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Not a fan of  DeFi in general, but I did take a look at TokenSwap because I support most developments in BSV space.

Like every DeFi project doing pooled liquidity, Tswap.id at the current stage is also based on a pyramid scheme. Don't see a better way to put it, to be honest. Necessary for "ignition" perhaps.

Let's not forget that Tswap is based on an automated market maker (AMM), and AMM is only a real economy to the extent that high-volume real trading occurs.  The initial incentive payouts for pooling and farming, although a necessary marketing mechanism, is not real trading in themselves.

So far, no DeFi project has shown a real economy that is even remotely commensurate with its valuation. That includes Uniswap.

Hope Tswap.id will prove to be different.

A more balanced perspective

At same time, certain things need to be put into perspective:

TSC's price fluctuated in the range of $0.10 to $1 in the past weeks, corresponding to a fully diluted valuation (FDV) in the range of $100M to $1B.

Because the current FDV of BSV is $3B, this is equivalent to a FDV valuation ratio of BSV/TSC in a range of 3 times-30 times.

In comparison, ETH/UNI is about 18 ($360B vs. $20B, FDV).

Note the following:

As of today (9/24/2021), less than 2% of the total TSC tokens have been released. Within 30 months, 100% (1 billion) of them will be released.  Therefore, TSC is suffering an extremely high rate of inflation (dilution) every day, presently about 4% inflation daily.  And this is a result of only two pooling pairs, namely TSC/BSV and BSV/USDT, with payouts in TSC.

However, there are several factors that contribute to the profitability of pooling and farming TSC, despite the high inflation rate.

(1)  The high inflation rate is compensated by a  high payout rate percentage wise.  For example, when there was only one pool (TSC/BSV), most if not all released TSC were released as payouts to farming accounts, so farmers didn't feel any pressure of inflation.  (This however will change when more pairs are released that give payouts in TSC but not staked using TSC, because in this case, the newly released TSC have nowhere to go but to be staked in the TSC/BSV pool, unless of course one day TSC itself is listed somewhere and directly traded).

(2) As the total number of released TSC increases, the inflation rate will gradually decrease, because the denominator becomes larger. If Token Swap sticks with the 30 month release on a roughly even rate, the inflation rate would quickly drop from the present 4% to about 0.25% daily in 12 months. Still a high inflation rate, but far better than the current rate.  This factor, however, helps only partially, because at the same time, payout rates, although fixed in numbers, decrease percentage wise.

(3) Farming earns TSC in transaction fees as well. (At this stage, however, this is minimal, because fees generated in the trading are far below block payouts.)

(4) Tswap promises to spend part of its transaction fee income to buy back TSC and burn them. However, at the buyback rate 80% x 0.005%, this is insignificant at the present time. Even when the annual trading volume becomes 100 times the total TSC token value (indicating an extremely successful trading asset), the annual buyback rate would be only about 4%.

So can pooling and farming TSC be profitable?

It depends.  At the present time, the prospect for profitability is probably better than what the numbers might suggest.

It appears that many people are closely watching the TSC token price alone, thinking that only when TSC price goes up could pooling and farming TSC be profitable.

I can tell you some good news:  that is not the case.

Some simple math shows that, if the TSC price remains about the same relative to BSV, say 1 TSC = 0.002 BSV (or 1 BSV = 500 TSC), farming TSC in the TSC/BSV pair would make 2% profit daily, simply due to payouts.  Therefore, farming profitability does not require TSC price itself goes up relative to BSV.

If TSC price does rise against BSV, farming would be even more profitable.

In fact, as an ongoing process, the TSC price could be steadily decreasing relative to BSV price and farming would still be profitable.  It is only when the TSC price relative to BSV drops too quickly and substantially would farming TSC/BSV pair lose money.

It is also important to note that, because the total payout to the pool is a fixed number (2500 TSC/block), the payout rate to individual accounts decreases as the pool size increases. Therefore, the system incentivizes early participants.

An Experiment

As an experiment, I put in some BSV in TSC/BSV pool earlier when 1 BSV = 285 TSC (incidentally, it was probably the worst time to put BSV into the TSC/BSV pool, as the price trend reversed almost exactly at that point, but well...).

Six days later, TSC value relative to BSV didn't continue to go up but instead fell 20% to 1 BSV = 345 TSC.

But my account didn't lose value. It managed to break even.

Six more days later, TSC price relative to BSV dropped further down, at one point to a shocking 1 BSV = 685 TSC, although later recovered to 1 BSV = 500 TSC.  At this point, my account was in deficit, suffering about a 12% loss.

However, as mentioned above, if the TSC price relative to BSV maintains at the current level, it may take less than a week for the account to recover and break even again.

The account would sustain loss only if the TSC price relative to BSV drops faster than what the block payouts could compensate.  Will see.

What the experiment suggests:

1, At the current TSC farming payout rate and the present pool size, it can compensate a 15% weekly TSC price depreciation relative to BSV.  (But note that when the pool size increases with time, individual payout rates decrease, so the compensation power will also decrease.)

2. Alternatively, if TSC maintains its price relative to BSV, farming TSC would have a daily average yield of 2% due to farming payout alone without earning any transaction fees. This is an the extremely high return. This is also in line with the 710% APY (annual percentage yield) given by Token Swap, but in reality, if the yield is reinvested daily, the actual compounded APY would be significantly higher still.  On other hand, because the daily average yield is bound to decrease as the pool size increases, the compounded API would not be simply a result of compounding a daily 2% yield, which would be ridiculously high.

3. If TSC price even rises against BSV in the future, the return would be even higher.

4. Therefore, it is unrealistic to expect that TSC even maintain its price relative to BSV at the present 1:500 level, let alone to further increase.

Some further conclusions

After looking at the tokenomics of TSC, my conclusion is:

It's unlikely that TSC price would rise relative to BSV significantly from the current ratio.

I think it would be extremely favorable to farming if TSC price remains around 1 BSV = 500 TSC, which translates roughly to a TSC/BSV fully diluted valuation ratio of about 1/10.

Considering that UNI/ETH FDV ratio is close to 1/20, even if TSC/BSV price eventually drops to 1/1000, representing a TSC/BSV FDV ratio of 20, it would still be quite favorable, and would still make farming highly profitable.

(Don't confuse token prices with token valuation.  The former is the price of an individual token, while the latter the total value of all tokens released, and the FDV the total valuation of all released or to be released.)

Shortly, if the TSC/BSV ratio drops slowly, pooling and farming the TSC/BSV pair may still be profitable.

Given the extremely high level of dilution in the next 30 months, I believe that if TSC price relative to BSV remains around 1 BSV = 500 TSC, it would be an extremely impressive result. And I would not be surprised if TSC price relative to BSV drops further.  But as long as the TSC price relative to BSV does not drop too quickly and too low, pooling and farming the TSC/BSV pair may still be profitable.

I know many expect TSC value to further rise against BSV. That would be hard to believe.

Of course I could be wrong, because my analysis assumes a certain level of rationality, but pyramid-type marketing structures are never rational.

Overall, I just think that people got too excited about the skyrocketing TSC valuation in the first few days.  The reality will sink in, but may still be quite rosy.

But ultimately, it all depends on whether real adoption and real transactions may happen eventually, because without which the whole product will fall apart.