In search of a Seed token exchange strategy? Part 1.

Seed (SED) is a token Livetree has created to make the user experience as seamless as possible. Seed represents a mini-economy where you use the tokens to access rewards, unlock features, discounts and products. We’ve taken the best aspects of blockchain (royalty, transparency and democratisation) and put it inside Seed.

We created the Seed token as a way of bringing transparency, trust, security and ownership to the entertainment world, and during our journey have seen an unparalleled need to add transparency to the web.

We will be publishing a series of technical blogs on behind the scenes and the data protocol we have created to track royalties. We believe this protocol could be underpin the internet and revolutionise data privacy and truly bring about the Web 3.0 vision we all shared when Ethereum launched onto the scene in 2015. We’ll be writing a series of technical insights and publishing our protocol open source — but more on that later.

This blog focuses on listing and our current strategy. There have been a lot of questions on when the Seed token will be listed and we hope to set out in this blog what the challenges have been, why it has taken time and our next steps. We understand that there is some confusion as to why the token has not yet been listed and really would appreciate your valuable input as we publish a series of blogs and continue our journey.

We hope by publishing and sharing our experiences it will help those who are in similar positions and together we will come together to forge a positive solution. We have faced several concerns, including high costs, regulation and, in our view very questionable practices that could be viewed as market manipulation.

Market manipulation is where the price of the token is manipulated by external parties. We were shocked to be invited to China by some of the largest Chinese exchanges only to be told by the exchanges themselves that they “buy” and “sell” or “pump” and “dump” the tokens they list internally through a practice called Market Making. Often at arms length these exchanges utilise market makers to extract profit from those trading on the exchange. This practice is now widely employed throughout the crypto-industry. We feel this practice, although, not illegal in all countries/territories is highly amoral and goes against the reason we created the token in the first place.

Secondly, listing is expensive. Exchanges charge a listing fee, marketing and market makers are all competing to attract traders. In our experience thus far we have seen a range of listing fees starting at $25,000 for smaller exchanges to millions $ for large exchanges, not including marketing.

Lastly, the time and effort involved in listing and the meetings with exchanges, marketers and all of the middle men is a complete distraction from building a real business and true value.

In summary in listing Seed, we could potentially be engaged in an illegal activity, if not illegal now then in the regulated future definitely so. Secondly we feel it goes against our fundamental values of transparency, positive change and real financial value. Lastly, it’s expensive and time consuming and a distraction from building a real business.

We have been looking for alternative solutions and with this initial post we are opening up our thinking and asking you to participate in the exciting plans we have for the future.

Over the next series of posts we will be exploring our plans and ask you to participate and engage with us.

We’d like to begin with the definition of an ICO and IEO, so that we can all start from the same place.