I thought price was irrelevant. Or relevant. I forget which the current narrative is.

Good to see they've changed the name of 'To The Moon' to 'The Moon Or Bust' and released a trailer which contains all of no gameplay footage. Another sure fire hit on the way (for 30 people) in about six months, then.

The Ion on Yobit was the same Ion, but it was rebased in February to fix some problems so it may not be the same Ion chain now. There have also (allegedly -- I've not traded there) been problems with Yobit withdrawls across a number of coins so trade with caution.

I suppose it depends on your perspective. I'm not sure those sorts of amounts will add enough buy pressure to sustain your exchange prices, but I'll concede that it's a start. Not sure month two revenue will be as good, as the number of users seemed to slide after the first three - four weeks, but I guess it depends how dedicated the 40 or so weekly players are. I still think you'll struggle to maintain or generate larger numbers of users when the gestation for products and updates is so slow, and the quality is lacking. It leads to stagnation, and I've yet to see anything that will appeal to a larger audience from XPY.io or team Ion.

Fair's fair, however; they said they would start a buyback mechanism, and (eventually) they did.

There's this weird malaise going on with the team, who knew that the big staker release would be happening now and could have at least attempted to re engage with those investors who might be wondering what's going on before the release happened, and yet they chose the opposite and stayed silent instead. Moves like this make no sense to me from a strategic perspective.

While I'm aware there's not a vast amount of selling (or buying) going on, there just appears to be very little effort to actually hold on to existing investors who might see the endless waiting for anything -- a single update to 'Crypto Gravity', even -- as a negative indicator. They don't have many investors or community members anyway, so I'd have thought retaining those who might be leaning towards selling would be a priority. This lethargic approach is a big part of why ion has and will continue to struggle to get a foothold with other investors or even, as you point out, pump groups. They're simply not active enough.

I just can't get my head around how they think a team who hasn't been able to deliver even one single 'complete' game in a year of work is going to go magically transform into a well oiled studio churning out surefire hits by the end of the year. They haven't even 'finished' the first game yet, and the second hasn't gone into alpha. Just where are these games coming from?

Also, there has been excited chatter about the purchase pool from the ads; just how much money do they think a game with so few actual players will be bringing in in ad revenue? It's so far beyond delusion at this point that it's bordering parody.

Paycoinering. Excellent.

This just seems to me to be the usual life cycle of an alt coin stuff -- people try and start an independent crowd funding platform or 'foundation', it flops, eventually the followers of the coin fracture due to dissatisfaction with the way the 'official' group are running it/some controversy or scandal arises that means they can't continue running it, hastily formed foundation takes over, true believers bumble along, coin is essentially dead. Exactly what happened with XPY, in all honesty, but it's also happened in countless other altcoins. That's my take on it at least.

The reality is -- whether they've realised it yet or not -- that the official 'team' are just moving too ineptly and slowly for there to ever be any momentum or widespread interest in this project. Of course, that should have been obvious looking back again at how XPY.io was run.

That's the thread I was thinking about.

Honestly I don't see the point in them having started ion.community as they clearly don't have enough engaged users to warrant it. If anything it just highlights the lack of interest in the project and things surrounding it, particularly in threads like the one where they bet on the score for a given weekly leaderboard position. I also noticed that the 'Ion Foundation' that they tried to start a couple of weeks ago appears to have fallen flat on it's face (you can see the total amount of ion raised here and an initial announcement here), which again is probably a decent measure of how many people are truly engaged enough as investors to really care and contribute to the 'project'.

Some chatter on slack this week from MrCoins et al about this being 'the last chance to buy cheap ion' with the upcoming 12 month staker release and reward drop. We shall see. The long silence (entirely predictable, of course, given their track record) from the team before even the first update to 'Crypto Gravity' is released to the public has meant that even what minuscule interest there was after ion got pumped has dwindled.

I assume the 'functionality' he's referring to there is the ability to invite/request/gift lives to Facebook friends from within 'Crypto Gravity'. There's screenshots of the beta build that contains that floating around, I think on the ion.community site. Quite why Sharky couldn't just come out and tell us instead of the bizarre 'I know something you don't know' thing, I don't know -- but hey, I guess it makes him feel important.

As usual, there'll be no response from WildShark until he wants to share some positively spun nonsense again. Thankfully both his and his pal's efforts at 'promoting' ion seem amusingly impotent as ion still struggles to gain widespread investor traction despite alt coins being in something of a bubble.


Ah yes, all those trendy young game players with their new fangled Facebook accounts. But seriously, isn't this just the same argument that was made for 'Crypto Gravity' and it's potential on the iOS Store and the Play Store? How's that panning out? I'm reasonably convinced that the lack of popularity is simply due to it being a bit of a poor product, rather than it needing to be on yet more platforms.

Wait, so 'Crypto Gravity' is a 'higher quality game', yet it's somehow still incomplete, thus meaning that you won't comment on it's popularity (or apparent lack thereof)?

Don't even get me started on the comparison of gaming mechanics between 'Super Mario Run' and 'Crypto Gravity'. How you can think they even compete with each other and are therefore a valid pair to compare is beyond me. If the gameplay mechanics are so good in 'Crypto Gravity', why on earth do you only have 40 or so players each week? As I've pointed out before, you already know the reason yourself:

Aside from the fact that the idea that 'Crypto Gravity' was held back to make it 'higher quality' is plainly nonsense, where was it 'stated'? The roadmap still shows the original target of 'one game per month following Gravity's release'. Perhaps you ought to ask someone to change that so that you're not constantly batting away questions about it forever.

Meanwhile, Huey did his usual scrap feeding act last Monday since 'the team' had been all but silent for some time, but, again in typical Ionomy fashion, his timeline appears to be off since they've been silent again since.

I've also noticed that a lot of the talk in their community has switched towards trying to sell the masternode aspects of the coin rather than the gaming side of things while there is a (predictable) lull in development and the gaming world waits eagerly for Gravity to be 'finished'. They apparently started a closed beta for the next update to Gravity last week, so I guess anywhere between now and six months time we might finally see the 'completed' version let loose.

Erm... as a community whose communal investing track record includes such luminaries as GAW, Lendcoin and scrypt.cc to name but a few, I feel you'd probably do better to not push that door.

I agree. I've also played 'Crypto Gravity' and honestly, I didn't think it did anything unique or compelling and the control dynamics that Korvas confidently described as 'spot on' before launch I found to be clunky and really rather awkward. I understand that people might have a different opinion to me and that's fine, but the prevalent impression seems to be that most people who downloaded it didn't particularly enjoy it, as borne out by the fact that despite having over 5000 downloads, only 30 or so people play it regularly.

For my part, I just don't see how they can improve the game to the point of it being attractive to play without completely overhauling the concept and the controls, by which point it may as well be a different game. Given how long it took to get this to release in its current form, it would be months before anything substantial could feasibly be rolled out if that was the plan. I don't think adding new levels or weapons when the problem really is more basic than that will really do anything, but I'd imagine that's what they'll do anyway.

I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt if it wasn't for the fact that he continually contradicts himself.

I suspect we're entering the 'perpetually nearly in alpha' phase of development for 'To The Moon' and it'll be some time yet before it actually sees the light of day. Next up we have the 'whales drone on and on about how fantastic the game that they're privately testing is' stage.

I do wonder what the first release of 'Crypto Gravity' was actually intended to be. If it is essentially a public beta, why the big fanfare and hoopla within the community about a countdown, along with massively over ambitious download targets? Likewise, if it was a completed release, why has there been almost zero actual marketing and PR? Once again, the strategy isn't very clear here.

Genius. Clearly there is a gap in the market there. Smartphones... but with a hyper staking shitcoin crypto. Anyone fancy starting that ICO?

Meanwhile, Spells of Genesis launched their game on the iOS store and the Play store yesterday, and got a fair amount of press (some mainstream, but lots of crypto press) to buff up the launch. Despite many articles discussing blockchain based 'mainstream' gaming (which I still maintain is a needless solution in search of a problem, but whatever), none of the articles even mentioned Ion, Ionomy or Crypto Gravity. The brilliance of the Ionomy marketing machine in full swing, then. I realise that its an entirely different genre of game, but this is probably the first true 'competitor' to Ionomy. How will they react? Will they react at all? Exciting times.

Hmm. Incomplete, you say? How much longer do they need?


Funny how you didn't mention it being incomplete when you were trying to talk up the launch.


Indeed. And the content is crap, so people (in general, taking into account the huge market you like to talk about) aren't playing.

And yet...


So basically, it's relevant when you want it to be for the purpose of gloating like a glib idiot. I also doubt that you'd be able to liquidate your entire position if you had a fit of the yips without crashing the price right back down and causing panic amongst the other whales/investors, so essentially you're trapped for now.


You say this and yet you are unwilling to comment on the fact that the pool of players the flagship product -- worked on steadfastly for nearly a year behind closed doors and tested to within an inch of it's life (supposedly) by the expert whales -- has, on average, only around 30 players each week, a significant number of whom are people who were already investors in 'the ionomy' before the game launched. The fact is, no matter how much you choose to avoid it, that the market (i.e. the gaming community) doesn't want the game.

Thanks for this. Believe it or not I had somehow completely forgotten about the Seychelles company. I suppose its difficult for us to pass judgment when we don't have the full facts, but I'd agree that at the very least this structure appears messy.

To speak briefly to Korvas once again gloating over the price; I've said it before, I'll say it again. The price is utterly irrelevant other than the warm sensation in your loins that it might give you unless you are taking profit. The only thing that will make this project a success is it's base aim: successful games. 30 odd users per week over a month after release does not a successful game make, my friend. Everything else -- the master nodes, the back slapping in your slack channel -- all that will count for naught if the team can't produce a product that captures a lot more users.

I completely see what Franz says about Matlack defending GAW, but I'm still inclined to think that at the point the archived post was written, he still believed that Josh was largely innocent. I've said before that I don't think Matlack was an active part of the GAW fraud (by this I mean I don't think he was in cahoots with Garza et al) -- I think he was just another naive investor sucked in by Garza's lies.

I also don't believe he and Garza knew each other from church; I've asked many times when people have posted implying that Garza and Matlack have links that go back to their childhood and I've yet to see any convincing evidence that this was the case, or indeed any evidence at all. I suspect that angle was something that's been perpetuated by people (most likely accidentally) on here and other forums simply guessing and has become a kind of folklore, much like the oft repeated idea that Stuart Fraser was Garza's father in law.

The fact that they've set up the two UK limited companies (not LLCs; there is a distinction there) is interesting, but I'd assume they did it because it offers less liability should things go tits up (I'm certainly not an expert here so if anyone else wants to chip in I'd be interested to hear any other perspective) and may have been favourable in some way for app store registration. Also remember that Matlack is the owner of 3RE, LLC, which appears to be the parent company that is running the ionomy project. I may be wrong here (and you're welcome to correct me if I am -- please!), but I would have imagined that limiting ones liability in a way similar to this is probably fairly common.

Interesting discussion anyway, thanks.