$DONUT TOKEN 🍩 🍩 🍩

TL;DR:

• $DONUT is an ERC20 token initially built at the behest of Reddit to trial out their Community Points initiative. Reddit is now scaling this up big time with the Reddit Scaling Bake-off. Once the winner is announced, DONUT will get some nice airtime. It has so far remained under the radar.
• $DONUT has 3 core utilities; 1) used to purchase banner space in the 230,000+ member subreddit (this is a very attractive place to promote). DONUT used on the banner space is burned, marking the deflationary aspect of the tokenomics. 2) new tokens are issued on a periodic basis which is sent to active users of the community (they can HODL or sell to the continuous stream of advertisers). 3) DONUT holders can vote on proposals such as issuance reduction in the integrated AragonDAO, i.e. fully decentralised and community-run.
• $DONUT has remained under the radar since launching on main-net. This is typical for projects where the ecosystem and product take centre stage and the team isn’t as ‘commercially’ focussed in the typical way, i.e. no expensive marketing team. It is purely community-run (and the community is now starting to push it). We’ve also been in a bear market where many have kept their capital in ETH, BTC or other tokens. In the last 4 weeks, as predicted some time ago, DONUT is now seeing some serious interest in what I believe is the beginning of an interesting journey. Marketcap broke $800,000, price reached ATH of $0.01, volume/liquidity on Uniswap broke $100,000. This is still very early days for a token which has real utility in an ecosystem that will inevitably see a lot of traction during the bull market. Imagine holding a lot of DONUT now, and being the guy to sell to the flock of advertisers during the bull market?
• Following this last point, there is a positive feedback loop to consider. The more users hear about DONUT, the more they will join the sub, the more they join the sub, the more valuable the banner is, the more valuable the banner is, the higher the price of DONUT, the higher the price of DONUT the more of deflationary it becomes (due to the burn-rate surpassing issuance-rate).
• How likely is it more people will hear about DONUT? Well, right now some of r/ Ethtrader’s most active users are earning about $3000 per month in DONUT. Can you imagine the headlines and media attention? “Ethtrader users earn $XXX in DONUT.”
• There is also the meme-coin element to factor in. I don’t like mentioning this because DONUT has actual use-case and is not a meme-coin in the traditional sense. But, let’s be honest, meme-ability / marketability are both very important. Dogecoin got to where it did with zero utility.
• I am not saying that Reddit will roll out DONUT across their entire site. DONUT will be just for Ethtrader. Other subs can have their own token and use their own tokenomics. There are some examples already, like MOON & BRICK. Neither of these has tokenomics close to as attractive as DONUT and at the moment, there is no reason for them to accrue in value.
• Useful links at the bottom of the page.

“Fun fact, @cslarson (head moderator of r/ ethtrader and founder of DONUTS as far as I can tell) was actually hacking on SourceCred before DONUTS happened. He, along with @lkngtn and @jvluso had recently coded up credao at a hackathon, a project that mints ERC-20 tokens in an Aragon DAO according to Cred scores, when he got the call from Reddit offering support for prototyping DONUTS on r/ ethtrader. Can’t blame him:)” S_ben Source.

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MAIN POST:

Funnily enough, this is actually an alpha: right now you can ‘farm DONUT’ by contributing to r/ ethtrader through high-quality memes, discussions, comments etc. Just by being an active member of the community, you can earn DONUT 🍩 tokens which you can sell for real $ETH. I’ll explain later why people would want to buy DONUT. Or, you can HODL them, which is highly recommended. Based on the last rewards distribution (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/i48u9g/new_donuts_distribution/) if you earned a mere 100 or so Karma points in the sub, you would have received 10,000 DONUT tokens which you can then sell for ETH on a growing list of exchanges, namely Uniswap (which has growing liquidity).

This is an example of what DeFi and Ethereum are all about and is one of the more significant community-focused projects. You have all sorts of crummy community tokens out there but none have the ecosystem to back them up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying DONUT is a $LEND, $COMP, etc but it ticks all the boxes to be considered a moon-shot: meme-worthy, existing network effect, undeniable utility, Reddit-backing, AragonDAO support, and more.

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The Ethtrader Group is a 100% community-run subreddit-collective where the governance token DONUT 🍩is used to vote on proposals regarding tokenomics. Slashing supply, changing tokenomics and other decisions can be made in their AragonDAO with the more DONUT 🍩 you hold resulting in higher voting power. It makes sense that Aragon was used seeing as the lead developer Carlson was working on Credao (a similar concept) using Aragon before he was approached by Reddit to work on the very first iteration of their Community Points system before rolling it out across the entire platform. Source. Any member of the community can propose changes by first gauging sentiment through polls in the subreddit (something you need DONUT for by the way), following up with proposals in AragonDAO which require voting (again voting power is tied to DONUT holdings).

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Growth over time: DONUT 🍩 has thus far followed similar growth trajectories of projects that start out organic, community and product-focused and over time attract real interest, real activity and real growth. This is in opposition to projects that market first and deliver later. DONUT hasn’t marketed anything as the community has focussed internally during the bear market and the ecosystem is relatively new, which is why it isn’t already worth more. I have been trading crypto since 2011 and ALTs since 2014 and I’ve learned to spot these nuanced differences between projects, and the all-important signals.

The DONUT token launched in its current state in Jan 2019 with a volume of $30 and a price of $0.0019. But I am going to focus on December 2019 as the start date for a number of reasons: first, due to some teething pains with the direction of Ethtrader & $DONUT some of the team split off, the Token also underwent a shift and you can see on the chart this early phase does not reflect any organic price action. So, starting from the latter date, looking at the chart, you can see an organic price development typical of many promising projects. Slow, steady accumulation, followed by sharper ups and downs with the bottoms rising upwards. I saw this same pattern on pretty much every organic-driven ALT I’ve invested in with success. In the last 2 weeks, ATHs have been broken across the board (price, marketcap, volume etc).

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Similar successes: Let’s face it. In our funky community, tokens of all kinds can grow astronomically. Even those without a single use-case can grow simply because they are meme-worthy. Think $DogeCoin or $Garlicoin. More recently you have $TEND which is growing in popularity and is currently worth $1 (when I first started writing this post, it was at $0.50. DONUT was at $0.005 and is now touching $0.01).

DONUT 🍩 is unique in that it has potential to be a significant Ethereum meme token on par with these examples but more importantly, it also has tangible use-cases which will ensure the project remains active over a longer course of time, with accessibility open to anyone with spare time to meaningfully contribute to the community. But that isn’t the clincher. The Ethtrader group is large and getting larger with almost a quarter of a million members at the time of writing. That is a valuable audience of highly relevant people interested in cryptocurrency, especially Ethereum. DONUT 🍩is used in a Harbinger Tax style system (whereby someone would use DONUT to buy ad space from the current owner for a price set by that owner. This person would then set a new price — this will be the cost someone who wants it back will need to pay — and then based on this new price there will be a 100% daily tax for as long as you choose to hold the banner for).

This adversarial system will ensure you have projects (typically with deep pockets) buying up lots of DONUT 🍩 to ensure they can control the banner, spending those DONUT tokens on getting the banner, and the process will continue over and over. If we enter a new bull market for DeFi, this will be a significant value and liquidity driver as let’s face it, that is prime real estate for brand exposure. I’ll draw your attention back to the feedback loop I mentioned in the TL;DR.

Tokenomics:

*note, this is just a quick thing I slapped together and shows just one process and one use-case and is not a comprehensive diagram. Hopefully, it is useful anyway.

Deflationary or inflationary?

The DONUT used to buy the banner is always burnt, currently, 3 Million DONUT is burned per month. While there is monthly issuance (the source of contribution rewards), there is also frequent burn events. Currently, the banner is burning 100,000 DONUT per day compared to the 4,000,000 issued per month.

This daily burn can increase or decrease depending on the cost of the banner which can increase or decrease based on what the owner sets it as. This means when demand increases (exchanges, dapps, projects bid for the banner space), the burn rate will exceed the issuance rate, resulting in deflationary tokenomics. Conversely, if the cost of the banner decreases and is below the threshold (as it currently is, only slightly) then technically it will be inflationary.

The deflationary dominance has already proven to be effective seeing as the token started out with 100m units and now on around 90m. Furthermore, the issuance rate can at anytime be slashed if put to a community vote which anyone in the community can initiate, so long as they own DONUT. So, DONUT is also used here as a governance token, the more you have the stronger your vote on such decisions. To use DONUT to vote on community initiatives or a change in the tokenomics, you’ll need to visit their integrated AragonDAO and learn more about the process. This can be found here: https://mainnet.aragon.org/#/0x57EBE61f5f8303AD944136b293C1836B3803b4c0 and is also where DONUT is claimed from.

Takeaways:

• Own DONUT now and be the one to sell it advertisers who will be in bidding wars with each other. Advertisers in this industry are used to ridiculous prices and the banner is very cheap at the moment.
• The DONUT used for the ads will be burnt and the advertisers, of course, won’t get them back. This means a continuous BUY-pressure for DONUT.
• As a DONUT holder, you will have voting power in their AragonDAO integration. What does this mean? We can submit proposals and vote on tokenomics to change, e.g. reduce supply.
• We all know this space, right? On top of the concrete utility, DONUT could and will become a popular ‘meme-coin’. Previous examples of these (that lack utility) are Dogecoin & GarlicCoin.
• If you were an exchange, would you pay $3k per day to reach all the ETH traders? (They currently spend so much more than that on useless CMC banners) If so, that’s $1m per year. For example, you’ve all seen the endless crypto . com banners right? They spend millions on marketing. I will wager all my DONUT that they will be serious bidders soon.
• Some people are already earning $3000 a month on r/ Ethtrader via donut. You can take a look at the latest distribution list here.
• Media attention is practically assured and the number of new people tweeting and talking about DONUT is rising rapidly, just take a look at twitter, 4chan, reddit and other places. DONUT was also listed on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap within the last mont.

Resources:

• CoinGecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/donut
• CoinMarketCap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/donut/
• Telegram Trader Community: https://t.me/DonutTraders 👈👈👈
• Reddit Community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/ 👈👈👈
• $DONUT overview: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/wiki/donuts 👈👈👈
• Etherscan Link: https://etherscan.io/token/0xc0f9bd5fa5698b6505f643900ffa515ea5df54a9
• Discussions: https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/donuts-a-case-study-in-tokenized-incentives/810/10
• More discussions: https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/donuts-a-case-study-in-tokenized-incentives/810/5

In the news:

• Coini.fy: https://coin.fyi/news/ethereum/donuts-on-ethereum-launched-e70bjc
• Trustnode: https://www.trustnodes.com/2020/08/07/ethereum-reddit-donuts-rise-by-10x
• DefiRate: https://defirate.com/reddit-donuts/

I hope this was in-depth and useful. I have tried to add as much as possible but I have no doubt missed some stuff as well. As always, DYOR and make an informed decision. For me, at this price, it’s a no brainer.