SPICE 1.0 Genesis and Backstory

SPICE was the first Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) token that gained widespread use mainly thru its tipping bot. Many SLP tokens created afterwards were either inspired by it or tried to follow its path.

The token was created by Spicetoshi on February 25, 2019 and handed over to Soupernerd (creator of r/btc subreddit, paybutton.cash, and tipbitcoin.cash) who then assembled a team composed of Joey Wong, Laura Young, Columbus, and me. We were supported by key influencers and builders in the BCH community including Collin Enstad, Jake, the CoinSpice guys (Mike Malley, Linzerd, etc.), Semyon Germanovich, pokkst, JT Freeman -- to name a few. At a time, we were employing five full time developers under my lead.

We have achieved quite a lot in a short span of time. These include most of the nice features that spicebot now has; listing of SPICE token in Coinex, Bitcoin.com, Altilly, SideShift.ai, and Cryptophyl; partnerships with or sponsorships in other projects and initiatives within the BCH community including fountainhead.cash, Bitcoin Cash City Conference, SLP Foundation, and others; and, not to mention the active community engagement in Telegram groups.

By first quarter of 2020, SPICE was hovering around 500 to 600 BCH satoshis per token with a market cap of around $1,000,000. And then, the dramatic decline occurred. This was accompanied by members of founding team leaving for various reasons, including Soupernerd himself.

Despite these setbacks, the dev team has stayed strong. We kept maintaining the project, releasing enhancements (e.g. more robust deposit tracking and withdrawals) as well as new features (e.g. peer-to-peer trading bot). The November 15 fork and the renewed momentum in the BCH community has offered a perfect timing to grow and expand. For us, this meant reflecting on a more clear direction and new roadmap to achieve growth and, eventually, sustainability.

SPICE 2.0: Clear Direction and New Roadmap Towards Sustainability

SPICE, as originally conceived, was focused around appreciation through tipping. In the words of Spicetoshi, "Spice is a social mechanism that allows you to say to another human being, 'Hey... I like your stuff, your content fulfills me in some way'". As we went along, it was already obvious that appreciation alone does not quite capture everything we were planning to do with the project.

We approached this from top-down view, asking questions like what's our vision and mission. From there, we narrowed down to a certain value proposition themes that the project will push to carry out its mission.

• What is our vision?

  We envision a vibrant, engaging, rewarding, and fun Bitcoin Cash community.

• What is our mission?

  To be at the forefront of community building and engagement for Bitcoin Cash by creating a suite of services that will make involvement in the community fun and rewarding for everyone.

The project will become more of an ecosystem of bots/apps/services that deliver value within the themes of appreciation, amusement, and adoption. Our efforts currently revolve around two groups of applications -- spicebot and the spice.cash portal.

Spicebot: Multi-Platform Tipping Bot for BCH & SLP tokens

Spicebot a tipping bot that works across multiple chat / social media platforms --Telegram, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, WeChat, etc. It only supports BCH and SLP tokens. At one point, we were supporting Telegram, Twitter, and Reddit but we dropped the latter two after having a number of recurrent issues so we decided to focus development on the Telegram bot.

The plan is to support, not only Twitter and Reddit again, but also other platforms -- Discord, WeChat, and if possible, Line, Slack, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Basically, support as many as we can as long as we see significant engagement in those channels.

We review the SLP tokens we support to make sure that there are serious projects that back them and that they have first gained some level of popularity in the BCH community. Currently, we are supporting SPICE, HONK, DROP, MIST, RNEW, ZAPT, and HAM.

Spice.Cash Portal

We are creating the Spice.Cash portal that will bring together all the current and future services that would work better with a web-based UI.

• Games games.spice.cash

  We currently have game bots in Telegram for Dice Game and Paper Rock Scissors Game which both connect to the custodial wallet in Spicebot. These games are quite popular and comprise a significant portion of daily engagements. We will be creating web-based versions of these games and add a few more. Then, it will be easier to create game dashboards, rankings, and game recommendations than the current chat-based interface.

• Peer-to-Peer Trading trade.spice.cash

  We also have a Peer-to-Peer Trading bot in Telegram that has been running since the last two months. The volume of trade requests has been low (but constant) as we have not been promoting it. Just like the games, the UI can be made better in the web-based version.

• Merch and NFT Store store.spice.cash

  The merch store has been planned for a long time but never materialized. When we do pursue building the store, a section of it will be dedicated to Non-Fungible Token (NFT)-backed items like game items, artworks, collectibles, etc.

• SLP Swap Service swap.spice.cash

  This is planned. It's a fast SLP token swap service that implements automated market making (AMM) with token pairs that are supported by liquidity providers.

Monetization and Growth

As probably common with other token projects, the monetization strategy we had in the beginning was to "slow sell" the tokens so we can cover operational expenditure (OPEX). This is not sustainable in itself in the long run, and we learned this the hard way. Eventually, we ran out of the SPICE dev fund allocation.

We shifted to a different monetization strategy but we need the scale to earn enough to cover the OPEX and become net positive. At the moment, we are earning from fees from listing of new tokens, withdrawals, big tip amounts, as well as on house edge and fees on the games. We are yet to add fees for the peer-to-peer trading. The store will earn through price margins and the swap service will earn from transaction fees. With this monetization strategy in place, our revenue will grow as we scale.

At the moment, Spicebot has a total of 14,329 users (refer to the metrics dashboard above). Around 500 to 600 users are actively using the bot daily. The bot has been added to 1,822 Telegram groups and around 30 to 40 groups are actively using the bot daily. We get around 20 to 30 new users a day. For comparison, consider that that there are 1.5 million daily new users in Telegram (based on April 2020 stats). If we conservatively estimate that 1% of this is familiar with cryptocurrencies and would have potential interest in BCH/SLP, that's still 15,000 new users daily. This is in Telegram alone and we will still integrate with other platforms. There is, definitely, a lot of room for growth.

Conclusion

SPICE 2.0 is about picking up SPICE 1.0, standing on its shoulders and marching forward. This has involved setting a long term direction and charting a path to get there. This has meant creating a clear roadmap towards growth and sustainability. As long as the BCH community keeps patronizing us, as has always been, we will grow together. The future is bright!