The MEAN Token Launch & IDO
NOTE: The Mean Token Launch was delayed 7 days. Please read the updated announcements with the new dates here
We have a loaded update for you all. The good kind of loaded.
TL;DR
- The MEAN IDO will go live on Dec. 15th at 13:00 UTC. We’ll auction up to 10 million MEAN tokens (4.76% of our total supply).
- We are doing something special, new, and exciting, and the community is at the center of it all. It’s a mix of a Mango-style + Fair Auction + Launchpad. We are calling it a Mean Launch.
- Mean Launch is a community-focused launch that disincentivizes whales and bots from playing in the IDO game. They suck the fun out of the process anyway and nobody likes them.
Humble Beginnings
Since launching MeanFi on Solana Mainnet on Sep. 17th, we have seen nothing short of extraordinary growth, support, and engagement from all sides of the ecosystem. Let’s summarize where we are today as we start the last month of 2021:
- We have amazing top-tier investors deeply connected across the TradFi and Crypto universes, including SoftBank, Three Arrows Capital, DeFiance Capital, and SkyVision Capital.
- Our community is now over 90k members across Twitter and Discord. We also have 1,000+ DAO members on our merit and reputation system, putting their talents to work every day to make us better and stronger.
- We now service over 60k accounts on MeanFi and just passed $1 billion in transaction volume. Our reach continues to grow daily at an unprecedented rate.
- Our partnership circle keeps expanding, and beyond the amazing collaborations we have with top projects like Grape, Solrise, Port, Solanium, and Synthetify, many new and exciting ones are joining the #MeanLife, such as Jupiter, UXD, Parrot, and Marinade.
- Mean Protocol’s vision to make Money Streams a cross-chain interoperability layer for protocols has captivated the attention of an entire ecosystem. We have closed over 18 partnerships with other projects that cannot wait to be part of a future powered by Money Streams with many already deep in the integration process.
The MEAN IDO
We are doing something special for our IDO, with a lot of “first seen here” kinds of things. We are calling it a “Mean Launch”, and it’s a Community-First IDO approach that takes the best parts of a launchpad, a Mango-style contract, and an LBP fair auction, and throws away the bad parts.
It is a 48-hour event that maximizes transparency, price discovery, participation, and fair distribution of the token through the use of money streams and game theory to promote extreme community incentive alignment.
The MEAN IDO will be live at https://ido.meanfi.com, and up to 10,000,000 (4.76%) of MEAN’s total supply of 210,000,000 will be set aside for the event. 10% of the IDO proceeds will go to provide liquidity on the market after the IDO ends, and 20% to fund the operating treasury for development. The remaining 70% will go back to the Community Treasury which will continue to give life to Mean DAO’s products for years to come. As you probably already noticed, these splits correlate exactly with our community-focused tokenomics.
There are a lot of things happening around the MEAN Launch: a Solanium Launchpad, our IDO Portal, listing on Serum, Orca, Raydium, and Gate.io, and liquidity and farming rewards. Here’s a timeline that will make these easier to follow:
The final times for activities may change a little as we synchronize calendars with our launch partners, but not by much. Please follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.
A Whole New Way to Launch
There are many ways to launch a token like launchpads, fair auctions, and liquidity bootstrapping pools (LBPs). Each approach has built on the previous record of things that worked well and things that didn’t. We are doing another iteration of this cycle with our Mean Launch by picking the best parts of the previous giants that got us this far. We hope our analysis and efforts set an example for future projects on how to do a token launch with a community-first approach.
Process & Transparency
Mean Launch is governed by a smart contract that guides the process in a fully permissionless, self-custody, and trustless way. There are no admins behind the scenes touching knobs, just the participant and the contract interacting with one another. The Mean Launch IDO contract is open source, and you’ll be able to inspect it and see how the rules are set for everyone, just like the Mango Markets IDO contract.
Price Discovery
This was a tricky one, and we borrowed some things from the Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools and Copper’s Token Launch Fair Auction and put those ideas into our own price discovery bonding curve. It starts high and always goes down on an inverse correlation function, so people can invest when they feel the price is right for them.
Preventing Runaway Valuations
Runaway valuations happen when the demand for the Token is extremely high during the IDO phase, causing the fully diluted valuation to go so high that it can only come down in the subsequent months. This usually brings along a level of discomfort from the community and people that participated in the IDO, because they are now holding a token that can potentially come down in price a lot before it reaches a stable point.
This is not always the case — if the project launching the token has a consistent roadmap (like Mango Markets) and continues to execute well on their vision, there’s always more growth ahead for the value to keep going up. But market conditions and the future, in general, are unknown, and it is hard for most projects to sustain a continuous hype at the level of the token launch.
This is why we think the traditional launchpad approach here wins hands down. By setting up a ceiling (max cap) of how high the total valuation of the company can go, we are ensuring that we don’t sell more tokens than what the market is willing to buy, and we can keep the price discovery open while protecting participants from a super high valuation since it is now capped.
Fair Participation
Just like Mango Markets, the Mean Launch is an open event spanning 48 hours. We score ourselves a 4 and not a 5 because, unlike auction styles that can grow infinitely, having a valuation cap and protecting the token, also means that we cannot let an unlimited number of people invest in MEAN through the IDO. Once the valuation cap is hit, all other participants join a waitlist that will backfill any of the people from the guaranteed allocation that change their minds in the 48-hour window.
Another special thing we have on the participation side is our Maximum Contribution Bonding Curve. This curve limits the max amount anyone can put up at any moment in time. Investing early means you can invest more while waiting till the end means you’ll be very limited in your contribution amount.
Fair Distribution
When you think about the token distribution of different projects and platforms, the most important aspect is whether their tokens are unlocked or vested. It is useful to unlock tokens when you want to optimize for trading volume and movement (hello👋 meme tokens). It is more useful to leverage vesting schedules when you want to make sure incentives are aligned between your token holders and the project, like those tokens for the Team and the Investors.
One of the core pieces of Mean Protocol is the Money Streams. They are amazing for payroll, treasury management, and token distribution (aka vesting). Vesting also aligns investors with the project with a long-term view, and it goes without saying that we want investors and a community that thinks about Mean DAO with a long-term view. For this reason, 100% of our initial distribution is going to be a vested distribution that leverages our own Money Streaming contracts.
Mean Launch: Community First
This is a big step forward and we hope to set an example for future projects on how to protect the community during a token launch. By putting these guardrails on pricing and valuation, we make sure the token has room to grow post-IDO, therefore making our community happy.
We wrote this article to share the methodical approach we took to make our decisions and the idea behind Mean Launch. As always, this is not financial advice; please do your own research.
There will be a video explaining how everything works so you can visualize your options. It’ll be live on the launch portal in the next couple of days and throughout the main event.
The portal is live now at https://ido.meanfi.com.
Get Involved
These are exciting times, our roadmap is coming to life, and as we drive into our larger vision of becoming the bridge that brings the next billion people into DeFi, we cannot think of a better future around Mean DAO than to see our community enjoying the benefits of a healthy MEAN token ecosystem.
Stay in touch with our progress every week, and join the DeFi revolution by checking our website, joining the Mean DAO Discord, and following @MeanFinance on Twitter.
