Introducing a New Lottery System and Holding Requirements for Guaranteed Presale Allocations

Published in

FerrumNetwork

8 min readMar 11, 2021

Dear Ferrum Community,

While Ferrum’s presale allocation system clearly stands out in the market — with guaranteed minimum allocations and a stress-free, inclusive process for FRM holders — we are always looking for ways to improve and benefit our community.

Therefore, we have decided to introduce a new lottery system for our smaller holders, while also introducing a small FRMx holding requirement for our larger holders.

Introduction

One issue we are constantly facing is how to balance the interests of the larger FRM investors with the smaller FRM investors, especially in the face of an ever increasing FRM valuation.

Therefore, in order to satisfy the interests of the smaller FRM holders while also satisfying our larger holders, we are introducing a new lottery system, which will allow our smaller investors a significantly increased chance of participating in the private sales of our FAS incubated projects.

At the same time, to ensure that our private sale allocations are reserved for only our strongest and most loyal community members, we will be introducing a small FRMx holding requirement for all those who hold 50,000+ FRM.

Finally, we will be providing 25,000 FRM holders guaranteed allocations on selected pre-sales (e.g. Netvrk).

Brief Overview of the Updates

As detailed in this article, we are implementing the following upgrades that will come into effect for future presales:

For smaller holders with at least 1,000 FRM but less than 50,000 FRM on their UniFyre wallet we introduce a new lottery system to win presale allocations. Each 1,000 FRM represents one lottery ticket — hence the more tokens you hold the higher the likelihood to win;
For selected presales, also holders with at least 25,000 FRM will get guaranteed allocations — e.g. for the upcoming NetVRk presale;
Holders with 50,000 FRM+ will soon need to hold a small amount of FRMx in order to qualify for guaranteed allocations. This amount will initially be 0.1 FRMx, and is likely to increase in small steps after every few successful presales.

All of these changes will go into effect after BSCView, but will be in place for Netvrk. We believe that these changes are in the best interest of the overall Ferrum ecosystem and our community. Let’s explore each one further.

Introducing the Lottery Tier for Smaller FRM Holders

While the constraint of limited allocations makes it impossible to offer guaranteed allocations to all Ferrum holders, we also want to give smaller holders and new investors the POSSIBILITY to gain access to our highly attractive presale opportunities. Previously people were required to hold at least 25,000 FRM in order to have a chance to participate in Ferrum presales….This threshold is now significantly reduced to 1,000 FRM.

How the New Lottery System Works:

All holders with 1,000 to 49,000 FRM in their UniFyre wallet qualify for the participation in a lottery that we will have for each presale. Holding FRMx is NOT required to qualify for the lottery
Qualifying holders will be sent a pledge form to their e-mail address (the one connected to their UniFyre wallet) and will have to pledge in order to participate in the lottery
Each 1,000 FRM will act as one lottery ticket and increase the likelihood of winning an allocation. So a holder of 5,000 FRM would get 5 lottery tickets, whereas a holder of 10,000 FRM would get 10 lottery tickets
Each lottery participant can only have one winning lottery ticket
Lottery winners get a presale allocation of AT LEAST $125 — this amount can be higher on a case by case basis.

We believe this new model is inclusive to our smaller holders, while still being completely fair. If you hold 30,000 FRM your likelihood to win an allocation is 3 times higher compared to someone holding 10,000 FRM.

Holders with 50,000+ FRM who do not hold any FRMx and therefore do not get a guaranteed allocation will be given the maximum possible amount of lottery tickets (49) and hence have a high likelihood to get an allocation via the lottery.

Introducing FRMx Requirement for Future Guaranteed FAS Presale Allocations

Historically, in orde to obtain guaranteed allocations in our FAS presales, one only needed to hold 50,000 FRM in their UniFyre Wallet as of the time of the snapshot. Except for UREEQA, It had not been necessary to also hold FRMx (although holding FRMx has increased holders’ presale allocations).

After extensive discussions, the Ferrum Governance Committee has voted that for FUTURE presale snapshots, in addition to holding 50,000+ FRM, it will also be required to hold at least 0.1 FRMx in a Unifyre Wallet in order to qualify for guaranteed presale allocations. This is all in service of ensuring our ability to provide a GUARANTEED allocation.

Why the Update

Looking at current industry norms, it is disappointing when a lottery system results in no allocation for a desired presale. We believe that our positioning of guaranteed allocations is a better system design and one that differentiates Ferrum’s positioning in the market.

At the same time, we want to be as inclusive as possible and also give holders of lower FRM amounts an opportunity to benefit from Ferrum’s attractive presale opportunities. Therefore, we have also introduced a new attractive lottery system for holders between 1,000 to 49,000 FRM (details above) where no FRMx is required.

The implementation of these changes will take place AFTER the launch of BSCView.

Here is further context on how we arrived at this important decision:

Preserving the Long-term Sustainability of the Ferrum Ecosystem

One of the key responsibilities of the Ferrum Governance Committee is ensuring the sustainability of the whole Ferrum ecosystem. For this ecosystem FRMx plays an important role and we consider it critical to ensure that FRMx will always remain like an American Express Black Card for Ferrum holders: very rare, very valuable and very useful.

To preserve the value of FRMx despite a (very) slow increase of the circulating supply because of monthly FRMx rewards and the unlocking of FRMx staking rewards we have always communicated that we would be actively adding new FRMx utilities. Adding FRMx as holding requirement for future FAS presales significantly increases the value of FRMx and incentivizes people to hold rather than sell their FRMx

Ensuring the Exclusivity of Ferrum Advisory Services Presale Access

To our knowledge Ferrum is the only incubator that is offering GUARANTEED access to presale allocations. We strongly believe that this process without the downside of the usual first-come-first-serve element is the most stress-free and fairest.

Understandably we cannot offer limitless guaranteed allocations, especially if we do not want to decrease the guaranteed allocation amount ($500 for people holding 100k FRM; higher allocations for people with higher tiers). While we therefore need to ensure a certain level of exclusivity for our presales, we expect the good problem of significantly increasing demand for FAS presales in the near term future:

The Ferrum-supported projects that are about to launch are doing extremely well and we expect that Ferrum presale participants will be able to realize significant profits — this will draw additional attention to Ferrum;
We have lined up a number of highly attractive presale opportunities that will be announced over the next few weeks and that definitely will attract even more new investors;
We are continuously increasing our services offered to FAS-supported projects, such as our new proprietary Fair Launch Protection System that protects projects from bad actors who utilize bot technology to dump huge amounts of unfairly sniped tokens. These additional services further increase the attractiveness of FAS for new projects and we are already experiencing an overwhelming demand of highly promising projects for our FAS support; and
We are continuously increasing our reach by building partnerships with prominent launchpads like Poolz and BSCPad and also offering presales for non-ERC20 blockchains.

In the context of this growing demand and considering the fact that projects selected by us typically have a very low initial market cap we need to ensure there is a certain level of exclusivity for Ferrum presales.

Please note: Holders with 50,000+ FRM who do not hold FRMx at future snapshots will be included in the lottery, but will no longer get guaranteed allocations.

Moreover, holding additional FRMx will still increase your allocation amount in accordance with the existing pre-sale access system.

Required FRMx Amount Expected to Increase Over Time

The introduction of an additional FRMx threshold helps to preserve the exclusivity of FAS presale access and we believe is in the best interest of the entire Ferrum community long term. We are convinced that all of the current Ferrum holders are still very early and we expect that just investing a small portion of the profits from the upcoming launches of FAS-supported projects will easily enable you to acquire the required FRMx (we also know that many of our community members already hold FRMx via the initial FRMx community airdrop).

Please note that after every few successful FAS-supported presales, the FRMx amount required for guaranteed access is likely to be increased step-by-step (typically in steps of 0.1 FRMx). We will communicate these steps in advance. We believe that Ferrum community members should be able to comfortably reinvest a reasonable amount of their profits into FRMx in order to secure their access to future guaranteed allocations, which in turn can generate more profit.

What’s Next

Next week we will be announcing the next FAS incubation…it’s a good one! Keep a close eye on the Ferrum announcement channel in the next days to stay up to date.

Thank You

Thank you to our community and governance committee for continuously pushing us to evolve and improve! We are thrilled to be on this amazing journey with you!

Very truly yours,

The Ferrum Network Team

About Ferrum Network

Ferrum Network is building a DeFi ecosystem that interoperates across chains and removes barriers to mass adoption. Founded in the 2018 bear market, it has grown into a DeFi powerhouse with four working products, over 20,000 active users, 50+ clients using its staking technology, 20+ million TVL on its staking protocol, a successful incubator/advisory arm, 8 FRM utilities, and much more. Ferrum’s forthcoming cross-chain DAG will enable the transfer of any digital asset in milliseconds for near-zero network fees. Its non-custodial UniFyre Wallet has revolutionized the way people send crypto with its “Link Drop” technology. Ferrum’s Staking-as-a-Service is used by over 50 projects and their Token Bridge is the fastest, and most secure means of moving assets between Ethereum and Binance Chain. Look for Ferrum to launch more transformative DeFi technology throughout 2021 and beyond.