/influencer communities… let’s all reach out to who we can and help get bancor into the spotlight. organically. most influencers will ask to get paid for a mention or an interview… But when Carbon is fully functional… it will be a kick ass defi product that people will want to utilize… and hopefully, influencers will be willing to discuss a project for its merits rather than simply for a pay cheque. So lets give the team a helping hand here and find them a platform to showcase Carbon.

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The mainnet gas fee is too high, consider launch Carbon on the Arbiturm?

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