🔮The Prophets of Babylon (NFTs)
Babylon is a community-led asset management protocol that enables users to create investment clubs (we call them gardens) and invest in DeFi together. It’s built on the Ethereum network and it’s non-custodial, transparent, permission-less, and governed by the community. BABL is the governance token behind it.
Last week, the BABL mining program was approved and activated. That means that Babylon beta users have started earning governance tokens based on their contributions to the protocol.
Today, we want to propose an NFT drop that doubles as an IDO. This proposal is intended to reward beta users, bootstrap BABL liquidity, raise money for the treasury, and finally, as a call to arms to attract more settlers to Babylon.
If the proposal is passed, this will be the first time a DeFi protocol uses NFTs for this purpose.
We’re calling the NFTs The Prophets of Babylon.
🔮 The Prophets are coming…
The Prophets are rare and crazy pieces of art in their own right, uniquely generated by combining 40+layers. The Prophets are coming to Babylon in November (15th-19th), in preparation for the protocol’s public release.
The Prophets are a limited collection of 10,000 unique, randomly generated NFTs. The arrival event will enable the protocol to:
- 🏛️ Raise money for the treasury. 100% of the proceeds will go to the treasury. The team will donate The Prophets to the treasury before the event. Token holders decide how the treasury capital can be effectively deployed to ensure the long-term sustainability of the protocol and BABL. The amount of value of the treasury also serves as a foundation to value the governance token.
- 💰 Provide Liquidity for BABL. After the arrival of The Prophets, the treasury will have enough capital to potentially bootstrap a liquidity pool on Uniswap/Sushiswap if the holders propose and approve it.
- ⛺ Reward early settlers. The users that have deposited in Babylon before October 16th will be able to mint a unique Prophet each for free.
- 📰 Reach a wider audience. The Prophets will spread Arkad’s teachings of Babylon around the web and social media landscape ahead of the public launch.
NFTs + DeFi
Unlike other NFT projects with only roadmaps and promises, Babylon is a DeFi protocol that is already live. Babylon grew 400% last month in terms of TVL, reaching $9M. These Prophets provide tangible benefits in the protocol right away.
The Prophets come bearing gifts 🎁 that provide actual utility within the Babylon ecosystem.
First of all, they come with 70,000 BABL tokens split across the 10k NFTs. Each prophet provides the owner the right to claim a valuable piece of Babylon through different amounts of BABL governance tokens. (Note: Claiming BABL is not available for people located in the US).
Secondly, they provide immediate access to the private beta 🎟️. The prophets will grant you one month of exclusive access along with the other beta users to the highest quarter of mining rewards (~53K BABL). The BABL mining program lasts for 10 years and the rewards curve slowly decreases, the Prophet ensures that you get at least two months of the first quarter, which is the highest in emissions.
In addition, some of the prophets come with unique attributes that provide you with boosts and benefits when participating in Babylon. Prophets can be staked into gardens and this will grant the owner rewards as a garden creator, strategist, voter, or LP. These attributes will be coded on-chain to foster composability similar to Loot items.
Finally, the Prophets can be used as your Babylon citizen ID. You can use it as a way to prove your membership and also as your digital avatar within Babylon or anywhere else.
🖼️ Prophets
There are two kinds of Prophets. They all come with the gift of BABL. After their arrival, these prophets will leave Babylon and spread the teachings to every corner of the world.
Prophets 🔮
- Supply: Elastic up to 8,000.
- Price: Fixed at 0.25 ETH. The first 300 will be claimable for free by early beta users.
- BABL Loot: Fixed at 5 BABL per Prophet. (40k total)
- Bonus: 1% LP Bonus.
Great Prophets 👑
- Supply: 1,000.
- Price: Auction-based. Starting prices range from 0.35 ETH — 50 ETH.
- BABL Loot: 7–1000 BABL each (30k total)
- Bonuses: 1–5% LP Bonus, 0–3% Voter Bonus, 0–3%, Strategist Bonus and 0–3% Creator Bonus.
Note: 1,000 legendary prophets will be reserved for future use by the protocol. The treasury, through governance, will have the ability to award them over the next years to contributors through different community-led initiatives.
Arrival Mechanics
Babylon is not isolated. Babylon exists within the Ethereum ecosystem. Babylon is just one of many protocols, and as such, we believe being a good citizen means preventing gas wars and server congestion on the network. Vitalik has a good post explaining the problems with NFT events.
We are using a “Dual Prophet” system to achieve a balance between a fair and wide distribution and clearing at or close to near-market prices.
Prophets 🔮
In order to ensure a fair price and a wide distribution, we are limiting the number of prophets a person can buy to just one.
To prevent gas wars and network congestion towards the end of the event, we will give access to these Prophets in batches. Only users that have been whitelisted and proved they are humans can participate.
Successful entries will be sorted based on the timestamp of the verification. Upon verification, users will be able to tweet about the event to bump their position on the list. Existing Babylon beta users will have priority access.
Great Prophets 👑
In order to maximize price discovery, the great prophets will be auction-based. They don’t have a per-person limit.
To avoid gas wars, the great prophets sale will use an off-chain auction. Signatures will be used to represent and store the user bids.
We’ll use a Vickrey auction. A second-price or Vickrey auction is a sealed-bid auction in which the highest bidder wins and pays a price equal to the second-highest bid. You only pay enough to beat the second person, which provides strong performance guarantees and promotes people to truthfully bid their value.
In simpler terms:
- The 1,000 great prophets will be sorted by their floor price.
- Every person can submit multiple bids. You cannot see what amount other people bid.
- A bid needs to be above the floor price of a great prophet to qualify for it.
- A specific bid qualifies you for all the great prophets whose floor price is below your bid.
- Once the event ends, all bids will be disclosed. The top 1,000 bids will receive the 1,000 great prophets*
*Note: In reality, things are a bit more complicated. After sorting the bids, it is possible although not likely that there are no bids above the floor price of some great prophets, leaving them unclaimed.
Coming soon
The Prophets Arrival is scheduled for November 15th — November 19th.
📅 Add the event to your calendar.
If you want to mint a prophet, please visit the site and follow the steps to reserve a spot.
If you want to bid for a Great Prophet, sign up for updates and stay tuned.
If you haven’t had a chance to use Babylon yet, please join the waitlist to request access to our private Beta and help us build a better way for communities to invest in DeFi together.️
Join our Discord to stay up to date with the event and head to our governance channel in Discord to discuss the proposal with the community.
We’ll release more details on the landing page and the source code in the next couple of weeks.
The prophets are coming…🔮
Disclaimers
By purchasing the Prophet NFTs, you acknowledge that you are purchasing the NFT for the collectibility and/or the utility the NFT provides on the Babylon Finance platform. You acknowledge that the NFTs may decrease in value or lose their value entirely. This communication does not constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security or financial instrument. The Prophet NFTs are sold “as is,” and we make no warranties, expressed or implied, of any kind. You are advised to seek your own legal and tax advice prior to purchasing a Prophet NFT.
