Recently, Audius has relased a new feature: VIP levels.
So. What was their effect so far? What do they grant exactly? What are the plans of the Audius team for them? And most importantly, how can locking up $AUDIO that is in the hands of actual users/artists for cosmetic features affect governance in the long term?
As a quick TL;DR for those new to the Audius level system:
Levels are tiers you get for owning X amount of $AUDIO in your Audius wallet, and said levels grant you various features, currently (mostly) cosmetics, such as badges
With the current price of 3.15$ at the time of writing, $AUDIO has definitely risen beyond it's starting price of 0.2$ on average. But, with those gains comes something else: the higher cost to do everything with $AUDIO. And VIP Levels might be the one of the best examples of that. Because as it stands currently, the levels start at 10 $AUDIO and end at 100k (!), meaning that there's a big price disparity between them.
With 4 levels in that incredibly broad range, surely there's some balance to it?
As you can see below, that isn't the case. With current pricing, the bronze badge requires an investment of 31$. Silver? 3150$. Gold? 31k$. And, the last, platinum, requires a whopping 315k$ just to have it. And as a note: no one was airdropped 100k $AUDIO. The TOP 3 users got an average of 60k, meaning that if they haven't sold off their tokens at the start, but haven't purchased any, they would need to now buy 40k $AUDIO for the top badge. An investment of 124k$. You've read that right.
And what do these badges offer as of now? Cosmetic features. Honestly, as they stand, being simple cosmetic additions in form of the badge in your profile and "matrix mode" in higher tiers (3 & 4), there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Aside from the very high price, of course, and how the badges lock up tokens from being staked by users to participate in governance. But let's go over the features first.
Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum badges - not bad. Purely cosmetic. Doesn't affect the user experience in any way other than giving the user a way to show off that they, indeed, own enough $AUDIO to have one of the badges.
Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum Discord server (communication platform) roles - again, not bad. Purely cosmetic once again, and as far as I'm aware they don't give access to any special channels or priority list on discord requests for help etc.
Matrix Mode for Gold and Platinum - not bad, but not worth getting gold or platinum just for it, given that it again is purely cosmetic. Quite a cool effect though.
So, what's the issue? The text below. "More coming soon!". And what can be coming soon? Consider this article. Especially this line: "VIP Tiers unlock upgrades and enhanced product experiences." To me, as an user, it sounds like VIP Tiers (as they're officially called) might unlock more crucial features than purely cosmetic additions in the future. What would it be?
Whatever Soundcloud Pro offers.
So, what can it be? Planned uploading. Much more advanced statistics. Being on official Audius playlists. The list goes on, and the wording used leaves the gate open for such additions. Will it happens? I'm not sure. Do I hope it will happen? Absolutely not. With how high the price requirements are at the moment, it won't be cheap. And I sure as hell bet some of the features will be reserved for higher tiers in a such case.
But, those are just the features. Now, let's go to something much more important, something that affects the entire platform and how it functions.
Incentivising holding tokens in your Audius account.
By doing so, the Audius team willingly removes possible tokens from being staked, because as it stands currently, you CANNOT stake and have a badge at once, due to how staking works. So, what that means? A user must either spend much more to both have a badge at a tier above bronze AND stake. At the extremes in the form of tiers 3 and 4, it is a lockout of 10k $AUDIO and 100k $AUDIO respectively from the governance system. And the more users do it, the less tokens there are for governance. With the current centralisation of the vote where the top 3 addresses by voting weight hold 57%(!!!) of the vote, you'd think that getting more tokens into the governance system by incentivising staking more would be important to the team. Even more, with the current $AUDIO price, reaching any decent levels on your own is much harder than before, so anyone who wishes to have atleast 1% of the vote, must spend millions on $AUDIO.
But, as it seems, that is not the case. Because what else can I call getting users to just hold $AUDIO in their Audius accounts? In terms of pure platform benefit, you can get more by getting a badge rather than staking, considering that staking has additional costs of Ethereum Smart Contract fees which are stupidly high. With this info, you can get a picture of where an user seems staking (and thus the core aspect of governance aka voting) as less desirable than a badge.
Furthermore, the big stakes are from investors. Not from actual users, as those equate to around 1.5% of the vote IN TOTAL. What does it mean?
Using the governance system, the actual users (artists and listeners alike) are at a huge disadvantage, and the badge system isn't helping it.
So, in the end, as of 03.04.2021 I don't think that the badges offer any P2W functions. They can, in the future, but they also don't need to.
My biggest issue with them as it stands is how they disincentivise staking furthermore, as there are issues already with Ethereum fees or the high $AUDIO price.
That's all from me for today.
