It's gonna be an uphill task for smartBCH to acquire users and compete favourably with other smart contract platforms.
In this post, I discussed how and what we can do as a community to get around the shortcomings and challenges that smartBCH faces.
3 reasons why smartBCH is lagging
Lack of organisation
Poor funding
Inherited bad brand image
1. The lack of organisation
Except our goal is simply to exist and not gain any significant traction as a smart contract platform, smartBCH needs to address the issue of organisation. Because currently, it seems "nobody and everybody is responsible for anything".
The absolute absence of coordination and organised effort in the development and promotion of smartBCH projects us as "not serious for business".
I know there's been discussions around a smartBCH DAO, and I strongly believe this is perfectly in order. And I also know that the only thing stopping this DAO from starting off already is:
Someone to establish, design, and develop the DAO contract
Funding
Who should develop the smartBCH DAO?
This topic has been raised in the smartBCH main Telegram group and it's always ended in something like "you should do it", "who should do it?", "Someone should do it", etc.
I believe this responsibility falls on the smartBCH team or founders.
Every project starts off with a single person or small group of founders who bring their idea to life.
Then to make the project decentralized and transfer control to the community, they develop governance systems or a DAO with on-chain voting systems where anyone can submit or vote for proposals.
Examples of these DAOs are everywhere in crypto, one doesn't even have to look to find one.
A DAO system where anyone can propose literally anything (whether it's a feature or marketing and publicity campaigns, etc), and BCH holders will vote to approve and allocate funds accordingly.
Whatever design or approach the DAO takes, I believe there are already plenty of examples to look at and adapt for smartBCH. And the smartBCH team will champion its development.
2. Poor funding
Unlike all these VC funded smart contract platforms with their own native token which they used to finance the project, smartBCH was funded via a flip starter, from the pocket of the founding team, and donations.
Furthermore, other chains have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of development funds, backed with VC money, team allocations, etc.
This money is used to host hackathons, fund new projects and developers building on the chain through grants, fund highly coordinated and targeted marketing campaigns, etc.
smartBCH has none of these going for it, as it uses BCH as its native currency. And the projects to be dependent on donations and volunteer contributions of community members.
However, considering that funding is a major issue, I'm surprised that the team decided to burn 50% of the gas fees instead of allocating it to a development fund.
So to answer my question above, "where should the funding come from?", I suggest the portion of the gas fees being burned should be diverted to the DAO treasury and the money would form a significant part of the development fund.
This would be in addition to the contributions or donations to the fund from individual community members, whales, projects, etc.
Burning is not more important than building a solid development fund, I'm sure you will agree with me on that. So the fees being burned should be used to fund the DAO.
However, if we can source the funding required to be competitive (hundreds of millions of dollars) and still keep the burning, that would be absolutely great.
3. Inherited bad brand image
I bet many of you have watched the movie, "everybody hates Chris" (no, not my Chris 🤷♂️). In this case, it's almost like "everybody hates BCH".
If you talk about smartBCH outside the BCH community, more than 51% of the time, you'll be greeted with scorn, ridicule, or outrightly ignored.
BCH has successfully built and established a bad reputation for itself and smartBCH automatically inherited that bad reputation or ill-will from the wider crypto community. Talk about being "guilty by association".
There's no point going through the eternal arguments of BCH vs BTC here. If we're going to move forward, we have to let go of the past.
We don't have even 1% of the marketing firepower of most chains, we don't have a large community, and we certainly do not have THE BEST product or tech.
I don't think we should allocate any resources (time, attention, money) to doing the same thing that's been hurting the chain for years.
We should focus on building, marketing, user acquisition and retention, collaborations, and integrations into the wider crypto community.
PS: I'm not saying those who already formed a bad impression of BCH and smartBCH are wrong or right. I'm saying we've had our fair share of controversy, propaganda and counter-propaganda, and it certainly hasn't worked to our advantage. It's time to organise and start building a positive brand identity for BCH and smartBCH.
4. Other ways to accelerate smartBCH growth
Does anyone else feel that the relatively big smartBCH projects are not doing enough marketing outside of the BCH and smartBCH community?
Marketing and publicity efforts such as
Submitting press releases and paying for sponsored posts on popular crypto media sites. The price range is around $1500 to $5000 or more depending on how many millions of users the site has.
Video reviews by popular crypto YouTubers with considerable followers.
Employing the services of marketing agencies to handle. smartBCH itself can think of this.
Partnerships and collaborations with other projects within and outside the smartBCH ecosystem. There's power in synergy.
Events and campaigns can be organised and sponsored by two or more projects aimed at user acquisition. This will lessen the financial burden for each of the projects involved, create more awareness for the chain, as well as potentially bring in new users to the projects.
There're many creative ways existing projects with relatively good funding can grow their own business while helping support the growth of the chain through user acquisition campaigns outside of the existing smartBCH community.
Onboard existing BCH investors onto smartBCH
Furthermore, since charity begins at home, we need to get more of the existing BCH investors and holders into smartBCH.
Because clearly, not so many of the current BCH holders are using smartBCH, otherwise the TVL and volume would be higher.
Hopefully, with the coming of the Bitcoin.com-backed Verse DEX, smartBCH will catch the attention of most existing BCH investors and we should see some new users.
Conclusion
As a member of the BCH and smartBCH community, I think it's my civic responsibility to share my opinion on important matters that affects all of us.
Firstly, for smartBCH to be competitive we need organised and coordinated effort which has to be done by the team or a DAO.
Also, I believe the responsibility of creating a DAO and transferring responsibility to the community rests on the founding team.
At least, they would have to spearhead the creation of such a DAO, working with major developers or projects on smartBCH and volunteer community members.
Secondly, I believe that the portion of gas fees being burned should be allocated to funding the DAO and the development/marketing of the project.
We can't keep complaining about being under-funded and still be burning money for no economic purpose.
Maybe smartBCH and the burn mechanism were introduced to help pump BCH, but I believe growing the userbase of the chain will achieve that purpose more than burning.
Furthermore, BCH's supply is just 21 million compared to other smart chains with hundreds of millions, billions, and some have an infinite supply.
As such, we do not need burning to pump the BCH price. The more the smartBCH ecosystem grows, the greater the demand for BCH. The supply is already ultra-low, pumping BCH will be easy with the growth of the smartBCH userbase.
Thirdly, BCH has a poor brand image which is also rubbing off on smartBCH. Our work going forward is to change that wrong public perception and people's impression with coordinated positive brand positioning efforts.
PS: I stand to be corrected in case I have mistakenly misrepresented or overlooked a fact.
What's your opinion on these matters? Share with us in the comments section below.