Bringing Value To The Carb Token.
As you will all know, Carbon Labs has two primary tokens in its ecosystem, GRPH and CARB. The current and future utility for GRPH is relatively well understood, but people are asking what about CARB.
Even though the utility of GRPH and CARB are pretty distinct, we understand why people are asking. So time for a deep dive into CARB and its place in our ecosystem.
The Beginning
$CARB was initially launched just over a year ago. Designed to be the utility token that powers all of the products and services that we developed.
We released $CARB by funding the liquidity pool in ZilSwap ourselves. No presale was done, so we had to work hard to get investors to believe in what we were doing. Back then, there weren't even ZWAP reward tokens to be earned. So, incentives for anyone to buy CARB had to be either a long-term hold or for trading. We, therefore, got to work on developing our first product, CARB staking.
CARB Staking was the first ZRC token staking available in Zilliqa, and it was quite a few months before anyone else offered staking. Most ZRC2 staking is powered by the Smart Contract we developed. And so, the first product for CARB also helped the more comprehensive Zilliqa Ecosystem. CARB staking became a safe place for holders to invest their CARB while we developed more products and services.
With staking, we had given our community something they could do with their CARB - but staking in this manner isn't consuming CARB; it is temporarily locking it up whilst at the same time also releasing more CARB (through staking rewards) into the ecosystem.
Again, our idea for $CARB was to make it the utility token behind everything we did. To use any of our products and services, you would need $CARB. In simplistic terms, $CARB was to be the payment token for everything.
Over time, we have realised that this can be restrictive in growing. The Carbon Labs motto is "From not knowing how, to not knowing you are."
That is, we want to be building products and services that utilise technology in a way that is easy and intuitive. We don't want people to have to "learn" how to use our products and services. We would love for people to naturally learn about web3 technologies by interacting with our products and services.
We do not want to restrict our products and services to only those familiar with Zilliqa. Or, if they are not, we do not want to have to make them jump through many hoops to acquire $CARB to be able to use our products and services. It is naive to think that we can encourage people to take the required time to accumulate $CARB as a prerequisite for interacting with us.
We have, of course, started building products that make onboarding with Carbon Labs and Zilliqa in general easier. But we need to reorient ourselves and consider the broader community of people that would benefit from what we are building. People that do not need to (or have any desire) to learn how to get started.
We want these people to start using our products and services.
Transformation of $CARB.
Today, CARB can be acquired through the different Zilliqa based exchanges (Zilswap, xCad Dex and CarbSwap).
What you can do with CARB at the moment is somewhat limited. The primary use is within CarbSwap, where CARB is required to pay the 0.25% swap fee for exchanging between different tokens supported by CarbSwap.
All tokens in CarbSwap are also paired against CARB, so as a liquidity provider, you need to acquire CARB before you can provide liquidity on CarbSwap. Currently, there is around 1.9million CARB held within CarbSwap.
Previously, we mentioned that CARB could also be staked. However, CARB Staking (in its current form) will end shortly. With the release of CarbSwap, we had a better way for people to utilise the CARB that they are holding.
With limited options of what you can do with CARB, it is understandable why we are not seeing significant demand for CARB at this stage.
The solution would be to make everything payable in CARB. Wrong. That was where we started, but as I have already written, that limits the size of our customer base.
Instead, we will work towards making Carbon Labs operate more like a DAO, where CARB will represent your stake within Carbon Labs.
What next?
To understand the next steps we will be taking please read our blog post linked above about the steps to becoming a DAO.
In summary, going forward our products and services will be built to target a wider audience than what we have just in Zilliqa. CARB as a token exists on Zilliqa, but we will be producing products and services that can exist on multiple chains.
These products and services will accept payment not only in crypto but also in more traditional payment options. Any payments received will go through a dedicated buyback contract that will buy CARB back from the market.
The constant buying back of CARB will have positive price impact on CARB. AS a holder of CARB you will directly benefit from these buybacks.
So, as I hope you can see from this very simple overview, that by looking at a much bigger market of people, and making it easy for them to pay for our products and services, we can increase the value of CARB and encourage others to join us.