As many frens know, listing an item in the Baazaar charges a 0.1 GHST fee, and that GHST gets sent to the burn address.
Since the inception of the project, over 2.2M GHST has been burned, with a significant chunk coming from the Baazaar listings.
However, a few recent developments lead me to wonder if we should remove the listing fee:
An update in the pipeline to allow sellers to change the price of their listings without delisting + relisting.
Many new frens utilizing the baazaar, due to FAKE Gotchis.
New price discovery mechanisms with GBM Auction and soon, Offers
I sometimes wonder if the listing fee is actually hurting trading by imposing an unnecessary barrier on finding price equilibrium. Yes, the fee is intended to help prevent botting, and one may argue that it prevents spam listings. Without it, it may be more difficult to humans to sell items on the Baazaar without being undercut immediately by bots.
However, this is natural price discovery, and I canât think of any other marketplaces that impose a fee on listing.
Perhaps it is time we do away with the GHST burn and embrace automation, as it may lead to more trading, more discovery, and of course, more fees for the DAO / Rarity Farming!
Iâm keen to hear from sellers in the Baazaar if the 0.1 GHST fee has affected how you list items, and whether or not removing the fee would be a boon to your business or not.
I think the fee serves a purpose, like you said. However, Iâd much rather see it send to the player rewards wallet instead of burning it.
I donât sell much, but I never considered it a hindrance. Making price changes free could facilitate a race to the bottom, if two or more people are eager to sell the same item (I was in such a situation a couple of times in the past, even with the fee).
That could be because youâre already a hardcore Gotchigang member I am wondering if we underestimate the friction that some new members could face if they decided to sell an item (like a FAKE Gotchi) but donât have GHST. Then, they have to go to Quickswap, convert to GHST, come back and approve it, etc. Itâs a pretty lengthy process for a newbie.
If we wanted to keep a fee but simplify the process, perhaps charging 0.1 MATIC could also be an option, as users on Polygon already have that and they wouldnât need to approve it. That 0.1 MATIC could be sent to the player rewards pool to help us build out the treasury.
If we keep it, change it to 0.1 MATIC as coderdan suggets, and maybe make a monthly Bazaar Listing Fee lottery where the entry is an Aavegotchi? Player rewards and treasury sounds good too.
I donât really see how that would be any different? If we were only going to charge for one, to me it would seem that the initial listing should have a fee, but updating price should be free.
Hm that could make sense I suppose, so the initial listing is free to reduce friction, but if you want to delist or update price, youâd be charged the fee.
What about griefing? Itâs so annoying when a bot insta lists the same item 0.1 ghst lower than you, would removing listing fee make that worse or is there another way to prevent that?
i tend to agree more with this one than removing the fee, in the end of the day its still web3 gaming protocol, if users find friction in having to purchase the ecosystem token to participate they wont be very good engaged participants .
If the goal is to allow market making bots to find âcurrent market priceâ and increase volume maybe one could update the bazaar 4% fee to include a minimal part for the gotchiverse player rewards like someone suggested .
The Matic fee tho could be a good way for the dao treasury to get exposed to its own âecosytem tokenâ and could prove to be very healthy mid-long term with the absolute sucess that the polygon network has been . (and will continue to be?)
All in all anything decided will have its pros and cons.
On a personal note, the bazaar fee has not affected the way i list items, but i dont strive for âmaximum bazaar efficiencyâ , could see it being relevant on the common decorations /tiles/ and small tickets but barely relevant on wearables/gotchis/realm
As often it boils down to this: punish unwanted behaviour, reward wanted behaviour. So first of all we might have to define these categories.
I personally think the higher the volume in our marketplaces the better. In order to achieve that we need people to list their NFTs as close to the price a buyer is willing to pay as possible. This has ideally to be rewarded (NFT badges for sellers & buyers?) or at least not punished. You could argue that changing the price without being punished (fees) could also increase volume. So maybe to level the playing field in comparison to botters we need a built-in selling bot in our marketplaces. You would define a minimum selling price and a starting selling price. âBe the cheapest offer until you reach a price of X GHSTâ.
So as an interim conclusion I tend to:
no listing fee
no price changig fee
delisting fee of 0.5 MATIC
built-in selling bot as roughly described above (maybe co-funded by the DAO?)
We need to remember that GHST has a technically unlimited supply. My kneejerk reaction is to keep the fee in place to remove supply from the market.
Because of the bonding curve we need sinks to the circulating supply of GHST to keep new money coming in to the ecosystem. Iâm no economist but I worry that, without a burn, the supply will just increase with demand thus creating an economy that ignores the value of GHST.
There is a big emphasis on staking GHST for gltr and we are already at the whim of any whale that wants to come in and manipulate the price of GHST through the curve. I (and again Iâm no economist) believe that removing ghst from circulation helps mitigate the risk for stakers by a small margin.
As Bearded pointed out in the Discord chat, so far weâve burned roughly 60K GHST from Baazaar listings, a significant amount, but actually fairly small compared to the 2.2M that has been burned through other methods like primary sales.
The main reason I would advocate for removing the listing fee, or using MATIC instead of GHST, is that it can reduce some friction for new entrants into the ecosystem.
I disagree with this. We should try and make the onboarding process as simple as possible for new players. Sure, there are members who will push through any level of friction thrown at them because they really want to get involved, but those are the minority. The majority of inbound is casual players looking to get started. The easier we can make that journey, the lower our churn rate will be.
It does make sense to replace the $GHST fee for a $MATIC fee. I would not change the fee structure otherwise. As for now, 0.1 Matic isnât a significant fee. Can be reconsidered later. I do agree that the fee can not be burned but must go straight into the war chest/player rewards pool.
If we did switch listing fees to MATIC, another interesting option would be to send the MATIC to a wallet designated specifically for gasless txns.
As some frens may have experienced in the past, we used to offer an option for gasless petting, but Biconomy (the relayer service) stopped supporting free gasless txns.
Baazaar listing fees could be a sustainable revenue model for allowing gasless transactions in some areas of the dapp, such as the Baazaar, GBM, or other areas that generate revenue for the DAO and Pixelcraft.
Thus, the wallet where fees are sent would act as the âgas tankâ for these txns, helping to improve the UX of aavegotchi.com.
The fee is more of an annoyance than a hindrance. It also is a disproportionate tax on cheap single-listed items. I donât think weâd miss it were it removed. Personally Iâd like to see more buy-side features on the Baazaar - the ability to offer bids on listed items or set bids for unlisted items or collections.
I am wondering if we underestimate the friction that some new members could face if they decided to sell an item (like a FAKE Gotchi) but donât have GHST. Then, they have to go to Quickswap, convert to GHST, come back and approve it, etc. Itâs a pretty lengthy process for a newbie.
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