Over the past months, we’ve seen the price of Autonomi continue to decline. While I don’t believe market price alone should dictate protocol decisions, it’s important to recognize that a prolonged downtrend — combined with only around $2,500 in USDC liquidity on Uniswap — creates a negative feedback loop. Once marketing efforts and the Impossible Future Season 2 launch begin, it will be much harder to attract new participants if we’re operating under strong downward momentum.
That said, the main reasons for pausing emissions go beyond price action:
Unequal earnings have been reported among node operators, raising fairness concerns.
Exploits have been identified that allow participants to extract emissions unfairly.
Artificially low node capacity is currently maintained because of ongoing emissions. This makes data uploads unrealistically cheap, with a significant portion of value lost to Ethereum transaction costs. It also means the ANT token continues to lack meaningful utility or demand, while we still haven’t properly tested network performance with nodes approaching 50%+ capacity.
At this stage, the most valuable data we can generate is operational, not emissions-based. We’ve said for over six months that we’re “close to scaling up,” but given how long this phase has lasted, it’s clear we would have been better off adjusting emissions earlier to allow for more realistic testing conditions.
For these reasons, I propose temporarily halting emissions until:
the current reward distribution and exploit issues are resolved,
we can test the network under real capacity conditions, and
we’re ready to reintroduce emissions with stronger mechanisms and fairer economics.
This would not be a step back, but rather a step toward stability, credibility, and sustainable growth when marketing and adoption efforts resume.
I am a strong supporter of fixing the emission issues.
I doubt we have any chance of getting it paused.
Slim chance we could maybe argue a better mechanism/reduction.. I hope!!
Reduction means a smaller network but a healthier network.
Idk what the team consider a viable network size though?
3 million nodes with a combined 50GB of of available storage offered due to emmision incentives is not an amazing feature though.
Also the VPS concentration at Hetzner is a network wipeout waiting to happen. Emissions are totally to blame for that, and should be a point in your list @Mightyfool
I think 1 & 2 are claims not established fact. It should be a priority IMO for Autonomi to validate these and publish their assessment rather than let the ideas fester.
Testing the network with realistic supply, demand balance and stored data per node, without emissions would I think be wise.
It could build confidence in claims of long term viability and flush out issues that may be difficult or impossible to fix later. I think we’re close to a point where this would be meaningful and worthwhile.
At the same time my largest concern is management, and the apparent lack of a strategy or even a plan. A lot of fuss was made of updating the roadmap, but like other times, what we got was something different and not much use to me. Long ago I stopped listening to what they say and only take notice of what is visible and testable, so I wasn’t disappointed, except to see native token conspicuously absent. Some folk here tell me they still plan to do this, and even that David has said he wants it to happen and that he hopes someone else will do it (despite his recent public statements that appear dismissive of the need, or even opposed to this).
What comes out of Autonomi with respect to the future gets progressively thinner and ever more disheartening. Right when I thought Bux might come into her own.
I have no idea what management are doing apart from watching the developers and putting out videos and small scale events that very few will see.
I guess there’s planning for IF2, but as with IF1 I can’t regard that as likely to be effective. It has produced very little after the event. There were positives, such as getting bugs fixed, but we have heard next to nothing of new partners and AFAIK very little ongoing app development or new developers who have stuck around.
I do hope they have a plan. This stage was supposed to be Bux’ thing but she’s invisible.
As for listening to us on emissions, testing or much at all
When Bux joined she described herself as a ‘marketing beast’ which I agree we have failed to see yet but I do think we need to give her the benefit of the doubt because marketing hasn’t really started yet at all in my eyes. Like I said yesterday I’m hoping she is waiting until she thinks she has something to really market and then we will see if the ‘marketing beast’ was a valid claim.
Paymaster and this merkle payment scheme to get gas down to negligible. If this is around the corner then what else after that won’t it be now or never.
Around 100,000× emissions ↔ rewards for being a useful node.
The Paymaster/MercleTree will help prevent whistleblower uploads from being traceable to an ETH exchange and, ideally, reduce the upload cost by 10×.
Stopping emissions would make sense (from our point of view — though probably not from the perspective of those who set it up this way, due to promises made, etc.).
It’s a bit of hopium, but probably not a needle mover.
I am also supporting this, but mainly due to simple reason - we do not have enough data to fill in the provided storage. I though that the number of nodes should be determined by demand for storage. Now with emissions this is creating crooked economy, that is driving the ANT price down, fueling FUD and bad emotions. It was probably ok for a while when we wanted to jump start the network and see if it can survive at a scale, but now we have a large number of rotten nodes, not really providing the space and it brings us down (IMHO).
Any big player with 2 braincells to rub together will figure out that those nodes have zero storage capacity and if it is marketed as a huge amount of storage capacity that is us in the scam bin.
This is an unprovable claim, we can’t be sure until the data starts coming in.
My current opinion is that the God Whale is using the emissions to fund full nodes. This hypothesis is supported by the fervor with which David defends him.
He is not stupid, he certainly understands the risk of zero storage nodes and what they would do to the project’s reputation, so he must have information that we don’t have access to.
It was just an off the cuff idea to the previous reply so not a huge amount of thought into it but I would think that we can easily enough find via the blockchain how much any tx paid in gas and then reimburse that accounts gas fee from the ant pot that needs to be handed out one way or another.
Then they spread those ant to people using the network and cover the fees incurred by us not having native. I’m sure it can be fleshed out.
We could do both reduced emissions and cover gas fees! Balance vs one sided approach at distribution we now have.
It is possible, of course, that this is exactly what happens. We may have a Killer Whale hidden in our ranks.
It is also possible that we may never find out, because with the attraction of big players and the sharp price increase, more nodes will enter the fight for emissions and the “bad” nodes will be diluted to a negligible part of the network…
I’m all for this. I don’t think we should incentivize node runners beyond what the network actually needs.
Let the community run nodes, and when people want to upload en-masse it should cause demand for more node runners etc as the fee would be higher due to demand. Right now it’s just not sustainable and causes a lot of people running huge numbers of nodes for no real reason besides dumping the token.
However we don’t have governance so can’t vote on this.
No need for both, if gas fees are how the ant get into circulation they are cycled to the node operator’s via data uploads.
Full circle economy and distribution.
Users and Node Ops gets a piece of the pie, not just people running countless nodes.
Everyone benefits.
Gas fee become a zero cost to users.
The ANT get distributed fairly.
Uploads are essentially network cost.
Nodes earn rewards for storing data.
