What is XEN?

Published in

The Poloniex blog

4 min readOct 19, 2022

TL;DR

The crypto space has been exploding with news about XEN, a project that operates with the original intention set out by the Satoshi whitepaper. With tokenomics that incentivize community growth and adoption, as well as preclude whale accumulation, overbuying, and pre-minting, XEN has seen a huge boost in popularity, so let’s take a look at what it is, and what makes it tick.

What is XEN?

XEN is an ERC-20 token built on Ethereum. Founded by Jack Levin, creator of ImageShack and Nventify and a former early engineer at Google, XEN is operating with a mission to cultivate a like-minded community of developers through a token with unique tokenomics. That is, the project wants to get back to the original mission of Bitcoin to give people access to a decentralized, self-custodial, and censorship resistant crypto that is fully open source and community-first. Everyone has an equal opportunity to become a XEN minter and holder.

The project is very much dedicated to the idea of decentralization within crypto. This means that owners of XEN are their own custodians. it is also an open-source smart contract that isn’t owned by anyone. Moreover, one of the unique aspects of XEN is the fact that it is a token that is minted for free. All a prospective user needs to do is connect an Ethereum compatible wallet to the XEN smart contract.

How does XEN work?

Let’s start with the problem that XEN seeks to solve. According to the XEN litepaper, popular cryptocurrencies are overbought and lesser-known ones suffer from pre-mining and whale accumulation. This is why XEN has designed its tokenomics such that the token’s value is derived from community participation and use.

And it’s easy to join the community as well. All someone needs to do to mint XEN is connect their Ethereum compatible wallet to the XEN smart contract. So a wallet like MetaMask and ETH to pay gas fees is all someone would need to get started.

Tokenomics

So, we mentioned that one of the attributes that sets XEN apart is its unique tokenomics. Let’s dive into what that looks like:

The main thing that we should start off with is the fact that the token is free in that participants don’t need to deposit anything to start minting. Furthermore, XEN starts with zero supply and has no supply cap. Because of its minting formula, the token will become less inflationary overtime as adoption increases.

Like Bitcoin, the $XEN token has no intrinsic value. That is, the community surrounding it and using it as a medium of exchange on the XEN smart contract platform will be what gives it its value.

When a user connects their wallet to the XEN smart contract, they define the amount of time that passes before they actually receive their tokens. The longer the time period, the more tokens they receive. Minters are also assigned a XEN rank (cRank) which is based on the number of people that have interacted with the XEN smart contract before them. What this means is that someone who wants to mint and receive more tokens would be incentivized to tell others about the project and have them link their wallets. These parameters are used with a formula to calculate how much XEN one is to receive.

Free Mint

Until the network reaches 5,000 users, XEN has a Free Mint function, which sets the maximum term of claiming XEN at 100 days. Afterwards, and as more participants join, the tokenomics are designed such that it will get harder to mint tokens, and the maximum wait time will increase accordingly.

Penalties

There are penalties in place to disincentivize users from waiting to withdraw their tokens after the waiting period is over. This is meant to imbue the minting process with a sense of responsibility.

Proof of participation (PoP)

According to the project’s litepaper, it is neither proof of stake nor proof of work that secures the platform. Rather, XEN functions on proof of participation, which means that participants in the ecosystem have full ownership through self custody.

What can you do with $XEN?

XEN is an ERC-20 token, and as the project’s litepaper states, the crypto is merely meant to be used as a medium of exchange, much like Bitcoin. So you can trade it, stake it, or use it to buy various things like NFTs.