$BOOT Token Generation Event
Medium Article written for Boot Finance
Introduction
Many crypto projects conduct a 1-time public sale of their tokens at inception. Plenty of marketing and market timing is involved. The rationale is to extract as much financing as possible to bootstrap the project.
Often, public sales are messy situations. Some people come away from them deeply unhappy. Fingers are pointed at technical issues, gas spikes, and bots frontrunning the majority of participants, to name but a few issues.
The unhappiness stems from public sale participants competing against each other in the arena of speed. These first-come, first-serve distribution mechanisms are increasingly recognized to be at odds with the ethos of DeFi — a new financial system that is open and fair to every single participant. As an industry, we have to do better. We have to do away with such archaic token distribution mechanisms.
To play their part, Boot Finance will be giving the boot to these first-come, first-serve distribution mechanisms. The team will be supporting a fairer distribution mechanism and this article will be explaining how we intend to do so.
$BOOT Public Sale Contract
Codebase
The Boot Finance team is inspired by the work done at Vether Asset, a scarce, store-of-value Ethereum-based asset. To mint $VETH, the equivalent value of ETH or ERC-20 assets has to be burned. In doing so, the value of $VETH is derived from the value of the burnt tokens.
Boot Finance forked and modified the Vether Asset contract to contextualize it to the team’s needs. This will be discussed in the sections below.
Duration of Public Sale
The public sale will last for 5 years and will be a fixed percentage of the total emission schedule. This is something that we will cover in a separate post. But at a high level, the emission was modelled closely after the Synthetix decay based schedule. Each day, the contract will emit a certain amount of $BOOT. Once the daily sales quota has been met, no one can purchase any $BOOT tokens until the next day. Over time, the amount emitted will decrease until it hits the terminal value of 0 at the end of 5 years.
Boot Finance modified the Vether contract such that ETH will not be burnt. Instead, the ETH will be used to fund development, pay salaries, and to build a treasury to ensure the long term success of the protocol.
The emission schedule in the early days is aggressive, with ~50% of the supply emitted within year one — so it will likely pay to get in as early as possible. After week 1, the inflation rate will be >5000% and this decision was made to bootstrap the project in its early stages.
At any point in time, people can buy $BOOT using ETH through the contract. Compared to the first-come, first-serve model, the Boot Finance model removes speed from the equation.
Acquiring $BOOT
$BOOT can be acquired in 2 different ways. First, would-be investors could purchase it using ETH through the public sale contract.
There will also be incentivized liquidity pools in place with $BOOT tokens. And obviously, you can earn tokens by farming. We will cover this opportunity in another post. For now, we are focused on the public sale.
Unlock Schedule
Another tweak introduced by the Boot Finance team is the unlock schedule. Buys from the public sale contract are treated in the following manner:
30% of the tokens will be distributed immediately
The remaining 70% will be vested and linearly released over the next 12 months
For example, if 1,200 $BOOT is bought, 360 of the tokens (30% of 1,200) will be sent to the wallet immediately. The remaining 840 (70% of 1,200) can only be unlocked linearly over the next 12 months. This means that every month, 70 tokens (840 divided by 12) can be claimed until the remaining 840 tokens in total are fully claimed at the end of 12 months.
Many crypto projects adopt a 6-months lockup period. The decision of the Boot Finance team to introduce a 12-month lockup period is to encourage long-term thinking among holders and to ensure we are focusing on building out a long term sustainable community.
Note that this locking mechanism applies to everyone including the seed investors whose investment will be emitted over 5 years and are also subject to the same vesting schedule detailed above. This ensures that everyone is on the same starting line and no one has an unfair advantage over another which is especially important to the team and early investors to ensure that the protocol couldn’t be destabilized by a handful of early whales.
To incentivize the team to remain committed to the project, any member who leaves the project early will forfeit their vested $BOOT token from the point of departure onwards. That’s how things work at Boot Finance!
As the Boot Finance team continues to deliver, the $BOOT token price will follow suit. It just needs farsighted community members who are in it for the long haul.
Ready for the Public Sale?
Are your ETH bags prepped? The dawn of the $BOOT public sale is upon us. Join us and let us realize the dream of Swerve Finance in their stead — a fair-launch, community-owned, and community-governed protocol!