So what is the real value of a CAT?
Let's take good critical a look at this question!
The Cat Appreciation Token wasn't really designed with its trading-value in mind. CAT was intended as a novelty, with a mostly symbolic value and a bit of utility attached. Under these premises I like to just say:
CAT is absolutely priceless.
But of course, CAT is a token after all, you can trade it on steem-engine, and 
What brings Value to a Token?
Ultimately, like with anything else that gets exchanged in a monetary way, it's often explained as a bit of a mix of supply and demand, but in the end it's mostly a question of "faith", whether people believe it's valuable, to themselves directly, or, which is unfortunately all too common these days, just because they've seen it go up in price.
But, especially with all these crypto tokens, you shouldn't just go with blind faith. Always take a good look at the fundamentals of the token you're considering to buy and do some due diligence on what you will decide to put your faith in.
The Price of a CAT
As the token-issuer,
The price-cap is currently fixed at 0.010 STEEM per CAT.
I've limited any unreasonable speculation with CAT by maintaining sell-walls on the open market and additionally offering tokens at this fixed price-cap in direct sales.
This works primarily to avoide any uncontrolled market craziness but it also creates a nice alley for fund-raising. I've been 100% committed from the start to keep all funds raised through this price-capping action within the
There's certainly better ways to get rich quick, and we're not really maximizing sales this way either, but the primary focus here will never be on bringing in the money.
This strategy should instead allow CAT to grow in a fairly organic and hopefully sustainable manner. Some speculators might be making a quick buck here and there, but thanks to the CATnip auto-staking feature they won't be able to benefit much from the actual value building "behind" the tokens.
Some Token Fundamentals
One of the first things to check, you should really do that with any token you put your eyes on, is the global properties of the token itself. On steem-engine, these properties are easily accessible for everyone, for any token. The key information here is the token supply and the issuer information.
- The total supply describes the number of all tokens ever created so far.
- The circulating supply shows how much of these tokens are still in existence, it will only be lower than the total if some tokens have been "burned", taken out of circulation by sending them to
.
- The maximum supply is the forever fixed maximum number of tokens that can be created.
- The token Issuer can, at any time, create more tokens up to the limit set by the maximum supply.
The Market-Cap and actual CAT-pricing
The so called market-capitalization of a token is the number of tokens in circulation multiplied by their price. It describes the combined value of all existing tokens at their current pricing. This can be used as a good indicator if a token is over- or under-priced.
When setting the price-limit for CAT this concept was used to determine a reasonably "fair" value for the token.
Fair Value?!
Sounds like white-washing, I know, but I think I'm actually just a bad salesman. Hear me out:
CAT was introduced through an unannounced airdrop. A little over 1.3 million CAT were sent to almost 1000 steemians. The distribution was strictly based on the kitten-bots subjective "debt" to their countless cuddly friends whom they've exchanged affections with for almost two years already. At the same time 100.000 CAT were put on the market at 0.001 STEEM each.
At this point the initial market-cap for CAT would have been limited to 7000 STEEM and all the CAT in the hands of users would not be worth more than 1300 STEEM combined. That's actually already quite a lot considering the three kitten bots "behind" this token were equipped with only little more than 100 SP each and delivering accordingly dusty cuddles, you might even be inclined to say: almost worthless cuddles. But this was set to be a maximum limit for the price and the goal was after all to also help the kittens grow a little.
Then: The first sell-wall was gone in less than 24 hours!
Over half of the initial token sale was bought up by a cat-affectionate speculater who has already dumped their bags again in the meantime and ever since the new price-limit has been set to 0.010 STEEM. A sell-wall with over 82.000 CAT remaining is being maintained on the marketplace but tokens are currently trading much lower than that.
So Where's the Value now?
Again, CAT is absolutely priceless. The value of the Cat Appreciation Token isn't in the price for a CAT. The real value comes from its utility as a symbolic token. The primary function of holding CAT is to bring the kitten-bots to deliver cuddles for you.
The funds raised so far have allowed the kitten bots to receive a bit of power-up and
With the PAW-TRAILS update in operation CATnip hodlers should actually see some of their cuddles returning real STEEM rewards to them.
More fun things to do, like the CALL-A-KITTEN service, will be added in the future. Your CAT stake will be good for more than one thing, eventually. Also, any income with the program, posting-rewards and token-sales, will be used to further grow the project.
The kittens still have a mind of their own and each of them can't deliver much more than 10 cuddles per day currently. There's also already roughly 1.5 million CAT owned by more than 900 users, all attracting kitten-attention with their CATnip, so there are natural limits to all of this.
The more CATnip you have, though, the more likely it is to get a kitten's attention. You can check the CAT RICHLIST to get a sense of how much CATnip your neighbours might be growing. Making it into the top 100 CAT hodlers should almost guarantee several kitten cuddles every week, but of course...
DICLAIMER: Keep in mind, the kittens do have additional criteria when sending their cuddles your way. If you're self-voting all day, if the kittens think you're a bad hooman or if you never put out any cuddle-able content, then you won't see them very often, no matter how much CATnip you're growing. A CAT does never come with any guarantees!
I could go on and on about all this and there are plenty more aspects, possibly even open questions that I didn't get to address without making this even longer and losing the attention of everyone who barely made it this far.
If you've actually made it this far, and you've read all of the above, first of all: Thank you so much for your time and attention! And that also means you probably do care about this project at least a little - I'm even more grateful for that!
I would appreciate any and all open questions, your honest feedback, possibly even blunt criticism.
A lot of tokens out there have strange fundamentals and empty promises. I hope to make CAT something better, and better and better as this project continues to grow. Your thoughts can help me do that.
I'll distribute 1000 CAT among all thoughtful comments below this post.
edit: 5 users have left meaningful comments and received 200 CAT each.
a CAT is absolutely priceless
meow!