Thread by @fmoulin7

1) Since @nic__carter analyzed and classified cryptoassets launch styles & funding in his master's thesis, the pace of innovation has been staggering. Buckle up, here is a detailed thread on cryptoassets’ launch styles & funding experimentations since 2009.messari.io/c/research/mes…

@nic__carter 2) First of all, I want to link to @nic__carter’s amazing master’s thesis, coinmetrics.io/papers/dissert…. Even though many things have evolved since he published it in 2017, it stays one of the most detailed, structured and broad report on cryptoassets I’ve read to date.

@nic__carter 3) Let’s start with Fair Launches. A Fair Launch means that there was no premine, the coin was mineable from the start of the blockchain, and the launch was announced publicly. Examples include Bitcoin of course, but also Dogecoin & Monero.
messari.io/asset/bitcoin

@nic__carter 4) Conversely, Instamines & Stealth mine refer to a situation best defined by @nic__carter where: “founders use asymmetric advantages to mine large percentages of the coin at launch or fail to announce the inception of the coin, thus mining stealthily.” One example is Bytecoin

5) Ripple & Stellar premined the coins & are distributing them through airdrops / selling them. To date, both teams are still controlling 70%+ of the coins’ outstanding supplies, leading to a high circulating inflation rate for $XRP, as detailed here

https://twitter.com/fmoulin7/status/1151518540282978304?s=20

6) Hard forks occur when nodes cannot agree on a change, and they lead to a permanent split in the network as we saw with Bitcoin Cash. The owners of the original cryptoasset receive proportional amounts of the new cryptocurrency. messari.io/resource/hard-…

7) Sometimes, the fork includes an additional “premine” to cover fork costs and future development expenses and reward the team. Examples include Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond messari.io/asset/bitcoin-…

8) Chain-based airdrops consist of “borrowing the distribution of an existing network to guide distribution of a new currency” HT @nic_carter. The Ardor supply was distributed by taking a 3-month snapshot of the NXT blockchain.
jelurida.com/index.php/ico

9) Treasuries governed on-chain by validators / token holders, were an early experiment. The BitShares Blockchain has a working daily budget. It was entirely premined, & BTS holders decide how to allocate it with a daily upper limit of 1/2924th of the remaining budget.

10) PIVX features a different model. Every month, the PIVX masternodes vote to fund proposals. Proposals that pass are funded in what's called the superblock, every 43200 blocks, which represents a max of 16.6% of the total monthly reward.

11) The @ElectricCoinCo raised $1m in seed in 2014 to initiate research on a ZKP-based payments protocol. The protocol has a built in "founders' reward", equal to 10% of the 21m ZEC that will ever be issued. Part of it is allocated to early investors. messari.io/asset/zcash

12) Whereas the “founders’ reward” will effectively cease after 4 years is still very uncertain, as discussed broadly by the community & @placeholdervc here

https://twitter.com/placeholdervc/status/1148993603546411008?s=20

.

13) Everyone knows about crowdsale & private sales. The first token sale was held by Mastercoin in 2013. ICOs exploded in 2017. Some projects did not even bother to do crowdsales, and raised the entirety of the funds during private sales, such as Telegram and its $1.7 b sale

14) A variety of token sale mechanisms were experimented during this period. @VitalikButerin analyzed, compared and contrasted different models including @gnosisPM reverse dutch auction & @maidsafe multiple currencies sale in this great write-up. vitalik.ca/general/2017/0…

15) @SiaTechHQ double token model is also interesting. The first is the siacoin token allowing to rent storage on the network. The second is the siafund token, that entitles the holder to a portion of the siacoins exchanged when a file contract is created blog.sia.tech/siafund-token-…

16) Think this is a lot? Well, the last two years have been a crazy ride in terms of Launch Styles & Funding innovations. Let’s quickly try to recap what has been experimented.

17) Following the ICO craze, lots of people called for the STO era. While the STO model hasn’t quite picked up as expected, some projects like @iconomicom, opted for a STO, transforming their legal structure and giving up on their utility token. thetokenist.io/iconomi-transf…

18) @LivepeerOrg introduced Merkle mining which consists in "generating merkle proofs demonstrating that a specific ETH address was in the set of accounts that had at least X ETH at some block height” as described by @KyleSamani multicoin.capital/2018/11/09/new…

19) @LTOnetwork , designed a dual-chain token model, with an innovative bridge toll fee burning mechanism to incentivize private sales investors not to dump their tokens during early development stages of the network. medium.com/@Price_Steven/…

20) @storecoin adopted a milestone-based approach to raise long-term project treasury. Instead of completely pre-fund the development of the project the team only offers tokens for sale once their development reaches a new milestone on the roadmap.
messari.io/asset/storecoin

21) The first part of 2019 was definitely the year of the IEOs. The % of supply sold is relatively low but it is paired with the opportunity of being listed & usually provide good marketing for the project. $AMPL raised $5 million in an 11-second IEO. messari.io/article/amplef…

22) Innovative Dev & ecosystem funding models were also launched, such as @gitcoin to monetize or incentivize work in Open Source Softwares & @MolochDAO, a grant-making DAO for the Ethereum community. medium.com/messaricrypto/…

23) More recently, @HeyEdgeware & @NuCypher built upon the timelock programmability of smart-contracts to create the Lockdrop & Worklock models & incentivize active participation.
messari.substack.com/p/pop-lockndro…

24) - @thibauld Thibauld introduced continuous organizations using Bonding Curves medium.com/hackernoon/int…

- @yanroux explored liquid airdrops, using @UniswapExchange, which ...

- Launched Unisocks

https://twitter.com/UniswapExchange/status/1126506342225629185?s=20

25) @Algorand conducted its first of a long series of auctions introducing a novel refund policy protecting auctions investors against downside risks meanwhile incentivizing market making.

arringtonxrpcapital.com/wp-content/upl…

26) And then, two weeks ago, @blockstack received the green light from the SEC to conduct a $28 million token offering under Reg A+ pioneering the use of Reg A+ to distribute tokens while complying with existing regulations as broken down by @EricTurner messari.substack.com/p/blockstacks-…

27) Last week-end @econoar started playing with the idea of a fork of @PoolTogether_ - the newly launched no-loss lottery - for Ethereum public goods funding...

https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1152724775942254592?s=20

28) ...Just before raising flag on EIP-2025 , a proposal to fund ETH1.x development through inflation funding, allocating 0.0055 ETH per block to a dev fund, that has sparked much controversy among the Ethereum community. boards.messari.io/b/eip-2025-dis…

29) It’s interesting to see how these experimentations & dynamics have evolved through time. From Bitcoin’s Fair Launch, acting as a fair distribution mechanism rewarding active participants.

https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1110302988?s=20

30) It then became almost all about raising funds, with little place for bootstrapping security & network effect "we'll migrate to Mainnet later" or regulatory compliance "no one knows how these things should be regulated.''

31) But the 2018 bear market halted this dynamic, the get-rich-quick scheme faded way, and ICOs became increasingly less trendy & frequent throughout the year. messari.io/onchainfx/view…

32) Projects started using the programmability of smart contracts to bootstrap active network participation (@LivepeerOrg, @NuCypher) by coin holders and favor future active validators, delegators, voters or workers.

33) The community looked for off-protocol on-chain funding mechanisms (@Molochdao) and new ways to govern tokenized networks and insure a fair distribution (@thibaud’ continuous organization)

34) While at the same time, the industry is navigating through regulatory constraints (STOs, IEOs, Sia Double token model) or accepting those constraints & stepping up its game (@blockstack)

35) I expect these trends to continue and the pace of experimentations to keep growing. I am excited to see if regulated investment vehicles can be programmed in a fair & accessible way ;)

36) On @Messaricrypto Pro, you’ll soon be able to filter all assets by launch styles, funding & governance mechanisms, and many more filters. Until then, you can check out this board which includes all the resources from this thread: boards.messari.io/b/launch-style…