Assessing the potential of moons: apples and oranges, or moons and bats

There has been a lot of speculation about the potential price of moons recently, and with good reason! Comparing moons to the mcap of SHIB, as seems popular, leads to hopium infused fever dreams of over $60 per moon. It would be nice to see, but I would suggest that a more appropriate project for comparison should be considered in the context of the evolving use cases of moons.

Something that stands out to me is the potential for the use of moons as a method of purchasing advertising in this sub by crypto projects. These moons are then exchanged, effectively, in return for the attention of users. Interesting, this seems very close to the model of monthly distributions of Brave Browser’s BAT. This token currently has a marketcap of just under $0.4 billion, and is just within the top 100 projects.

If we assume that this marketcap simply reflects the balance of advertising buy pressure and Brave users sell pressure (there are other factors of course) we can make a few inferences about a potential equilibrium of the buying and selling pressure of moons based upon audience size.

Brave browser claims 19.3 million daily active users; while not all of these will be using and selling BAT, that is a substantial number. Trying to estimate the portion of users who use the Brave rewards system is tricky, as while we could check out the number of holders, the brave rewards are linked to exchange accounts, and therefore this number won’t truly reflect the number of users. Nonetheless, the number of holders gives us a hard minimum number of holders: 464,891 as of today. For moons this is 196,767. As moons are distributed directly to user wallets, and BAT is aggregated to exchange accounts, this will make the number of BAT holders appear fewer than reality. Despite this difference in distribution methods, we can conclude that at the very least there are 2.5x as moon BAT users as holders. I’d lean towards this multiple being much higher, so let’s explore a couple of scenarios. This also roughly seems aligned with brave having 3x as many daily users as this sub has members. There’s guesswork here as not all brave users will receive BAT, and also not every member of this sub is a daily user.

If we assume this give us a ballpark idea of the potential value of moons based upon a comparison with BAT, we can assume Brave offers advertisers a user base of at least 3x the amount of engaged users as in this sub. So we might expect moons could reach 33% of BAT’s mcap, for around an 130m mcap, or $1.22 per moon. Not too bad even in this scenario!

If this comparison serves to give us a rough idea of how moons might be valued, then in a bullish environment, such as where BAT achieved a mcap of $2.5 Billion in November 2021, then if moons maintain the same ratio of active users relative to brave, then this might result in a moon mcap of $833 million, for $7.8 per moon. Now we’re talking!

However, this does rely on the assumption that the crypto market will price a token proportionally to its utility, in this case the size of the user base that moons can be used to advertise to. This is just an attempt to guess at the value that one of the recently implemented use cases for moons might generate in terms of value. Do you think this comparison is a good place to start? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Perhaps there’s another token that would serve in place of BAT here!