We have a story to share about the inception of Sandclock. If you care to listen, keep reading. And if you’re only here to learn about charity mining, feel free to skip ahead—no hard feelings.
Cristiano and I have a beautiful 1.5 year old border collie named Ella. She is our pride, joy, and happiness. Nothing in the world beats a day at the beach with Ella, chasing waves and digging in the sand.
On Christmas Eve 2020, Ella swallowed a whole chicken thigh, bone and all, in one gulp. We rushed her to an emergency veterinarian, where they checked for an obstruction. Luckily, according to the x-rays, she was fine. The veterinarian told us to monitor her and expect diarrhea for a few days.
When nearly a month had passed, and Ella was still experiencing major digestion problems, shedding clumps of fur, and losing weight rapidly, we took her to a different veterinarian, informing them of Ella’s previous run-in with a chicken bone. This time, the veterinarian prescribed antibiotics, believing it could be a bacterial infection. Yet Ella’s symptoms continued to worsen.
Cristiano spent hours upon hours researching on the internet, reading through scientific literature, and emailing every veterinarian in Portugal. Finally, he came across EPI — Exocrine Pancreatic Insufficiency, a syndrome often caused by an excess of calcium in a dog’s bloodstream. All of the symptoms matched. Ella was a textbook example of EPI. Yet no veterinarian in the country was able nor willing to issue Ella a test for EPI, and they couldn’t offer much useful information. They knew too little about the syndrome.
Eventually, Cristiano came across Epi4Dogs, a non-profit foundation dedicated to the “advancement of science and education of EPI…by raising funds for EPI research”. Epi4Dogs promotes EPI research and education to pet owners, researchers, veterinarians, and veterinarian schools. The public information and research provided by Epi4Dogs is the reason that Ella will live a long, happy, and healthy life.
This probably isn’t the kind of content that you’re used to seeing from an upcoming crypto project. But this is the story behind Sandclock. This is the reason that Sandclock exists.
Ella’s story drove Cristiano to stop thinking about it and finally create a product that bridges his love of blockchain technology with causes that help the greater good. Why can’t the two coexist?
Epi4Dogs represents what is close to our hearts. Now it’s time to ask yourself: what is close to your heart? We’re here to help you amplify your positive impact on that cause.
Of course you can also pocket the yield for yourself if you prefer, and we’re willing to help you with that too. 😉
🤍 Charity Mining
Never heard of it? That’s because charity mining is entirely revolutionary, novel, and exclusive to Sandclock.
It’s simple. Out of the 100,000,000 tokens we will mint, a significant percentage of the Total Supply will be permanently locked. So how do you access them? Through donations. Donate the yield or make a regular donation to temporarily “borrow” tokens. By “borrow”, we mean that the tokens will be staked by the backend on your behalf — delegated to you, akin to Compound’s delegation contracts — which then entitles you to voting rights and treasury management on Polygon. Yes…You do things on the L1 of your choice and governance rights are conferred to you on Polygon, where our DAO will reside. (Nigh-)gasless voting anyone?
A practical example.
- user deposits $1000 for 1 year in our Moderate Risk vault, with the option to donate the yield.
- backend is monitoring deposits on all supported L1s and will automatically stake tokens on our Polygon DAO and allocate voting power to this wallet, as well as anything else that may or may not accrue to it.
- At the end of the maturation period, the backend will automatically unstake the tokens, voting power will automatically vanish, and everything will return to normal.
While Sandclock can be used to generate yield for you, we ultimately aim to make a positive impact. A donation through Sandclock is tax deductible, no matter who you are donating to; not only that, but you are able to claim a refund of the principal. Moreover, in the spirit of incentivizing donations and betting on the success of the protocol, we created an entirely new concept that we call Charity Mining — a way to reward donors and allow them to participate in governance.
The stronger your conviction that the protocol will generate significant cash flows and reach success, the higher the incentive to donate or buy tokens. Should the token be too expensive for you to bite, you can expose yourself to the protocol at no cost to yourself by making a zero-loss donation through Sandclock. Everything in perfect equilibrium.
But why not simply distribute tokens to donors instead of “borrowing”? Sandclock won’t distribute its tokens to donors because we want a permanent way to incentivize donations. Always. By only delegating tokens to wallets that participate in “giving,” we ensure that there will always be tokens in the treasury to incentivize.
We could have resorted to inflationary tokenomics a la Curve to solve this, but we don’t want our token to have dilutive properties. As such, there will never be more than 100,000,000 tokens in circulation, of which a significant number will be permanently locked away in a contract, ready to be staked in the DAO by the backend, no matter where your actions take place.
But what if we run out of tokens to delegate? Ideally, the allocation will target a predetermined utilization rate based on a forecast of the protocol’s adoption. Currently, we do not have such a forecast. Sandclock can be used as a normal crosschain yield optimizer with built-in insurance and surely, we expect this type of usage to be quite high comparatively. The charity aspect on the other hand is a bit trickier — we are the first project to target this market. As such, the first iteration of this function will be conservative and simple, and we will iterate on it as adoption grows and data becomes richer.
In the future, we hope that governance will adjust the parameters of the function and select the utilization rate themselves as they see fit.
A donation needs to be made through Sandclock. This is the only way to participate in Charity Mining.
The variables that go into how many tokens get allocated to a user’s wallet are as follows:
- Amount deposited.
- Type of donation (yield or whole).
- Percentage of yield donated, if yield was chosen.
- Duration of the deposit.
- Risk of the vault (higher risk typically implies higher APY, though not always).
Also important to note, while there is a maturation period, performance fees will be collected continuously in a way that is similar to Yearn’s system, as opposed to being collected exclusively at the end of the maturation period.
In the end, charity mining benefits all parties involved, turning what was initially a zero-sum game into a positive-sum game.
Next time, we will delve into Governance and Tokenomics, and how we baked our mission into our tokenomics to align incentives. Get ready. We’ve barely scratched the surface, and we have a lot to share with you all.
For now, enjoy some Ella content. She is the living, breathing inspiration for all that is to come for Sandclock.
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Warning: Sandclock has not yet released a token. Anyone trying to sell you a token on Sandclock’s behalf is a scammer.
