Ponder Strategy and Token Structure

For the last 6 weeks Ponder has been part of the Helix hashgraph accelerator in Hong Kong. The program is run by Mind Fund, a Hong Kong-based VC that is also an investor in Hedera Hashgraph. For Ponder, the accelerator has been an excellent experience and has led to some major changes. This article aims to describe the rationale for some of those changes.

Business Referrals and Not Dating

One of the biggest changes is that as we have decided to develop the business referrals app as the next product, with a focus on the Chinese market. We think business referrals is the biggest opportunity out of all the verticals we are targeting, and its best that we grab this before it gets taken. The Chinese market is uniquely positioned as one of the few large markets where a single front-end payment solution — WeChat Pay — is ubiquitous among both businesses (that would be seeking customer referrals) and consumers. We think a use of a fiat-based consumer wallet is needed for the business referrals product to have maximum impact — more on this below.

Furthermore, it’s hard to have a brand extension of a dating-related product. Once you have a brand that’s associated with dating, any business related product will be hard to take seriously. Better to go in with a business product, and later do a brand extension to a dating product.

No Crypto Wallet

Why do you need WeChat Pay, you ask, could you not just use a crypto wallet? We’d like to avoid the friction for our consumers associated with fiat/crypto conversion. Or putting it another way, your local mom & pop bakery seeking customer referrals is unlikely to be dealing with cryptocurrency any time soon (and crypto’s use is banned/severely restricted in both China and India). And since we believe we have a unique opportunity with a business referrals solution, we don’t think we should limit our market scope by insisting on consumer usage of crypto.

Hashgraph Back-end

That being said there is a clear advantage is using a hashgraph back-end for moving money around internationally, particularly for micropayments. Speed is quicker, and costs are lower. So take the example of someone in India referring someone in China, referral fees would need to be transferred from China to India. It would be ideal if a token could be used as the means to do that on the back-end, but with both the Indian and Chinese users seeing fiat alone. That’s what we’re exploring with Hedera hashgraph, developers, and lawyers.

Token Structure

That brings us to the form of the token itself. Originally, the Ponder token was to be used primarily as a medium of exchange. Those making the referrals would receive tokens, and those benefiting from the referrals would pay tokens. In such cases our own unique token adds no value that an existing token could not provide. We could use Bitcoin or Ethereum and we’d get the same benefits as having our own token. And with our own token, there will be high ‘velocity’ since there isn’t a reason to hold the coins, leading to a downward pressure on the token. This volatility will make the consumer experience awkward. How do you explain to referrers who were previously earning $10 per referral that they will now be earning only $2 per referral?

So if it’s better to use an existing token for the medium of exchange, then best to choose a token that has low volatility. Anyone say stable coin? And that’s the conclusion we’ve reached — to use the soon-to-be-released Carbon stable coin for the Hashgraph network.

That doesn’t mean we won’t ever have our own Ponder token. A Ponder token could be a ‘work-based’ token, where high quality/volume users are rewarded for their efforts with a token that fluctuates in price. Such a token could be integrated with the strong gamification of the app to improve upon the user experience and create more loyal customers. Some users might not even know that its a crypto-token.

Over the remaining few weeks in the Helix program we’ll be examining all options with a view to deciding token strategy by the end of April. While this may frustrate some people waiting to dump our token on exchanges, we believe that our first priority has to be to create a great product with an amazing user experience. If that means that we never release our own token, then so be it.