Oct 23, 2020
Welcome $AUDIO to Mainnet
TLDR: The $AUDIO platform token is live on mainnet. Our top 10,000 artists & fans received an exclusive $AUDIOdrop now available to claim in your dashboard and use on the Audius platform.
We’re thrilled to announce that $AUDIO — the Audius platform token — is now live on mainnet.
To our growing community of artists, fans and curators, head over to your Audius account to see if you’re eligible for a very special surprise.
We’re giving 50M $AUDIO, or 5% of the initial supply, to our top 10,000 artists & fans through an exclusive $AUDIOdrop to be used on the Audius platform .
The official contract address of AUDIO is 0x18aaa7115705e8be94bffebde57af9bfc265b998
Please be very wary of scams and duplicate tokens with the same ticker symbol. Members of the Audius team will never ask you to send us tokens or wallet information!
Claim Your $AUDIOdrop
Every Audius user now has access to an extended dashboard, showcasing your $AUDIO holdings with a newly launched claim feature.
Simply visit your Dashboard and look for the ‘Claim $AUDIO’ button.
Thanks to metatransactions, or the ability for Audius to cover transaction costs on behalf of user wallets, you can claim $AUDIO with no ETH required, all in one simple click.
Once claimed, you’ll be able to track your $AUDIO balance directly in the dashboard, marking the first step into the growing world of token-based feature access.
So you claimed your $AUDIO — now what can you do with them?
$AUDIO Discord
We’re happy to welcome users to the wonderful world of token-permissioned chats with an exclusive $AUDIO-holders only channel using our newly launched Discord bot.
Join the $AUDIOphile server using the link from the Audius dashboard. Upon entering the Discord you’ll be asked to enter a code displayed in your Audius dashboard. This proves your account holds at least one $AUDIO, giving you a special $AUDIO role and granting you access to the exclusive $AUDIO holders-only channel.
This is the first of many ways $AUDIO will be used to enhance your Audius experience, so stay tuned for more announcements on this front in the very near future!
To celebrate the launch, we’re throwing an exclusive mainnet party with Deadmau5 and RAC, live on the front page of Twitch tonight at 6:30PM PT.
In this article, we’ll break down the logistics of the $AUDIOdrop, the $AUDIO token distribution, ongoing issuance, staking on mainnet, and the future of $AUDIO.
$AUDIOdrop Details
Since our launch in September of 2019, we’re now home to 750k monthly active users (MAUs) with over a million streams each month across more than 100,000 tracks.
What better way to speak to the ethos of a community-owned and operated streaming protocol than by sharing the token responsible for shaping Audius’ future with the very people who helped us get to where we are today.
Audius structured its 50M retroactive airdrop to reward active contributors to the platform, measured as a combination of aggregate streams, followers, song saves, reposts and playlist saves.
This resulted in 10,000 accounts receiving an average of 5,000 $AUDIO, with top accounts like Brownies & Lemonade, Phuture Collective, and Good Society taking home roughly 60,000 tokens each!
Here’s how it looked in practice:
Score =
(0.75*least(streams_on_your_content,2500)/2500) + (0.1*least(followers,1000)/1000) + (0.05*least(favorites_on_your_playlists, 100)/100) + (0.05*least(favorites, 100)/100) + (0.05*least(reposts,100)/100)
These categories were all assigned an upper bound and normalized to democratize the distribution, with the weighting of the various components broken down as follows:
- Streams on your content = 75%
- Your Followers = 10%
- Favorites of your Playlists = 5%
- Number of Songs you Favorited = 5%
- Number of Songs you Reposted = 5%
We wanted to create a distribution that favored power users, both on the artist side uploading tracks and on the fan side actively engaging with content in the form of song saves, playlist saves, and reposts. This is why each parameter is capped at a ceiling value.
A breakdown of the exact $AUDIO distribution can be found here. Big shoutout to Uniswap for open-sourcing their elegant merkle distribution tweaked with love by the Audius team! 🦄
$AUDIO Distribution
For our token nerds out there, the ‘soon’ in ‘coming soon’ is here.
Audius is proud to present the genesis distribution of $AUDIO, consisting of a supply of 1B tokens at launch. Here’s a look at our circulating supply through July of 2026.
For the genesis distribution, the 1B $AUDIO minted at launch is approximately broken down as follows:
$AUDIOdrop: 55M AUDIO (5.5%)
Rewarded to past users of the Audius protocol and attendees of special events. $AUDIOdrop tokens are circulating at inception.
Foundation Treasury: 178M AUDIO (17.8%)
The Open Audio Foundation, a new entity formed to steward the long-term growth of Audius, was endowed with an allocation of the genesis supply for incentives and growth programs.
$AUDIOdrop tokens are the first way foundation tokens were used, continually acting as a reserve for the Audius community to allocate, distribute, and utilize as they see fit.
65M $AUDIO from the foundation will be circulating at inception for launch incentives. The remainder is subject to a five year unlock schedule starting on October 23rd, 2021.
Team & Advisors: 406M AUDIO (40.6%)
Reserved for Audius founders, employees, and strategic artists/advisors.
All team and advisor tokens are subject to three year unlock schedule with quarterly unlock events and a six-month cliff happening on April 23rd.
This bucket consists of roughly 80 individuals, including our key artists like deadmau5, 3LAU, and RAC.
Investors: 360M AUDIO (36%)
Allocated to investors who participated in Audius funding rounds, totaling $9M raised across a seed round and a strategic round.
Outside of the investors listed in our last funding article, we’re proud to welcome Binance Labs, Standard Crypto, Hack VC, and Free Co, all players bringing key insights and connections to help Audius cross the chasm.
All investors are subject to a two year unlock schedule with quarterly unlock events and a six-month cliff happening on April 23rd.
This distribution means no team, advisor or investor tokens will be in circulation until six months from launch. At inception, 120M $AUDIO will be in circulation.
The community is of utmost importance to Audius, and it’s important to emphasize that the genesis distribution allowed the protocol to achieve the milestones it has today. Audius has established a strong foundation for future sustainability, and it’s now time to decentralize ownership of the protocol to our users through ongoing issuance to value-added actors.
$AUDIO Issuance
Audius features a 7% genesis annual issuance rate, used to continually reward the protocol’s most active users, rather than simply allowing tokens to be hoarded by a few early adopters.
The topic of issuance is not one we take lightly, and one we encourage $AUDIO holders to discuss, challenge, and amend using our newly launched governance dashboard.
Issuance aims to always funneling tokens into the hands of the most value-added community members. Audius recognizes that those who are the most active on the platform today are likely not to be the same actors driving the platform in 5 or 10 years, meaning $AUDIO needs to be distributed in such a way that new users can always earn a voice.
The choice to start with issuance is a model that we believe is paramount to the ongoing democratization and decentralization of the world’s unstoppable streaming protocol. Issuance will originally be funneled to service providers who stake $AUDIO to secure the protocol, with the hope to increase issuance rates in line with new incentives and programmatic distribution for Audius users.
All elements of issuance can be modified and adjusted through $AUDIO governance, a discussion we’re keen to watch unfold among the Audius community.
$AUDIO Staking Migration
Service providers are now able to migrate their nodes from testnet to mainnet. This means all content now lives on a mainnet iteration of decentralized service providers, giving Audius the unstoppable foundation we’ve been battle testing for two years.
Given that the majority of the transition is expected to take roughly a week, Audius will originally host the first mainnet nodes as $AUDIO stakers get situated. Moving forward, the Audius founders and foundation will not participate in staking to ensure all issuance is funneled to service providers.
Those who stake $AUDIO have a higher probability of being used for discovery services, entitling them to a larger portion of issuance.
We’re extremely proud of our growing list of node operators, including Figment, Staked.us, Stake Capital, and more.
At this time we’d like to open our door to all those interested in staking. Please reach out to stakers@audius.co and someone from the Audius team will be in touch or read up on our staking resources!
Why Should I Care?
The launch of $AUDIO marks the first step in Audius truly being owned by its users.
As a token that can be staked for security, feature access, and governance, the multifaceted design of $AUDIO is meant to favor a variety of stakeholders, all unified through the common goal of driving value back to Audius.
The notion of a digital token is one that is brand new to many of our users, a challenge we welcome with open arms in terms of adoption, utility and value accrual as Audius demonstrated the ways in which web3 platforms empower their most valuable users.
Over the coming weeks, Audius will share a number of updates regarding the token, its extended support in the wider ecosystem, and plans to integrate new features that can only be accessed by staking $AUDIO.
Be on the lookout for more information about Audius genesis governance next week, including plans to showcase transparency and kickstart community involvement.
To be the first to hear about these updates with a growing community of audio visionaries, join the $AUDIOphile Discord.
We’d like to thank all of our artists for taking the time to make Audius a household name both in music and crypto circles, an intersection we believe is set to make big waves in a digital future.
Until then, turn up the $AUDIO and welcome to mainnet!
Follow Audius
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Note: $AUDIO have not been registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933 (“Securities Act”) and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to a U.S. person absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements.
