The Assembly Call Blog

As our private community members already know, we have been working hard over the last few weeks to launch our own community coin for the Back Home Network — the IU sports content and community collective we formed with CrimsonCast and Tony Adragna.

Today, I am excited to announce to our entire audience that $HOME coin is now live!

With this post, I want to do a few things:

• Explain what $HOME coin is and how it will be used
• Explain how $HOME will lead to an ongoing NIL treasury
• Describe the many ways you will benefit from holding $HOME coins
• Show you how to claim 10 free $HOME coins
• Show you how to buy additional $HOME coins

Plus, the comment section below will serve as a thread where I can answer any questions you may have about this emerging method for organizing the economic activity of an online community economy.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get to it.

What is $HOME coin?

$HOME coin is our own branded cryptocurrency on the Rally network. There are roughly 275 coins on the Rally network, with only a few of them being sports related.

• You may have seen headlines several weeks back when UCLA basketball player Jaylen Clark launched his own cryptocurrency, $JROCK. He did this on Rally.
• Oregon star defensive end Kayvon Thibodeaux also has a coin on Rally, $JREAM. He uses it, in part, to support his JREAM Foundation, which aims to educate mentor, empower and instill confidence into underprivileged youth.
• And a website similar to ours, Raptors Republic, has the $RAPS coin on Rally.

Getting a coin on Rally is very difficult. In fact, my initial application was rejected. But because I have experience launching and managing another coin on the network, and our use case of a content network is actually unique for their platform, they were willing to give us a chance. 

And I really wanted our community to have a coin.

Here’s why:

After being highly skeptical about cryptocurrencies and NFTs for a long time, my recent work on other projects has convinced me that this is the future for how online communities like ours will be organized. It’s the ultimate win-win for content creators and their communities

The questions you may be asking yourself, especially if you are new or resistant to the rapidly emerging crypto landscape, are … 

• WHY? 
• HOW?
• What’s the point of launching a coin like $HOME?

Simply put: the point is to keep more of the economic value that the entire Back Home Network community creates here in the community. 

$HOME coin enables this by creating a token-based community rewards program that supports our work as the content creators while delivering special benefits and ownership to community members like you who choose to participate.

Here’s how it works

On the day the $HOME coin was minted (Thursday, November 11th), 50,000 $HOME tokens were deposited into our Back Home Network creator account. These tokens had an initial market value of $0.40 per coin. 

Over time, as the ecosystem grows and we pass certain vesting periods over the next few years, we are eligible to unlock 5,000,000 total creator tokens. (Note that we did not pay any money to mint our token on Rally. This is why getting a token on Rally is so difficult.)

Meanwhile, the token is now available for purchase on the Rally marketplace. As I type this, the current price is $0.352 per token. Tokens can be purchased via credit or debit card — a unique feature of Rally’s website that is not available through other community coin platforms.

People who buy and hold $HOME coins will then be eligible for special benefits — like a rewards program or loyalty program. Examples include discounts on your community membership, memorabilia giveaways, and an exclusive discount by Homefield Apparel that is the biggest discount they’ve ever given. 

We currently have five coin holder benefit tiers (25, 100, 250, 500, and 1,000) that provide escalating levels of benefits. More on this below.

There will also be opportunities to spend $HOME coins. For example, we may at some point allow people to pay for their community access in $HOME coin. Or sponsors may get discounted rates if they purchase with $HOME coins.

And because there is a fixed supply of $HOME coins on Rally, the price of $HOME at any given time is determined by the simple rules of supply and demand: as more $HOME coin is purchased and held, the price per coin goes up. As it’s sold, the price will go down. 

This means that as we grow the Back Home Network community moving forward, we can all benefit from an increase in the value of $HOME coins. And if the community doesn’t grow, or the coin doesn’t catch on, the price could also drop. (The cheapest coins on the Rally network usually hover around $0.25 per coin.)

This is why any future purchase of $HOME coins you make should be driven by a) your desire to support our work and b) your interest in the real benefits of being a coin holder. 

Then, as a tertiary concern, you might get to experience an appreciation in the value of your coins. But the bulk of the value is in supporting the community and getting the benefits of holding, which are independent of the coin’s price.

How $HOME will be used

There are two main topics to discuss here:

• How $HOME will lead to an NIL treasury
• The benefit tiers for holders

To set the stage for those two discussions, I need to explain Rally Rewards.

The impact of Rally Rewards

I’ve already explained how creators benefit from launching a coin on Rally by getting a large allotment of their own coin “for free.”

The other way that Rally supports creators and their communities is through Rally Rewards.

Here is how Rally Rewards work:

Rally has its own native cryptocurrency, the $RLY token. $RLY is traded on the open market (current price: $0.4976 per coin) on popular exchanges like Coinbase.

Every week, Rally allots a large pool of $RLY tokens to be distributed to token communities that are showing growth over the previous week. These are Rally Rewards.

When the Rally Rewards are distributed on Saturday nights, every holder of Rewards-eligible coins, including the creators, earns Rewards.

So if $HOME coin earns 12,084 $RLY worth of Rewards (as it did its first week after going live), and you own 0.5% of all the $HOME coins in circulation, you get 60.42 $RLY tokens, which is the equivalent of roughly $30 USD.

These Rally Rewards can then be used to buy more $HOME coin, to buy other coins on the Rally network, or you can “bridge out” to Coinbase and turn your $RLY into US dollars. (Note that the current blockchain “gas” fees to do this are pretty high, so you wouldn’t want to do it every week.)

The benefits of Rally Rewards are clear:

• $HOME coin holders like you can earn extra economic value, similar to a dividend, just by holding $HOME coin.
• The creators (us) also earn Rewards, which means that we earn revenue that can be used to cover expenses and pay contractors (or ourselves) without having to sell our $HOME coins.

Now here’s the part I’m really excited about …

How $HOME will lead to an NIL treasury

Each week, we will take some of our Rally Rewards and reinvest them into $HOME coins. We also use some to cover our ongoing costs.

And we are pledging at least 10% of all the Rally Rewards our creator account earns toward Name, Image, Likeness activities for IU athletes. 

You can also pledge a portion of your Rally Rewards toward NIL activities too, if you so choose.

This is another way we are all incentivized to grow the coin ecosystem. The bigger it gets, the more Rewards we’ll earn, and the more we can put into the hands of IU athletes.

But how will we determine what happens with this NIL treasury?

I’m glad you asked.

Let’s take a look at the benefit tiers for $HOME holders.

The benefit tiers for holding $HOME

As I mentioned above, we currently have five benefit tiers for people who choose to buy and hold $HOME coins.

Here they are, branded with college sports lingo, of course!

Tier 1: Player – 25 $HOME coins

• Access to all of the IU sports discussion channels in the Back Home Network Discord server
• Plus additional Player benefits to be added later

Tier 2: Rotation Player – 100 $HOME coins

• Earn $HOME when your questions are used in our Q&A and mailbag segments
• Earn $HOME based on your activity in the BHN Discord server
• Plus additional Rotation Player benefits to be added later

Tier 3: Starter – 250 $HOME coins

• 25% off community access
• Access to monthly memorabilia and/or coin giveaways
• Discounts on Back Home Network gear (once we launch it)
• Additional Starter perks to be named later
• Plus all Rotation Player Benefits

Tier 4: Star Player – 500 $HOME coins

• 50% off community access
• The biggest Homefield Apparel discount ever (30% off)
• Additional All-Conference perks to be named later
• All Rotation Player + Starter Benefits

Tier 5: All American – 1,000 $HOME coins

• 100% off community access
• Proposal and Voting privileges for NIL Treasury
• Proposal and Voting privileges for future of Back Home Network
• Additional All-American perks to be named later
• All Rotation Players + Starter + All Conference Benefits

As you can see, the value escalates with each tier, leading to the All American level. The folks in this tier will have the opportunity to helps us make decisions on how we allocate the NIL treasury and even what we do with the future of the network.

Do you believe more NIL money should flow to sports beyond basketball and football? Do you want to see new shows covering other sports? You’ll be in on the decision making process.

We truly want the Back Home Network to be a community-owned and driven project. This is the future of online communities in the web 3.0 world.

How are coin holders verified?

You may be wondering how we’ll know who owns $HOME and how much they own. 

The answer, for now, is that it’s built into our Discord server.

Once you have your $HOME coin, you simply link your Rally account to Discord. Then you go to the #verify-coin-holdings channel and enter the command !coin join. 

Here is a video that outlines this process:

You’ll then be given access to private channels based on the tier(s) you qualify for. If you sell your coins, you’ll lose access to those tiers.

In the future, there should be ways to do this from within our Mighty Network community. But for now, Discord is the best way.

Okay, enough about what $HOME coin is and how we’ll use it. You probably have questions, which I’ll be happy to answer in the comment section.

For now, let’s get to the fun stuff: how to claim 10 free $HOME coins.

How to claim your 10 free $HOME coins

One of the lessons I’ve learned by participating in several crypto projects, studying community coins like $HOME, and managing the launch of the $MOVE coin for the Unemployable community, is that the community members who made the coin possible in the first place should benefit when it launches.

This is why we want to get your “bag” of $HOME coins started. So we’ll be giving away 10 $HOME coins to anyone from our audience who reads this and wants to claim them.

The only catch, of course, is that you have to create an account at rally.io so we can send you your $HOME.

It’s incredibly simple. Just go here: https://rally.io/signup/

I also recorded a tutorial video to show you how:

Once you’ve created your account, you just need to send me your Rally ID so I know where to send your 25 $HOME coins. (The video above shows you how to get your Rally ID in your profile.)

To send me your Rally ID, use this Google Form. 

I’ll be doing the free $HOME coin distributions in batch, so allow for a little time after you submit your Rally ID for the coins to show up in your Rally account. You’ll get an email notification once they are sent.

Note: there are no strings attached to these free coins!

Obviously we’d love for you to buy more $HOME coins because you want to support the community and value the reward tiers. But if you don’t, that’s fine too. 

You are already an essential part of the Assembly Call and Back Home Network community just by being a member of our broader audience. That won’t change. And nothing will be taken away if you choose to not get involved with $HOME coin.

The introduction of $HOME coin just adds another layer to the community we’ve been building for more than a decade now, and it’s a way for you to earn additional benefits as a member.

For those of you who do want to purchase additional $HOME coins to qualify for the reward tiers, read on …

How to buy $HOME coins

As I mentioned above, once you have created your Rally account you can buy $HOME coins with a credit or debit card. 

Here is the link to the $HOME page on Rally: https://rally.io/creator/HOME/

I also recorded a tutorial video for this process as well:

Currently, the maximum amount you can buy is $100 USD worth of $HOME every 24 hours. It will be like this until Thursday, December 9th.

We set up the launch this way to ensure that individual people can’t buy or sell an exorbitant amount of $HOME and drastically impact the price during this initial launch phase.

Which leads me to a couple of important notes:

1. The reward tiers are based on coin quantity, not coin value.

Once you have 100 $HOME coins (or 25 or 250 or 500 or 1,000), the price of $HOME won’t impact your access to the benefits. 

In other words, 100 coins is 100 coins whether they are trading at $0.25 per coin or $1.25 per coin. So, obviously, you’d rather pay a lower price for them.

My goal in making this initial launch announcement to our existing audience members now, even though it’s a holiday weekend, is to hopefully give you an opportunity to get the best price possible to get access to the reward tiers.

2. The price of $HOME will fluctuate moving forward

I’ve been involved on the Rally network long enough now to know that there is a 100% chance the price of $HOME will fluctuate moving forward. It will fluctuate up and it will fluctuate down, and occasionally the fluctuations will be pretty big.

This is how crypto markets work. For projects with strong communities and effective leadership teams, there is often a stable or upward price trend across medium- and long-term time horizons, but the short-term fluctuations can be quite big. 

Rally is an open network with people who buy and sell community coins as a means of speculation, especially early in a coin’s life cycle or when it is earning Rally Rewards. This inevitably affects the price in short term windows. 

But our view with $HOME coin is long-term — years into the future. And we recommend that you only purchase $HOME coins if you share that long-term view with us.

• That way, if the coin price drops to $0.25 in two weeks (which very well could happen), you won’t be concerned because your focus is on supporting the community and accessing your rewards.
• It also means that if the price goes up to $1.00, you won’t be in a rush to sell all your $HOME because you want to maintain your access to the reward tiers.

This is what I meant above when I said the price of the coin should really be a tertiary concern (at most). 

We’re here to build a stable, long-term coin ecosystem that all of us who are involved with the Back Home Network will benefit from. And if you feel the same way, we want you along for the ride with us on this endeavor.

Your next steps if you want to get involved:

• Create your account at https://rally.io/signup/.
• Submit your Rally ID to this Google Form.
• Purchase additional $HOME coins here.
• Go to the BHN Discord server and type !coin join in the $verify-coin-holdings channel.

And let me know if you have any questions! I’m here to help.

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If you’re not sure whether or not you want to get involved, or if you have questions, no worries! There is no rush, and you’re more than welcome to wait and see how it all works before you start acquiring coins. We’ll be here when you’re ready.

If you have questions, please post them below as a comment. I’ll be happy to respond to private questions, but I’d rather respond where everyone can see since I’m sure many folks will have similar questions.