Everest is an exciting and promising project. As a first decentralized registry of projects in cryptocurrency space, it has the potential to grow and become more valuable. However, I think that for Everest to be of interest to other dApps, the Everest needs to grow, change, and provide more value.
Currently, there’s no economic incentive for the participants in the projects. Users have to pay from their pocket to have the projects added and curated. Yet, the value the users get out of that is questionable. Also, there’s an issue of users spamming the projects, creating duplicates, or even fraudulent entries. However, that is where an opportunity lays.
First of all, to solve fraudulent, spammy, and duplicate entries, these users should be penalized by the network. This could be done in a form of a contract where the sum paid for adding a project becomes locked for some time and then repaid slowly with interest. If the entry would be deemed fraudulent, these funds would be lost.
Second, if users were to be incentivized for adding value to the project, that would bring more curation in. For example, users could be paid a small fee for curation and voting. Of course, these funds need to come from somewhere. And a good place to start are fees for adding projects in. However, at the moment the fee is fairly small. If the fees would be larger, that would bring more funds in. But why would project owners pay a substantial fee to be listed on Everest?
I think that is the question of value. To become interesting for a project, Everest needs to either have a very large user base or provide a financial incentive. The financial incentive for project owners could be integrated in a form of fees paid for querying data about the project by dApps. Yet, it still brings us to the question of value. For dApps to use Everest, there should be more information provided. One of the possibilities is to turn into something like Coingecko where in addition to contact information (like a website and a social account), the projects also have information about prices, project analytics, team, activity on GitHub, etc. The more data and analytics Everest can provide about the project, the more valuable it becomes to its users. And that will help to grow its user base and increase demand for other dApps. For example, a decentralized portfolio tracker could be built with data from Everest.
In summary:
- To increase its user base and become interesting to other dApps, Everest needs to provide more value such as prices, project analytics, project team, development activity, etc
- Once there’s more data, other dApps would be more interesting in integrating Everest. Such projects could be decentralized portfolio tracker, decentralized social network, a rating/review site, a coin price chart app
- To prevent fraud and spam, bad users need to be penalized. That could be done in form of a security deposit paid by adding projects. The deposit could be paid back slowly with interest
- To fund curation, there should be a significant fee for listing a project and for this fee to be justified, the user base should be significant too (see #1)
- To encourage curation, users should be incentivized for adding value by receiving a fee for curation and voting
