Introducing $CLOUD, the @sanctumso token
Thank you all for the outpouring of comments and suggestions on my first tokenomics proposal. I am floored by the power of our community. There are dozens of forum posts, hundreds of comments, and thousands of thoughtful Discord messages. I want to give a special shoutout to @JamesleyHanley, who wrote an excellent contribution to suggest how the community allocation should be used.
We took a community poll and $CLOUD was the clear favourite. LFG $CLOUD!
We have closed Wonderland S1 ahead of schedule
The foremost purpose of Wonderland was to delight our users and provide a respite from point program fatigue, and I'm so glad that we did so. People really, really loved the design of Wonderland, and the response to the community quests was incredible.
Wonderland exceeded our wildest expectations in every single way. Over 300,000 wallets have signed up and we have thousands of active users on the Discord. We were originally going to run it for longer (we had plans for 12 quests) but it has succeeded at what we wanted it to do and we don't want it to overstay its welcome. So we decided to end it on a high note rather than drag it on interminably.
We thought about launching Season 2 immediately after the end of Season 1, but we decided against it in the end. Moving to Season 2 right away would be great for TVL, but I want to take our time and build a Season 2 that will blow you away just like S1 did, rather than more of the same. And $CLOUD will take pride of place in it. We fully expect TVL to drop now that we've announced the end of Season 1. That's totally fine. TVL is nice, but a lot of time it's a metric that people try and pump to raise from VCs, and we're not doing any of that. What matters to us is real stake from real people.
We have some issues with retroactive XP and people having their XP zeroed out. Not to worry, the team is working on fixing this now to give everyone your correct XP numbers.
We're doing a truly public token launch
LFG is not just a token launchpad. It is not a way to get some easy publicity. And it is definitely not for your team and investors to dump on retail. LFG lets us get $CLOUD to the right people in a transparent, decentralised, and fair manner.
It's important to us that everyone gets the same opportunity to get the token, no matter who you know or how deep your pockets are. We have had a lot of VC interest; I have turned down every single one of them. They can buy it at launch like everyone else. We will start the curve low, at the price of our first ever round (50M FDV), and sell a relatively larger proportion of the supply. No "low float high FDV" meta here – 18% of the total supply will be unlocked at launch.
The true potential of LFG lies in channelling the attention and wisdom of 250,000 people into improving our product, roadmap and token launch. And I'm going to lean as hard as I can into that. We will do a truly public token launch: I'm going to pull away the curtain of exactly what goes into launching a good token, and get your input every step of the way.
We will kick off with a Sanctum Twitter Broadcast. Then we will also do deep dive whiteboard sessions on LFG vault and curve design with the Jupiter and Meteora team -- how we're thinking about designing the parameters to give everyone a good entry. And we will end off with a special Jupiter Planetary Call.
There is so much to learn when launching a token. We are going to document all our fuckups and our learnings along the way. I will try my best to bring you along in that journey, so that everyone can learn from it, and we can spearhead the decentralised meta, Sanctum and Jupiter LFG together.
We will design the initial airdrop to separate the farmers from true believers
I can't talk too much about the airdrop; there are some tricks up our sleeves which lose their effectiveness once revealed. But there is something I can gladly talk about, which is designing our mechanisms to create separating equilibria.
The idea of a "separating equilibrium" comes from game theory. It's hard for us to separate dumpers versus true believers, so we design a clever mechanism that causes dumpers and true believers to separate themselves.
$DRIFT was a good example: people can choose to claim their allocation immediately, but can double their allocation if they wait 6 hours. I think this was a great start but was perhaps too good of a deal: 6 hours is not a long time to wait, and so both dumpers and true believers waited. This is a "pooling equilibrium"; you get no information. One simple tweak could be to extend the duration and make it continuous: 50% unlocks immediately, the rest over 7 days. You can claim at any time but you forfeit the remainder. None of this is set in stone yet; details will come later.
What $CLOUD will be used for
SOL is used for governance (validator voting on SIMDs) and to control a scarce resource (blockspace). I thought very hard about what the scarce resource $CLOUD will control. It will be used for governance, and controls capital, of course; but as we well know, the scarcest resource is attention. Prospective partners will need to stake $CLOUD to qualify for the Sanctum Verified Partner program, and $CLOUD holders will vote on which partners make it in. These partners will be lavished with attention as we craft custom pets, quests, and more for their LSTs. And of course, $CLOUD will take pride of place in Wonderland S2.
That will be a good start. I am not interested in short-term things like gauges, bribing, or revshare, until much later down the line (if ever). Sanctum's vision will grow exponentially over the months and years. There will be many possible utilities for $CLOUD over Sanctum's many new products as we grow to become a cornerstone of the world economy.
We refuse to pay any CEX listing fees
We are making a public commitment here to pay no CEX listing fees of any sort. Zero, nada, zilch.
Any CEX can list us at any time, and we welcome them to do so. We simply refuse to pay any listing fees.
Why have we done this?
CEXes ask for a lot. And when you give your tokens to them, you have no control or transparency in what they do. CEXes almost always ask for large listing fees: 1%, 3%, 10% of total supply. I would much rather those tokens go to the Sanctum community instead. Some CEXes ask for a "security deposit" (hundreds of thousands of dollars) that they pocket if your token launch doesn't drive enough net new users to their platforms. And sometimes CEXes fuck up: one of Drift's CEX partners listed their token 2 hours earlier, which resulted in wild price swings.
Despite this, founders frequently fall over themselves to fellate the CEXes and secure listings at all costs, because it's a really big risk to do otherwise. It is very, very scary. The token is your baby, your blood, sweat and tears, years of effort -- are you really going to do something different, which might completely flop? Or will you follow the established playbook?
We struggled a lot with this decision. We may well regret it. But in the end we decided to follow our heart and do what we think is right.
The tides are changing. We now have a critical mass of Solana-native users, thanks to Jupiter, DRIP, and memecoins. Engineering-wise, the chain is a lot better now than it was before. Our explicit goal is to push forward the decentralised meta and to build a Solana-native economy. We are going to make on-chain a first class citizen, with the help of LFG. We will make this a launch the world will remember.
And now, the actual numbers:
Ticker: $CLOUD
Total supply: 1,000,000,000 (1B)
Initial circulating supply: 180M (18%)
Launch Liquidity (18%)
18% of the total supply will be unlocked at launch. 10% will be given in the initial airdrop, and 8% will be used to seed liquidity in the LFG launch pool. The proceeds and any unsold tokens will go to the Strategic Reserve.
Community Reserve (30%)
30% of the total supply will be governed by the community. IMO, the community reserve should be used strategically to grow the pie (via future airdrops, active staking rewards, grants, etc.), although the community decides what to do with this at the end of the day. James Hanley had an excellent suggestion.
Strategic Reserve (13%)
13% of the supply has been allocated to the Strategic Reserve, which will be used by the team to grow the Sanctum ecosystem. It is earmarked for future acquihires, strategic investors, LST partners, grant recipients, loans to market makers, on-chain liquidity, and so on.
Jup LFG (1%)
1% will be given to Jupiter LFG.
Team (25%)
25% of the supply has been allocated to founders and core contributors, who have been building Sanctum for more than three years.
Investors (13%)
13% of the supply has been sold to investors. We sold some tokens at 50M and some at 60M, most of them back in 2021. Full details on our blog.
We have worked on Sanctum for three years, including throughout the bear market. We take an appropriately long-term perspective. All team and investor tokens unlock over 3 years with a 1-year cliff. That means that 33% of the tokens will unlock 1 year after TGE, while the other 66% will vest linearly over 24 months after the cliff. All team and investor tokens will be fully vested 36 months after TGE.
—
wen token? what's next? We're moving as fast as we can, but we will never rush things. For the next few hours I will be streaming live to answer all your questions. And for the next few weeks we will be incredibly public with the process – expect deep dives with the Jupiter and Meteora team on LFG curve design, a reveal and explanation of our airdrop criteria, and a special edition of a Jupiter Planetary Call.
We'll be really stressed out, but we're going to have a lot of fun too. The entire team will fly over for the launch, and we plan to have a little launch party as we put our labour of love -- three and a half years of blood, sweat, and tears -- finally out to sea.
Will you join us on our maiden voyage?
Thank you all for the outpouring of comments and suggestions on my first tokenomics proposal. I am floored by the power of our community. There are dozens of forum posts, hundreds of comments, and thousands of thoughtful Discord messages. I want to give a special shoutout to @JamesleyHanley, who wrote an excellent contribution to suggest how the community allocation should be used.
We took a community poll and $CLOUD was the clear favourite. LFG $CLOUD!
We have closed Wonderland S1 ahead of schedule
The foremost purpose of Wonderland was to delight our users and provide a respite from point program fatigue, and I'm so glad that we did so. People really, really loved the design of Wonderland, and the response to the community quests was incredible.
Wonderland exceeded our wildest expectations in every single way. Over 300,000 wallets have signed up and we have thousands of active users on the Discord. We were originally going to run it for longer (we had plans for 12 quests) but it has succeeded at what we wanted it to do and we don't want it to overstay its welcome. So we decided to end it on a high note rather than drag it on interminably.
We thought about launching Season 2 immediately after the end of Season 1, but we decided against it in the end. Moving to Season 2 right away would be great for TVL, but I want to take our time and build a Season 2 that will blow you away just like S1 did, rather than more of the same. And $CLOUD will take pride of place in it. We fully expect TVL to drop now that we've announced the end of Season 1. That's totally fine. TVL is nice, but a lot of time it's a metric that people try and pump to raise from VCs, and we're not doing any of that. What matters to us is real stake from real people.
We have some issues with retroactive XP and people having their XP zeroed out. Not to worry, the team is working on fixing this now to give everyone your correct XP numbers.
We're doing a truly public token launch
LFG is not just a token launchpad. It is not a way to get some easy publicity. And it is definitely not for your team and investors to dump on retail. LFG lets us get $CLOUD to the right people in a transparent, decentralised, and fair manner.
It's important to us that everyone gets the same opportunity to get the token, no matter who you know or how deep your pockets are. We have had a lot of VC interest; I have turned down every single one of them. They can buy it at launch like everyone else. We will start the curve low, at the price of our first ever round (50M FDV), and sell a relatively larger proportion of the supply. No "low float high FDV" meta here – 18% of the total supply will be unlocked at launch.
The true potential of LFG lies in channelling the attention and wisdom of 250,000 people into improving our product, roadmap and token launch. And I'm going to lean as hard as I can into that. We will do a truly public token launch: I'm going to pull away the curtain of exactly what goes into launching a good token, and get your input every step of the way.
We will kick off with a Sanctum Twitter Broadcast. Then we will also do deep dive whiteboard sessions on LFG vault and curve design with the Jupiter and Meteora team -- how we're thinking about designing the parameters to give everyone a good entry. And we will end off with a special Jupiter Planetary Call.
There is so much to learn when launching a token. We are going to document all our fuckups and our learnings along the way. I will try my best to bring you along in that journey, so that everyone can learn from it, and we can spearhead the decentralised meta, Sanctum and Jupiter LFG together.
We will design the initial airdrop to separate the farmers from true believers
I can't talk too much about the airdrop; there are some tricks up our sleeves which lose their effectiveness once revealed. But there is something I can gladly talk about, which is designing our mechanisms to create separating equilibria.
The idea of a "separating equilibrium" comes from game theory. It's hard for us to separate dumpers versus true believers, so we design a clever mechanism that causes dumpers and true believers to separate themselves.
$DRIFT was a good example: people can choose to claim their allocation immediately, but can double their allocation if they wait 6 hours. I think this was a great start but was perhaps too good of a deal: 6 hours is not a long time to wait, and so both dumpers and true believers waited. This is a "pooling equilibrium"; you get no information. One simple tweak could be to extend the duration and make it continuous: 50% unlocks immediately, the rest over 7 days. You can claim at any time but you forfeit the remainder. None of this is set in stone yet; details will come later.
What $CLOUD will be used for
SOL is used for governance (validator voting on SIMDs) and to control a scarce resource (blockspace). I thought very hard about what the scarce resource $CLOUD will control. It will be used for governance, and controls capital, of course; but as we well know, the scarcest resource is attention. Prospective partners will need to stake $CLOUD to qualify for the Sanctum Verified Partner program, and $CLOUD holders will vote on which partners make it in. These partners will be lavished with attention as we craft custom pets, quests, and more for their LSTs. And of course, $CLOUD will take pride of place in Wonderland S2.
That will be a good start. I am not interested in short-term things like gauges, bribing, or revshare, until much later down the line (if ever). Sanctum's vision will grow exponentially over the months and years. There will be many possible utilities for $CLOUD over Sanctum's many new products as we grow to become a cornerstone of the world economy.
We refuse to pay any CEX listing fees
We are making a public commitment here to pay no CEX listing fees of any sort. Zero, nada, zilch.
Any CEX can list us at any time, and we welcome them to do so. We simply refuse to pay any listing fees.
Why have we done this?
CEXes ask for a lot. And when you give your tokens to them, you have no control or transparency in what they do. CEXes almost always ask for large listing fees: 1%, 3%, 10% of total supply. I would much rather those tokens go to the Sanctum community instead. Some CEXes ask for a "security deposit" (hundreds of thousands of dollars) that they pocket if your token launch doesn't drive enough net new users to their platforms. And sometimes CEXes fuck up: one of Drift's CEX partners listed their token 2 hours earlier, which resulted in wild price swings.
Despite this, founders frequently fall over themselves to fellate the CEXes and secure listings at all costs, because it's a really big risk to do otherwise. It is very, very scary. The token is your baby, your blood, sweat and tears, years of effort -- are you really going to do something different, which might completely flop? Or will you follow the established playbook?
We struggled a lot with this decision. We may well regret it. But in the end we decided to follow our heart and do what we think is right.
The tides are changing. We now have a critical mass of Solana-native users, thanks to Jupiter, DRIP, and memecoins. Engineering-wise, the chain is a lot better now than it was before. Our explicit goal is to push forward the decentralised meta and to build a Solana-native economy. We are going to make on-chain a first class citizen, with the help of LFG. We will make this a launch the world will remember.
And now, the actual numbers:
Ticker: $CLOUD
Total supply: 1,000,000,000 (1B)
Initial circulating supply: 180M (18%)
Launch Liquidity (18%)
18% of the total supply will be unlocked at launch. 10% will be given in the initial airdrop, and 8% will be used to seed liquidity in the LFG launch pool. The proceeds and any unsold tokens will go to the Strategic Reserve.
Community Reserve (30%)
30% of the total supply will be governed by the community. IMO, the community reserve should be used strategically to grow the pie (via future airdrops, active staking rewards, grants, etc.), although the community decides what to do with this at the end of the day. James Hanley had an excellent suggestion.
Strategic Reserve (13%)
13% of the supply has been allocated to the Strategic Reserve, which will be used by the team to grow the Sanctum ecosystem. It is earmarked for future acquihires, strategic investors, LST partners, grant recipients, loans to market makers, on-chain liquidity, and so on.
Jup LFG (1%)
1% will be given to Jupiter LFG.
Team (25%)
25% of the supply has been allocated to founders and core contributors, who have been building Sanctum for more than three years.
Investors (13%)
13% of the supply has been sold to investors. We sold some tokens at 50M and some at 60M, most of them back in 2021. Full details on our blog.
We have worked on Sanctum for three years, including throughout the bear market. We take an appropriately long-term perspective. All team and investor tokens unlock over 3 years with a 1-year cliff. That means that 33% of the tokens will unlock 1 year after TGE, while the other 66% will vest linearly over 24 months after the cliff. All team and investor tokens will be fully vested 36 months after TGE.
—
wen token? what's next? We're moving as fast as we can, but we will never rush things. For the next few hours I will be streaming live to answer all your questions. And for the next few weeks we will be incredibly public with the process – expect deep dives with the Jupiter and Meteora team on LFG curve design, a reveal and explanation of our airdrop criteria, and a special edition of a Jupiter Planetary Call.
We'll be really stressed out, but we're going to have a lot of fun too. The entire team will fly over for the launch, and we plan to have a little launch party as we put our labour of love -- three and a half years of blood, sweat, and tears -- finally out to sea.
Will you join us on our maiden voyage?
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