Varyon — Buying, Staking, Referenda for Seasteads & SeaZones.
We’re pleased to share an updated Whitepaper for Varyon. Our token design has been adjusted with considerable input from expert advisers and community input. We will keep the whitepaper in draft format until our main sale so that we can continue to improve it based on additional feedback. This blog showcases our current token design. Read the full whitepaper here.
Varyon Token Design
Blue Frontiers is raising capital to build seasteads by issuing an ERC20 token named Varyon on the Ethereum blockchain. We plan and expect that Varyon will be usable to purchase seasteads, fractional ownership of seasteads, seastead residency, and other products and services from Blue Frontiers. As an easily exchangeable token, Varyon will also be tradable and usable beyond just Blue Frontiers.
Token Minting & Supply
One billion Varyon will be minted during the Token Generation Event (TGE) and none shall be issued after the TGE. Thus, the total amount in circulation will be fixed and publicly known. A portion of the total token supply will be held and used by Blue Frontiers for development, construction, and administration.
Uses & Ecosystem
Blue Frontiers will require Varyon for the purchase of products and services of significant value through a Vickrey auction or market based purchasing process. Products and services of significant value include — but are not limited to — purchase or rental of entire seasteads or dwellings on seasteads, fractional ownership of seasteads and seastead dwellings, major contracting services including design of new seasteads or SeaZones, and large events.
Varyon will be required for staking a person’s presence, residency, or virtual residency in a SeaZone.
Varyon may be used to pay Blue Frontiers for the registration of businesses, residency, and virtual residency in Blue Frontiers’ administered SeaZones.
Varyon may be used to pay the major utilities provided by Blue Frontiers, such as electricity, cable services, sanitation services, etc.
Additionally, Varyon is a tradable token which can be used independently of Blue Frontiers. Blue Frontiers will work with outside partners to establish other use cases and systems for Varyon beyond what is listed above.
Issuance of Asset-backed Non-fungible Tokens
When Blue Frontiers sells a permanent asset, such as a seastead, or a semipermanent asset, such as fractional ownership of a seastead condo, Blue Frontiers plans to issue non-fungible tokens to represent the assets. This will allow for the secondary sale and transfer of ownership of the assets via smart contract.
Vickrey Auction of Significantly Valuable Assets
When Blue Frontiers builds or acquires something of substantial value to sell, the asset will be auctioned off for Varyon with a minimum price in a sealed bid second price auction, also known as a Vickrey auction.
Auctions will be announced in a timely manner and held long enough to preclude shilling and insider sales masquerading as an auction. The proceeds of the auction (the amount of the second highest bid or the minimal price, whichever is higher) will go to Blue Frontiers. A minimum price will be set in the auction to assure that Varyon’s value is not depreciated by the auction.
Staking
For the purposes of Blue Frontiers, staking is the act of having Varyon locked in a wallet controlled by a Blue Frontiers smart contract escrow service to represent a participant’s commitment. Stakes act as a device to pool funding in order to mitigate general purpose civil liability. Common fees in the SeaZone which are correlated with population size are apportioned by stake size. Every resident, visitor, and virtual-resident of a SeaZone will be required to stake Varyon.
Staked Varyon is required at the Blue Frontiers level of administration for the governance of SeaZones. Individually owned seasteads may choose additional staking of Varyon or other means of collecting damage deposits and pooling monies to pay for insurance policy premiums.
Surface occupation stake
Any monopolization of space (even in a transient manner, such as with a moving vehicle,) would require its registered owner to maintain a stake. The minimum surface occupation stake will be set and revised according to each SeaZone’s charter. Owners of seasteads will bid using appropriate auction methods (such as the Vickrey auction method, or multi-item variants like Vickrey–Clarke–Groves) for long term, exclusive access to geographically identified areas in a SeaZone, and will need to maintain the stake in order to keep it.
SeaZone charters will reflect the agreements passed with other stakeholders such as local municipalities with which waters of the SeaZone may be shared. As such, it is also possible that some uses or categories of users may be exempted from staking requirements, or that Blue Frontiers or other third parties will handle stakes within broad categories, such as local boaters or the country’s coastguard.
As modularity and the potential of dynamic geography are major tenets of Blue Frontiers, access to geographical locations will be periodically put up for auction, and the seasteads will be rearranged according to winning bids. This system will allow stakeholders to express preferences as to where in a SeaZone they are located, and with which other seasteads they are sharing borders.
Staking for Virtual Residency and Business Registration
Blue Frontiers will offer virtual residency options for individuals and businesses. Varyon will be required for staking as a virtual resident or business, and will be usable for most of these transactions.
Staking for Referenda
The presence and surface occupation stakes are used to allow stakeholders to veto proposals by Blue Frontiers and to amend the SeaZone charter in a weighted heterarchical decision-making process, with length of staking granting somewhat higher weights for the same amount of staked Varyon.
The weighted heterarchical decision-making process correlates an individual’s time and resource investment in the SeaZone with their influence in decisions. The weighting algorithm will take into account the amount of Varyon a voter was required to stake, not the amount of Varyon a person owns. Stake requirements will presumably be higher for owners and residents than for visitors, aloting more veto power to the owners and residents. Additional weight will be granted to persons who have had Varyon staked for longer periods of time, so that seniority will play a factor in decision making.
Proposals to change the SeaZone charter pass when there is no simple majority veto from either the pool of presence stakes or the pool of surface stakes, taken separately. The proposal can be voted down by individuals with presence stakes, with more than 50% of the weighted stakes required to veto a proposal. Simultaneously, the proposal can be voted down by individuals with surface stakes, with more than 50% of the weighted stakes required to veto a proposal. Either group of stakeholders can veto the proposal, so in order for it to pass it needs to broadly satisfy individuals visiting and living in the SeaZone as well as owners of infrastructure in the SeaZone.
Access to Blue Frontiers Global & Blue Communities & Events
The online platforms and offline events Blue Frontiers hosts and manages, such as Blue Frontiers Global, Blue Communities, and seasteading gatherings, may be limited to Varyon holders. Blue Frontiers will determine — and adjust over time — the minimum amount of Varyon a holder must have to participate in these platforms and events.
Varyon Sale
Varyon will be distributed in a crowdsale to buyers who have been whitelisted through our anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC), and selection process.
The sale will be held entirely in Ether (ETH). The soft cap of the combined pre-sale and public sale will be 4,000 ETH and our hard cap will be 22,000 ETH.
Presales will be sold ahead of the public sale in Bitcoin, ZenCash, and Ethereum, with a tiered bonus of up to 15%.
There will not be bonuses in the public sale.
Time to Issuance: Tokens are issued upon successful KYC / AML checks, with a transfer freeze until a deadline set shortly after the sale (in order to fully process all sales and KYC / AML checks).
Distribution
- 40% Sale*
- 10% Community Development
- 15% Blue Frontiers team
- 35% Reserves: Future Seastead/SeaZone Construction, Development, Administration
* Varyon not sold in the main sale will be allotted to the reserves for future seastead/SeaZone Construction, Development, Administration.
Team Token Lockup
Blue Frontiers is allocating 15% of Varyon tokens to the team, which consists of the founders and executives, full and part time staff, more than one hundred professional volunteers, and advisors.
A small portion of those tokens will be distributed and locked for one year from the end of the TGE. The rest will be allocated and vested over time.
The team will also be required to accept a significant part of their compensation in tokens, from 10% to 40%, and 40% specifically for founders. Payments received until Dec 2021 in year N are locked until the last day of year N+1.
The Volunteer team will be allocated approximately one percent of the total token issuance. Volunteer tokens will be locked for one year.
Some advisors will be awarded half of their tokens at the close of the sale, with the remaining tokens being vested over the course of one year.
