The first round of the Initial Free Offering of NIL token is coming

Francesco Sullo
0xNIL
Published in
4 min readJan 26, 2018

If you don’t know what the 0xNIL project is, please read this post.
If you don’t know what an
Initial Free Offering is, please read this post.

😜 Initial Free Offerings are becoming a reality

Here are a few examples:

Ontology Network — defining itself a public platform for building a decentralized trust ecosystem — has recently announced that they won’t have any form of pre-sale, public sale, or private sale. Instead, they will distribute 1,000 ONT for free to their newsletter subscribers.

CoinFi — defining itself the first decentralized market intelligence platform — has distributed 500 COFI to the people who were whitelisted for the previously planned ICO. I am very curious to see what happens when Kucoin will list the COFI on January 29th.

EXRNchain — a project who wants to connect the blockchains using a crosschain gateway built on Ethereum smart contracts — has distributed the 70% of EXRN tokens for free to the community. Only after, they have started selling a 1,5% of EXRN on their website as a contribution to the project. Today (January 26th) an EXRN has an average price of $0.000081 on CoinMarketcap.

So many ₿itcoin forks

A well-known case of coin multiplication is the one happening during a fork of a cryptocurrency. In the last year, Bitcoin has been forked so many times that it is hard to find an updated list on the web. In consequence of those forks, any owner of Bitcoin also owns a lot of variants.

In some cases, the project behind the fork has pre-mined a certain amount of coin for themselves. Someone is calling this process an Initial Fork Offering, but I would say that the definition is improper. Despite the fundraising aspect of the operation, there is an offer when someone can receive it and decide if accepting it or not. Instead, during a fork, the owners can do nothing except than allowing what’s happening, choosing, in some cases, to do not claim the forked bitcoins.

In the meantime Ethereum…
Forks of platforms like Ethereum, which hosts on its blockchain a lot of tokens, are fascinating cases. As pointed by my friend Nicola:

One day, you will have the double of everything, but that day every token will keep the same name on the original and the forked blockchain. How will you recognize them? How will the exchanges manage the duplication? What at the next fork when you will have 4 variants? And when they will be 8? And…?

👈👆👇 👉 It’s going to be a mess. But the good thing is that there will be new coins for free. And this makes me happy.

What about the NIL?

The Initial Free Offering of the NIL token will happen in two rounds.

The first round will start on January 29th, at 9 am PST, and will last ~3 days. The second will start towards the end of February. Only at the end of the second round, the NIL will be transferable. If it would be transferable before, someone could transfer it to a decentralized exchange like EtherDelta and trade it, invalidating the entire second round.

The NIL is a standard ERC20 token published on Ethereum.

During the first round, anytime you send 0 ether to the smart contract which handles the round, the contract will send you back 5,000 NIL. You can repeat the operation to have more NIL, until you reach the cap of 30,000 per wallet. Sending more requests will then generate an error, causing the transaction to fail.

You can find detailed instructions in the IFO-first-round dApp on the 0xNIL website. Even if I assume that you know how to responsibly partecipate to a token distribution, I want to stress about two essential points:

  1. You must send your 0 ether from a wallet that you fully control, i.e., of which you own the keys. Never send from an exchange!
  2. You must use a wallet that can receive standard ERC20 tokens.

Good examples are MyEtherWallet and Metamask.

The second is an in-browser wallet and offers a few advantages, compared with the first, because it can interact with the page and show you, for example, how many NIL you have in the wallet which is active in Metamask, without asking you to type anything. Also, if you use an in-browser wallet, the updates will be four times more frequent, because in-browser wallets inject in the dApp web3.js, a particular Ethereum library, and the dApp will take advantage of it.

Summarizing:

The IFO will start on January 29th 2018, around 9 am PST, as soon as the block #4,994,866 is mined.

You will have a cap per wallet, but there won’t be a total cap, meaning that you don’t need to rush to have your NIL.

🙃 Have fun 🙂

When I started working on this crazy project in June 2017, I wouldn’t have expected much interest. I want to thank all the people that are helping me 🙏

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Francesco Sullo
0xNIL
Editor for

Polymath. CTO at Superpower Labs & @MOBLANDHQ. Before founded @Passpack, and was at @Turo, @Yahoo, @Tronfoundationand others. More at https://sullo.co