WEN $NEXT — Token Launch Update
Given recent market conditions and volatility, we have decided to delay our token distribution temporarily. Below you’ll find the reasons behind this decision and the next steps we are putting in place to transition Connext into a DAO as soon as possible.
In late April, we announced plans to launch $NEXT, a network utility and governance token, in addition to our intent to transition to a DAO — decentralizing the majority of our operations.
Since that time, market conditions have shifted dramatically, bringing heightened volatility and an exodus of many smaller holders throughout the space. Historically, launching a token in this type of market has had a centralizing effect on ownership, with a disproportionate number of tokens being accumulated by large holders after the distribution versus ending up in the hands of the long-term supporters and contributors of a project. This outcome is not what we want for $NEXT and sharply contrasts with our vision of Connext as public infrastructure.
After careful consideration and lengthy conversations with leaders throughout the space, we have decided to temporarily delay the launch of the $NEXT token while we wait for conditions to stabilize and research a distribution structure that better targets supporters and our community. Our goal is to finalize details and distribute by early fall. We plan to share the outcome of our distribution research and updated launch details of the token as soon as possible.
During this short delay, our core contributors will prioritize our engineering and community efforts toward the upcoming launch of Amarok, a major upgrade to the Connext network that will allow developers to build trust-minimized cross-chain apps.
For those of you that are unfamiliar, the Amarok upgrade is a fundamental paradigm shift for bridges and cross-chain development, enabling fast, secure, generalized communication between chains.
For users, the Amarok upgrade makes Connext cheaper, faster, and significantly more reliable. For developers, the upgrade drastically simplifies integration into Connext and exposes a new solidity primitive, xcall: a low-level function to create JS-style promises and callbacks across chains/L2s. We are already working with a number of prominent projects to demonstrate the power of the new upgrade — more on this soon!
We hope for the public launch to be an exciting moment for our community, and we are planning some fun xchain activities to explore and discover the new Connext.
As we work through the network upgrade and move towards the $NEXT distribution, we sincerely hope that you will join the conversation and share your feedback either through our Discord or Community Calls.
We want Connext and web3 to be for everyone. Thanks for joining us on our journey to make that happen.
About Connext
Connext is a network for fast, trustless communication between chains and rollups. It is the only interoperability system of its type that does this cheaply and quickly without introducing any new trust assumptions. Connext is aimed at developers who are looking to build bridges and other natively cross-chain applications. To date, over $1.5b in transactions have crossed the network.
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