Ready to launch
A few weeks ago we set out to experiment with a fundraising model that’s never been tried before, which we hope will enable more decentralized ownership and governance of open-source protocols — called the fair launch. Today, we’re ready to announce the first project to pursue this path.
We put out a call for projects to see if we could demonstrate a new path that doesn’t require any sort of pre-sale or pre-mine and has a more fair distribution to community contributors. Critical to this experiment is a grant of no-strings attached resources that enable a project to get to launch, and a request that the project pay it forward to the next fair launch pioneers.
Our first fair launch project: Marqet
We’re excited to announce today that we have chosen Marqet as our first project. Emiliano and Simone are the perfect people to be our first fair launch founders, as they’re crypto natives who have been deeply involved in the community for many years, and they truly believe in the fair launch ethos. They are building net new financial infrastructure that is complementary to existing platforms and deserves to be community owned.
Marqet enables trustless margin trading of any synthetic asset with no slippage by combining AAVE credit delegation and Synthetix peer to contract exchange. Marqet will be a positive sum contributor to AAVE and Synthetix, increasing their TVL and creating symbiotic benefits for their respective token holders. Moreover Marqet will be owned and governed by the community.
How does fair launch capital work?
Fair launch capital (through our sponsors) provides no-strings-attached grants to enable projects to do a fair launch. Once the project is up and running, the team & community can decide to pay the grant forward to support another fair launch. We’ll provide more detail on this structure and some exciting developments over the coming weeks.
We’ve been working closely with both the Marqet team and our advisors to develop an economic system that works for everyone. We’ve been inspired by the DAICO structure and have borrowed elements from it and added a few new twists. Thanks to Andre and Stani, we have created a credit delegation vault that allows sponsors to contribute to a credit line for the team to support them through their launch.
We’re honored to have substantial sponsorship from our advisors who are at the forefront of fair launch and distribution design. Together with our sponsors and advisors, we will work with Emiliano and Simone to build the protocol, designing for fair distribution and effective governance. In doing so, we’ll not only help establish the fair launch, but sustainable economics around a community-owned protocol.
Our supporters and community
We are also building a solid community to support Marqet and all future fair launch projects, and that’s where you come in. We are committed to running this experiment as transparently as possible in collaboration with the greater fair launch community.
In the next few days, we’ll share more details about the Marqet fair launch and the principles that will guide us towards a more fair launch. If you’d like to get involved, your contributions are welcomed, whether as a builder, trader, sponsor or community member.
If you’re eager to get involved, please join our telegram group or send us a message. You can find out more about Marqet in their announcement here and follow them on twitter!
Thank you to our initial sponsors of Marqet
- Stani Kulechov / AAVE
- Kain Warwick / Synthetix
- Andre Cronje / Yearn Finance
- Demian Brener / OpenZeppelin
Thank you also to all of our advisors and community of supporters
