$ASH — Operation Stability — Part 2

Part 1 of this series was meant to stimulate thought about the what, why, and how of $ASH the token and the $ASH the community: the ethos, the mechanics, and some example ways we can create value as one.

In Part 2, I will be focusing a bit more on Idea 1, that every $ASH Creator and Collector should drop collections in ETH for the next several months to raise enough to contribute to a community pool to help stabilize $ASH through the Liquidity Pool (@7silver7surfer7. This is especially important if we believe the stability and growth of our community is tied to $ASH the token and without it as a thriving token, we will be hard pressed as a community to make our mark on the evolution of web3 to a more perfect state.

In full disclosure (and I hate having to do this), anything I mention in this or any piece of mine is not financial advice, so please, please, please, DYOR. Ok, ugh that’s done so let’s move one :-)

I will be focusing on 3 key questions in this essay:

1. “What” is $ASH Operation Stability?
2. “Why” is having ETH so critical to accomplishing $ASH Operation Stability?
3. “How” can we as community kick-start Operation Stability?

Ok, so let’s go through each of these questions 1 by 1…

1.What is $ASH Operation Stability?

This is a term I coined to define the ASH Community’s desire to do something as a community that will see $ASH the token thrive and the community be seen by the broader web3 market as a premium quality brand and ecosystem that creates immense value for creators and collectors. $ASH Operation Stability is also meant to provide us with a framework to think about and consider how we define what “value” is and if the $ASH token is more than a “reward” token for collecting and burning Pak pieces. AND if we want it to have broader value than this, how can we define it and how can we make it increase in value and be stable?

For the purposes of this essay, I assume that yes, we want the $ASH token to be more than just a Pak reward token and that Pak also wants it to be more than that. I assume Pak wants $ASH to more than only a reward token for their creations because in the $ASH 2 Collaborative Collection (see list of artists/creator participants HERE), if certain criteria were met, works by $ASH artists other than Pak receive a Tier 1 burn that is equivalent to Pak pieces (friends, please correct me if I’m wrong on this technicality).

2.Why is having ETH so critical to accomplishing $ASH Operation Stability?

The main reason ETH is critical for stability is that $ASH the token is an ERC-20, meaning, it is a token that lives on the Ethereum blockchain. What this also means, is that in order to use $ASH or buy creations with it, you need ETH to pay gas fees. A question that might be swirling in your mind is, ‘why not use some other blockchain that has little to no gas fees? And why do we need to pay gas in the first place?’ I won’t go too much into this here but basically, it’s because for the long-term, ETH is the most stable protocol, tried and true and used across the largest NFT marketplaces, and has a roadmap for trying to improve the issues we’ve come to know as collectors and creators. Secondly, if web3 participants wants a decentralized protocol, it requires rewarding the people and organizations who provide the nodes to create the decentralized network we transact and build upon. If gas fees do not exist at a sufficient rate, the node providers will use their resources for something else. So what I mean to say is, gas will likely never go away even if we switch protocols and any protocol that does not have it, in the long-term, will not exist unless they find some other way to reward the network node providers. Web3, or any economy for that matter, cannot drive without incentives for participants and without gas or some reward for maintaining the blockchain, we’re left with no decentralized infrastructure for the economy, which defeats the purpose of web3.

3.How can we as community kick-start Operation Stability?

Critical to increasing the value and stability of$ASH the token are 3 things:

i)We need as much if not more ETH than $ASH in the liquidity pool. I’m not an economist but in its simplest terms, the way the value of money works is like this. Until a currency becomes the standard by which people can transact for the basis of survival in an economy, you need more of the foundational currency (in this case ETH) to maintain the perceived value of the secondary currency (in this case $ASH). Taking this as a truth, to simplify the math, if you have 100 $ASH in circulation and only 10 ETH to cover it in the liquidity pool, then 1$ASH = .1ETH.

Taking this further, if 100 more $ASH is created through burning Pak pieces or qualifying $ASH 2 Collection artists/creators, then now there is 200 $ASH in circulation. BUT if you don’t add more ETH to the liquidity pool (as a liquidity pool provider) and it stays at 10 ETH, the value of $ASH has now been cut in half and is now 1$ASH = .05ETH.

Now mind you it doesn’t EXACTLY work like this but in general terms, it does. This is oversimplified example is meant to drive home the point that as creators and collectors, $ASH will not thrive if we as a community are not flush with ETH. This means that we cannot just continuously sell our creations in $ASH if we mean to thrive in not only the $ASH Ecosystem BUT also in web3 in general. So unless we all have alternative revenue streams to ETH, selling in $ASH only is a losing strategy in the short-term as of today and in the long-term until the end of days.

So, my general recommendation and how will be approaching things going forward is as follow (and I plan to do this by the way):

1. Sell your creations in ETH
2. Allocate a portion towards $ASH (20–30%), Stable Coin (30–40%), and ETH (30–50%) depending on your needs, risk tolerance, and plans, and desire to do good by donating to causes your support.
3. With the ETH portion of earnings, set aside maybe 10–20% of this (kind of like a tithe into a wallet that acts as a kind of “savings account” for an eventual contribution the $ASH Liquidity pool either through an NFT/token mechanism like URN is creating OR individually when you are really comfortable and understand how this work so you don’t get wrecked).

You might be asking, ‘why set aside some of the ETH as stablecoin?’ Well, it’s so you don’t get completely wrecked during the bear markets in this space and have something you can pull out with little-to-no tax effect for a rainy day or to spend for your income IRL.

AND in full transparency, I have not implemented this recommendation for myself yet because I’ve been in an aggressive accumulation period, trying to collect as many NFT assets as possible during these months to have a healthy portfolio. Going forward, I plan to focus almost exclusively on creating (instead of collecting) and do my next drops in ETH and implement this strategy going forward.

“Ok, TheDigitalCoy, this all sounds all well and good in theory, BUT what do we do next to make some waves and do something?”

Thanks for asking…:)

My last set of thoughts/recommendation, and I’ll let this sink are as follows:

1. Let’s have an $ASH Continental Congress of sorts so we as the $ASH Community can get aligned on the why, what, how of achieving what we all want, a stable, thriving, and admired $ASH Community and Ecosystem. And I hope we can get representatives from every groups and “cliques” that have formed within the $ASH Community-at-large , e.g., Pak O.G.s, Paklings, Sibs, Fomoverse crew, Urn DAO crew, $ASH Nation, #WeAcceptAsh, The Room Crew, etc (apologies if I missed anyone). I suggest this because without alignment and collaboration on the overarching issues and challenges, very little will get solved or if it does, it won’t be fast enough and time is of the essence, especially in web3.
2. Please, please, please, do not look down or bash any creator who is selling in other token than $ASH, if anything, support them fully and follow them to these other markets because as I mentioned above, I very strongly believe we all should and must do the same if we want $ASH to thrive as both a community and ecosystem. This is especially true if we believe a healthy, high-demand, high-value $ASH token is critical or important to a successful outcome that is sustainable. Also, I can almost guarantee you, any big collector who is in it for getting beautiful things really doesn’t care if you sell in USDC, ETH, Tez, Solano, $Magic, etc. as long as it’s easy for them to transact, they will buy beauty no matter what currency it is in.
3. If you an $ASH Creator, please consider what I have said and feel free to give me your feedback, thoughts, and ask any questions. If you are an $ASH Collector and beyond, please do the same.

Thanks and the next piece in the series will likely be about what an $ASH Continental Congress can look like and provided a response to any questions & concerns that you have.

Cheers, Happy Mother’s Day, and I hope you have a great weekend!