We (we is inbot.io if you are interested) are not doing an ICO, which is what well over 95$ of the Ethereum tokens are. Most of those are little more than a whitepaper and a pretty website. Most of those will never translate into anything tangible with actual economic value. Ethereum is great for that and not much else. It's a funding vehicle and most of the real liquidity at this point comes from equity investors taking chunks of your shares in exchange for token purchases. This changed over the last year. Most early ICO investors got ripped off. People are a lot more careful now and want something more tangible than a token that will depreciate 99% on the first day. ICOs as a crowdfunding type vehicle are completely dead at this point.
We're actually building a business based on our customers paying us cash for services we deliver to them. Not even future tense; we have been doing that for some time and we have actual paying customers. We want to pay our users to help us deliver value to our customers using our utility token. So, they earn tokens for stuff they do. They can then trade on stellar. A pump and dump would alienate both our customers and user base. This makes it easy for us to let our international customer base and international user base help each other without getting bogged down in admin work, invoices, payroll, etc. You'd be surprised how hard this stuff is to do in the traditional financial ecosystem (we tried).
The volume at which we do these things requires a side chain in any case: it's not technically feasible to run this on a platform that has global throughput of only 4-5 transactions per second (on a good day), high and variable transaction cost, and high degrees of uncertainty around transactions actually clearing in a few minutes (or worse). IMHO Ethereum is years away from being of practical use for anything other than acting as an investment vehicle for speculators. It only makes sense for very low volume and relatively high value transactions.
We picked stellar as our side chain and then concluded we don't need another chain on top of it. It does what we need it to do and we get trading for free through stellarx. Transactions are close enough to free that we don't care about the cost.
I'll look at Ethereum again after miners go away, proof of stake has happened, and Sharding is the norm.
Thanks for the answer. Your reasoning makes sense.
Still, I think allowing your token to be traded more widely through ERC20 compatibility may have benefits that are hard to foresee right now. It's a truism that liquidity is beneficial. In any case it's probably not urgent given the embryonic stage of tokenomics, and quite possible not worth the additional engineering costs of adding another blockchain to the architecture.
We're actually building a business based on our customers paying us cash for services we deliver to them. Not even future tense; we have been doing that for some time and we have actual paying customers. We want to pay our users to help us deliver value to our customers using our utility token. So, they earn tokens for stuff they do. They can then trade on stellar. A pump and dump would alienate both our customers and user base. This makes it easy for us to let our international customer base and international user base help each other without getting bogged down in admin work, invoices, payroll, etc. You'd be surprised how hard this stuff is to do in the traditional financial ecosystem (we tried).
The volume at which we do these things requires a side chain in any case: it's not technically feasible to run this on a platform that has global throughput of only 4-5 transactions per second (on a good day), high and variable transaction cost, and high degrees of uncertainty around transactions actually clearing in a few minutes (or worse). IMHO Ethereum is years away from being of practical use for anything other than acting as an investment vehicle for speculators. It only makes sense for very low volume and relatively high value transactions.
We picked stellar as our side chain and then concluded we don't need another chain on top of it. It does what we need it to do and we get trading for free through stellarx. Transactions are close enough to free that we don't care about the cost.
I'll look at Ethereum again after miners go away, proof of stake has happened, and Sharding is the norm.