API3 Public Token Distribution Event

4 min readSep 28, 2020

We are excited to announce that the API3 public token distribution event will take place between October 15–29 on the Mesa DEX.

What is API3?

Businesses offer a wide variety of services over APIs, ranging from providing asset price data to executing traditional financial transactions. It is critical for decentralized applications to be able to access the kind of services that APIs offer in order to interact with the real world, yet these APIs are not natively compatible with decentralized applications.

With API3, we aim for the concept of an API to take the next evolutionary step to meet the inevitably strict decentralization requirements of Web 3.0 without employing third-party intermediaries. This will be achieved by dAPIs — fully decentralized and blockchain-native APIs — which will be set up, managed, insured, and monetized at scale by the API3 DAO.

Read our full whitepaper here. We are also starting a blog series later this week entitled “Getting APIs on the Blockchain” that will offer a deep dive into the problem we are solving and the design decisions that inform our solution. Stay tuned!

The API3 Token

To decentralize the governance of both dAPIs and the project as a whole, API3 will be governed by a DAO. The governance will be entirely decentralized and open, meaning that all stakeholders will be able to participate in the governance of the project directly. This will be achieved through the API3 token, which will grant voting power in the API3 DAO. The legal entity governed by the API3 DAO is API3 Foundation Limited Company, a Cayman Islands foundation.

Decentralized governance necessitates well-balanced incentive mechanisms that accurately model both positive and negative outcomes. In other words, the governing entities should be rewarded for good results and penalized for bad ones. The API3 token is designed to facilitate this through three main utilities:

Staking: Grants dAPI revenue and inflationary rewards.
Collateral: Backs insurance services that protect users from damages caused by dAPI malfunctions.
Governance: Grants direct representation in the API3 DAO.

The staking utility provides a financial incentive for participating in API3 and contributing actions that increase revenue. The collateral utility has the participants share API3’s operational risk and incentivizes them to minimize it. Finally, the governance utility gives the participants the ultimate instrument to enact these incentives.

API3 Token Distribution Event

The token distribution event will be hosted on Mesa, a decentralized exchange built on the Gnosis Protocol. The batch auction mechanism provided by the Gnosis Protocol allows for a fair token launch, as it limits the front-running and gas wars typical of token launches on AMM-based decentralized exchanges. We will release a step-by-step tutorial on how to get API3 tokens on Mesa closer to the distribution event.

API3 token distribution bonding curve (x-axis is token supply and y-axis is price in USDC)

We will utilize a logit-shaped bonding curve for the API3 token distribution. The initial price of the bonding curve will be $0.30 (the price provided to our institutional investors), and the ceiling price will be $2.00. Unsold tokens at the end of the distribution period will go back to the DAO bank.

Event details:

Starts on October 15th, 2pm CET
Ends on October 29th, 2pm CET (or when the total allocation is claimed)
Hosted on Mesa
15,000,000 API3 tokens will be available
Initial price will be $0.30, ceiling price will be $2.00
Proceeds and unsold tokens will go to the API3 DAO

Allocations

The API3 DAO will be bootstrapped with founding members and investors whose allocations are on a vesting schedule. This initial DAO will develop the definitive version of the DAO and migrate to it. The staking rewards will start being paid out with the launch of the definitive version of the DAO, and all token holders will be able to stake and take part in governance.

Use of Funds

Grants

The API3 DAO will give out grants from the DAO bank and by consequence decide on the general direction of the project. These grants will be for executing one-time projects or continuous operations that benefit the API3 Project.