The community behind Vanilla coin is pretty small and it is not even known by 50% of altcoiners till now.
They need to uplift their community as well as try to advertise their asset.
Everything is a community effort currently, so that explains why advertising is non-existent currently. Also advertising on this forum will be called out as shilling, scamming etc.
Seems Monero shilling is the only accepted form of advertising here.John will push marketing when the product is finished, while other projects are getting pushed even while being in a buggy/non-finished/alpha state.
They need to diversify their exchanges in order to get larger trade volumes + interest.
Well these are the better western alt-coin exchanges, Chinese exchanges will follow up probably after the coin gets marketing rolling and additional miners and investors.
The interest rate to secure the network is also very low (only 0.7%) which is why most members are not interested to invest in it. In other words the interest rate not worth nowadays.
The POS part was probably never meant as a source of income, if the project would reach it's true value in the future, even that 0.7% might be a good interest for "only" securing the network. Since VNL has a staking android and iOS wallet, which really don't take up much battery life (1-2% maybe), that's not a huge price for getting "free" coins.
It was mainly meant for further securing the network. POW/POS models should be more secure than simply POW or POS networks (see Decred is also running with this model). Also since fees are burned so it evens out the coin count in the future.
Also if you want something that pleases investors, VNL has Node Incentives running where you can run a Super Peer with collateral running (10k) and get a % of PoW rewards.
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I'm fine with POS, but I agree that we need more marketing and exchanges, but it will all follow up with time when the "product" is finished.