Aleph.im’s 2022 Tokenomics Update
2022 has already been a busy year here at Aleph.im. We finalized a $10M seed round led by Stratos Technologies, published an update of our roadmap, launched indexers for many dApps in the Solana ecosystem, and today, we’re excited to present our updated tokenomics.
Timeline
After the release of our (deeply outdated) whitepaper, we first updated our tokenomics on July 6th, 2020 announcing the current system of pools on our supply, then announced a reduction of half of the supply on July 28th 2020, effectively lowering the total supply from 1 billion to 500 million ALEPH tokens.
As much as we feel young, time has passed, and the project has evolved a lot. We now have core channel nodes, resource nodes, and many more exciting features and functionality to come. As the project evolves, the tokenomics should evolve too: An update was due, so here it is.
Why update our tokenomics?
First, it’s worth noting that all of the $ALEPH organisational pools are far from their original numbers, with less than 300M remaining in pools, and the rest being locked in Sablier streams or circulating freely. We are talking here about original numbers, regardless of what is left in the pools (more on this later).
A healthy ecosystem like Aleph.im’s needs both supply (i.e., servers, storage, computing) and demand (i.e., users, consumers of storage and computing resources).
For marketplaces to thrive, whether digital or physical, there must be an appropriate amount of providers (supply) and consumers (demand). And to be sustainable, the proper incentives need to exist for the parties involved on both sides.
Take Uber, for example. There is always demand from consumers for affordable rides at the press of a button. But drivers need to be incentivized or paid appropriately to continue providing rides. As the demand for rides increases, new drivers join, and incentives for drivers then naturally start decreasing to a reasonable extent. As consumer prices go down due to a surplus of drivers or service providers, this creates a network effect, through which this market grows as a result of organic supply and demand.
To bootstrap our efforts, we’ve decided to temporarily pay resource nodes (the people providing computing and storage resources) a minimum wage. For this minimum wage incentive to be sustainable and last for a long enough duration at current market values, we need to increase the size of the incentive pool, which is where these subsidies originate.
We also, of course, want the network to be as decentralized as possible. Considering the advancement of core channel nodes, computing resource nodes — and soon — storage resource nodes, we felt that Aleph.im’s power over the network had become too strong. Therefore, we’ve decided to decrease the supply of $ALEPH tokens in these pools, with the company’s pool being reduced by the largest amount, to double the total amount devoted to the incentive pool.
You can see in this chart the pools change, what is currently left in each pool, and what will now be left. This shift is mainly a way to set what the remaining non-circulating amounts will be used for.
New Pools
Incentives Pool
200M, left 118.4M (originally 100M, left 26.4M)
Pays for the node rewards, liquidity pools, and incentivized computing/storage. The main way to setup incentives on the network. Think of it as an equivalent of block rewards source on traditional blockchains.
0xaAf798d5F80dAEE72AEe8557B890809E9f5B6072
Business Development Pool
100M, left 36.3M (originally 120M, left 56.3M)
Used for business development. These tokens are unlocked and vested as needed in order to facilitate future partnerships, business development, and use cases with companies. These tokens are intended to be used within the aleph.im ecosystem, not sold on the market immediately upon unlock.
0x1C7449c294363982d5198C96858312BD17E0748c
Company Pool
100M, left 45M (originally 150M, left 95M)
These tokens are to be used by the company to fund operations. Unlocks at a rate of 2.5M per month. Worth noting that tokens sold from this pool are still unvesting for a period of 2 to 4 years through Sablier, so a big part of unlocks got effectively relocked upon sale.
0x44C8F0416614D7B06DCf5CdE85f18dc154E81A2f
Marketing Pool
40M, left 36.4M (originally 60M, left 48.4M)
Pool used to fund marketing efforts. Original release schedule is 1M per month max. Historically used for various efforts and raydium pool incentives (as a marketing effort). 8M got used for incentives of the Raydium pool: these will remain in the marketing pool as the new expanded incentive pool paid for it.
0x139552FcFd8f77038da072730E6ba2e641929f7C
Innovation Pool
50M, left 49.8M (currently left 49.8M)
Pool is intended to fund ecosystem projects, grants for future projects, etc. Will likely be managed by a DAO or similar organization.
Original unlock schedule was 0.9M per month, starting July 2021. Mostly not used so far as we are waiting on activating an adequate structure to manage this fund.
0x788673200ED5F75453a10cDf54A20be2c79CAde5
NULS Foundation Pool
10M, left 10M
Remains of an agreement with the NULS foundation in 2019. Will be managed by a DAO, can’t be touched by the company nor NULS directly.
0x23097E57F2DcCaf6d2cB9129B5d9a8e5446c5B77
About Aleph
Aleph.im is a distributed cloud platform that provides serverless trusted computing services, file storage, and indexing solutions to replace traditional centralized cloud computing. It provides dApps of any chain instant access to database solutions thanks to its scalable peer-to-peer network and programming language-agnostic interface. Explore our decentralized indexing solution. Follow Aleph.im on Twitter: @aleph_im or check out our Linktr.ee
