Is the project still viable under the existing market conditions?
Yes I think it is viable, these are the calcs to show why:
USD
There are 18 people listed on About Us | MaidSafe. Take an average salary of, say, USD 60K (which I guess is very low but let’s just use it in this example).
That makes 1.08M USD =18*60000 annual spend on salaries.
To fund salaries maidsafe must sell approx 10.8M MAID per year (at the current price of approx $0.10 USD/MAID). The 20M MAID loan would last about 1.85 years.
To generalise, sustainable price P = T*N*S/L (USD/MAID)
T years of work
N workers
S salary in USD per year
L loan amount in MAID
For example, to fund the project for 10 more years with 18 staff at 60K USD salary by using the 20M MAID loan, the average price for the next ten years needs to be =10*18*60000/20000000 = 0.54 USD/MAID.
The average price for the past year is USD 0.1506 (source data) and for the entire trading history since 2013 is 0.1709 (source data)
/* Calc average daily USD price on coinmarketcap historical-data page */
x=[]; document.querySelectorAll(".cmc-table-row").forEach(function(e,i) {x.push(parseFloat(e.querySelectorAll(".cmc-table__cell--right")[0].textContent)) }); y=0; for(i=0;i<x.length;i++) { y += x[i] }; console.log("Avg USD price: " + y/x.length);
A price of 0.16 USD/MAID would fund about 3 years of salaries from the 20M MAID loan.
Bittrex
Average daily MAID volume on Bittrex is 18408 MAID per day (last 90 days).
Average daily BTC volume on Bittrex is 0.255 BTC per day (last 90 days).
/* Calc average daily volume on bittrex ticker page */
key="V" /*V=maid volume; BV=bitcoin volume*/; days=90; x = JSON.parse(document.body.textContent); y=x.result; t=0; for (i=y.length-days; i<y.length; i++) { t=t+y[i][key] }; console.log(t/days);
Selling 20M MAID over 2 years is approx 27K MAID sold per day. This would more than double the average daily volume of bittrex.
Compared to poloniex
Average daily MAID volume on poloniex is 322444 MAID per day (last 90 days, 17x more than bittrex).
Average daily BTC volume on poloniex is 4.48 BTC per day (last 90 days, 17x more than bittrex).
/* Calc average daily volume on poloniex ticker page */
key="volume" /*quoteVolume=maid volume; volume=bitcoin volume*/; days=90; y = JSON.parse(document.body.textContent); t=0; for (i=y.length-days; i<y.length; i++) { t=t+y[i][key] }; console.log(t/days);
Selling 20M MAID over 2 years is approx 27K MAID sold per day. This is 8.4% of the average daily volume of poloniex. Or to put it another way, 8.4% or more of poloniex volume moving to bittrex would cover the needs of the loan for funding maidsafe.
The question is, how much volume will move from poloniex to bittrex? Only time will tell.
An interesting question to ask is what needs to happen on the markets? Maintaining a price of at least 10c seems important. Creating liquidity so maidsafe can confidently sell the loaned coins seems important.
Adding new markets might be good because it might add more liquidity, however is no certainty. It’s possible that just a single exchange could provide most of the liquidity (historically this has been poloniex) and things will still work. I think bittrex could certainly step into this role and I don’t think there’s any urgent need to create an erc20 token.
Are there any historical precedents for omni->erc20 to learn about a) number of new exchanges adopting the coin and b) change in overall daily volume traded and c) change in liquidity (especially bids)? Even if anyone knows of examples (even without numbers) I’d be happy to dig around for some precedent and expectation for uptake of erc20 conversion.
My feeling on erc20 (just a feeling, not based on facts, which I would love to see more of as per above request) is not to pursue it. The cost of complexity and confusion and effort required probably would not offset the benefit of listing (which may not actually attract additional demand; it’s the creation of demand I mostly doubt and want to research further). And I also feel bittrex can fulfill the required needs until launch.
If the erc20 contract could be designed such that omni can be burned for erc20 and then in reverse (erc20 burned back into omni maidsafecoin) it would be good to pursue since it wouldn’t require any maidsafe involvement. Maidsafe could continue to do the original omni->safecoin transition and erc20 be this side thing. When safecoin is launched people with erc20 would need to convert to from erc20 to omni then to safecoin. But if erc20 is irreversible then I fear it creates additional complexity for safecoin which takes resources away from the primary goal of delivering the network, both now and at launch.
My key takeaway from this analysis is a) hopefully 10% (or more) of trading moves from poloniex to bittrex and b) hopefully they put orders on the orderbook to try to maintain at least 10c when maidsafe sells their loan (since 10c ensures 2 years more development).