Welp. Time to talk virtual world fuckery. Again. As you may or may not have heard, @neos_vr has been working on a cryptocurrency for a few years as the backing financial portion of their system. NCR, backed on ETH. In late Oct/Early Nov, it popped. Hard.
Graph is from https://coinmarketcap.com/curr... goes back to early October.
Their discord has become nigh unto unusable as of late, with most traffic in the NCR channel, and they're getting flooded by shitcoin bots. No real surprise there. I'm not actually sure how the coin is tradable, mostly due to my own lack of understanding of uniswap/metamask.
Oh boy and I've already gotten 2 crypto bot responses to this thread with phishing links. Good times.
With the added attention, I was curious how Neos's Patreon was going. As far as I'm aware, it was their major source of income before this. As a patron, you get NCR allotments. Hoo boy look at that graph go. (thanks to @graphtreon for this info) https://graphtreon.com/creator...
Allotments vary per tier. How many patreon tiers does Neos have? 43. Most named for specific donors. Tiers give between ~2 and ~245 NCR/month. Assuming you can sell it off, you're making profit at any tier, by converting USD to NCR via Patreon. Of course Neos gets the USD.
And a non-trivial portion of the USD also goes to Patreon. This makes Patreon a currency exchange of sorts, which is technically against their TOS, but according to multiple articles from the past 2 months, Patreon is actually pretty ok with this. https://protos.com/patreon-cry...
So Neos needs money because virtual worlds are expensive to build/run and hard to monetize. Their coin pops (where Hi Fidelity's never even got close), but they can't sell up front. They rework it to sell on the side via Patreon. Patreon has revenue issues and want in on NFTs.
I'm curious where this ends for both Neos and Patreon. Neos is a developer focused virtual world/platform without much in the way of usability, or users. Patreon has been teetering on the financial brink for years. Now one is a coin focus, and the other is desperate.
I'm guessing this was tipped by Facebook/Meta's announcement, so we're getting to watch the convergence of a bunch of tech bubbles in real time. It'll probably end in heartbreak, and probably quick, but it was at least worth documenting, even if my mentions are all coinbots now.
I do have to say though, putting your real name on the donation tier of an Actual Company (Patreon) for a very shady exchange of currency in violation of who knows what kind of rules and laws is definitely something I will hold your beer for, honey.
oopsy whoopsie etc (current minting price is $10.27, current market is $5.75)
Updating this thread about NeosVR and their cryptocurrency. Current NCR Market: $1.63
Patreon down 20% from high, still sitting at $85k/month.
The plot thickens. Apparently some sort of strife in the C-Suite.
And to update on publicly visible revenue/holdings. Neos Patreon now down to $66k/month, closing in on 50% loss since the late December 2021 peak, but still 5x yoy at this point. Neos NCR has "stabilized" in the $1.80 range over the past 2 weeks.
Ok well I said "stabilized" ANNNNNNNNNNNNNND IT'S GONE ~20% shaved in the 30 minutes since the discord announcement.
This includes a screenshot tweet of the announcement from Froox themselves. https://x.com/Frooxius/status/...
From 2 days ago, it appears that there was a Brand Synergy tweet for Neos and an artist heavily involved in NFT and Crypto Metaverses. This is from the Neos COO, who is not a cosigner on the letter, meaning the C-Suite split may be larger than just the CEO versus the CTO/CMO.
Ok, quick retraction on the last tweet. CMO in Neos terms is Chief Moderation Officier, which afaik (confirming with @veer_neosvr), this is not an actual C-Suite position.
Looking at the Neos LinkedIn, it looks like the company (which lists 14 employees) has a 3 person C-Suite, CEO, CTO, and COO. This would mean the split is between CTO and CEO/COO. Rest of "employees" may be community or volunteers? https://www.linkedin.com/compa...
Thanks to @kentbye for this info, the rift is now pretty obvious: CEO/COO care about investors, CTO cares about project/platform/user community. This is already ugly and it's gonna get worse, and is especially complicated given the background of Neos. https://x.com/kentbye/status/1...
Remember, Neos is mostly a single developer, BDFL project that is also a company, and that single developer is CTO. The engine behind Neos is called FrooxEngine for a reason. It's *all* Frooxius' work. To the point where I believe there are few if possibly no other devs on it?
This is why I'm really trepidatious regarding everyone's "maybe it'll be open sourced" reactions at the possibility of a fork. The crypto side wants this to build their own worlds. The community side wants this to further the platform.
What I'm not sure either side gets is: Have they ever worked with a single dev project that just gets open souced after *years* of closed work? It's like reading the inside of someone's head, and it is a *shitton* of work to make that usable to a community of any kind.
Same can be said of closed source company/community projects, but there you're reading multiple heads and a culture, versus a single dev. It's a different type of story. Bringup on either is and *incredibly* difficult amount of work to calculate, so be careful what you wish for.
I say this having been part of the internal team that open sourced the Second Life Client in the late 2000's. That took a team MONTHS of work to clean, comment, document, with comm lins open to most of the original devs, and we still didn't get NEARLY as much of it was we wanted.
This isn't to say doing the work can't gel into something usable, as happened with the now multiple Second Life Clients and later OpenGrid, but that was larger communities putting in YEARS of work after the fact.
People want new virtual worlds *now*. Open sourcing a platform doesn't put you on the road to instantly capturing the zeitgeist by any means. Anyways, I'll now shut up about the "maybe it'll open source" argument around Neos. Back to reporting on boring financials.
Speaking of boring financials... NCR back > $1, currently hovering at $1.30. Patreon down ~3-4% from yesterday. Note that, for the patreon tiers to break even, NCR needs to be in the US$3.30 range. Being a patron stopped being instantly profitable ~25 days ago.
Time to add more complexity to the social situation in Neos. It's pretty well known that a lot of staff for the virtual world are not paid a salary. Many of those, as well as world creators, were paid out of the "CDF", or Community Developer Fund. https://wiki.neos.com/Communit...