No CEX on the First Date: Unwrapping the $AUKI Token Launch Strategy
In this post, I will explain our staggered launch strategy. We launch on Uniswap first, followed shortly thereafter by CEX listings. The first CEX listing is in the first week of September.
My observation: You have to focus all your energy on building organic demand and community for the token’s underlying utility. Focusing on empty hype instead of building is a slow form of rugging.
That’s right. Focusing your energy and resources on hyping the token instead of spending all your efforts on creating healthy, sustainable demand for the underlying utility is not only a serious strategic mistake but also a moral failing.
The previous bullrun was devastating for the largest-ever wave of newcomers to crypto. Billions of dollars moved from millions of newcomers to a few thousand whales. The result of this massive upward wealth transfer is obvious when you look at who is trading on the exchanges today. Two-thirds of trading volume on Binance is done by whale accounts that trade over 100m USD per month.
That’s not retail. That’s not a bullrun. It’s the insiders of the last hype cycle looking to draw you in with egregious amounts of wash trading. We need to do better as a community and a movement if we want decentralization to win.
Tokenomics advisor AGC explained some of the current shortcomings of the crypto meta in this excellent thread:
Something has to change. Something has to give. If you ever find yourself in a situation where there is leadership lacking, I believe that’s your calling and opportunity. Be that change. Be that leader.
Here are my rules for a healthy crypto relationship:
Rule 1: No CEX on the first date.
CEXes are not what they used to be, because they lost the audience that made them famous — but retain the audience that keeps them rich. Today, they try to ask for exorbitant fees for any project that can’t demonstrate that they’re willing to lead new suckers to the slaughter.
The decision to launch on a DEX first has already made it cheaper for us to launch on subsequent CEXes, as they have come back with better listing offers now that the chips are down.
We will launch on CEXes, but on terms that are good for the project and the community. We have already saved at least $200,000 USD by standing our ground, and that is money that we can now spend on building the project and the community instead.
Rule 2: Don’t blow your load too early.
Narratives move markets more than anything else. Projects take time to build, to gain traction, and to manifest great change in the world. They need a community and healthy support throughout that entire journey.
Not blowing your load too early means not focusing all of your efforts on a dangerous hype bubble that can exhaust and financially devastate the very community you’re trying to build.
A unique thing about our project is that every single backer is on daily linear vesting, with 1–4 years of vesting depending on their level of contribution. No one has day 1 unlocks. The team itself, myself included, has four years of vesting and a six-month cliff. The team and the early backers have very strong incentives to make sure this project is healthy for many years, and have no opportunity to dump on our community. We’re in it together, for the long run.
Rule 3: Get naked and expose yourself.
Building a healthy relationship with your community means being transparent, available and accountable. That’s why we build in public, why all of us are fully doxxed, and why we respond to everyone who comes to us. We’re proud and thankful for our core community that has been with us in the trenches for many years. These are the seeds of a world-changing project.
Rule 4: Everyone gets a turn.
TGE is just another day in the week. We’ll continue building for many more years, and listing on many more exchanges, meaning you’re still early. Our goal is to eventually be traded everywhere, and for our protocol to utterly win its category. We believe that a decentralized machine perception network like the posemesh will be the biggest DePIN ever — and that DePIN is the biggest opportunity in crypto to date.
If anything will ever take the throne from Bitcoin, it will be a decentralized machine perception network. People that find out about the posemesh a year from now will still be early. Our staggered launch approach makes it easier to sustainably build a world-changing community.
Rule 5: Choose your partners wisely.
The crypto world is full of meaningless partnerships purely designed to create artificial hype. The dirty secret is that insiders push projects to exchange audiences with each other, to quickly build exit liquidity.
When we partner with a project, it’s because we believe we can build something meaningful together. We’ve already terminated partnerships with projects we felt were not sincere about building, and don’t refer our community to projects we suspect to be rugs just for the cheap win of more eyeballs.
We have several exciting partnership announcements coming up with projects that are true builders, and where the integration of our technologies will create meaningful innovation and traction. Watch this space.
Rule 6: Exchange liquids with your partners.
We are in the process of putting together an alliance of DePIN projects that build together and support each other. We recognize that many projects are in a good position to help each other, and by exchanging grants and liquid tokens with each other, we create a healthier DePIN economy and faster technological progress. The decentralization movement wins when it cooperates, and we are already showing in many ways that we can beat the Web2 giants that broke the internet. If you haven’t already, listen to the inspiring testimony of these DePIN projects: The DePIN Decade
Our Strategy: Deflation and Community Rewards
As we observed in our tokenomics explainer video, we believe it is incredibly important to disproportionately reward your early adopters. We’ll be deploying an enormous chunk of the total supply of the token to the early community members, while the constant deflationary burn of the posemesh tokenomics continuously benefits those that continue to hold.
Deflationary economics are very powerful -and if you want to see billion dollar burns, you have to solve billion dollar problems. That’s why we have spent years in R&D to build a technology that some of the wealthiest organizations in the world are now clamoring to integrate into the very core of their businesses.
Together, we have created a DePIN for AI perception, and it is already starting to rock the world.
Investing in the Future
Now that the token is going live, we’ll also start a grant program to help attract even more builders. Over 600 organizations have signed up to build on the posemesh already, and if we support these builders now, it won’t be long before we see amazing new use cases driving even more demand and even more deflation.
This is a community effort. We are gathering here to build and deploy civilization-scale infrastructure funded, owned and operated by the people. This is how we win.
About Auki Labs
Auki is building the posemesh, a decentralized machine perception network for the next 100 billion people, devices and AI on Earth and beyond. The posemesh is an external and collaborative sense of space that machines and AI can use to understand the physical world.
Our mission is to improve civilization’s intercognitive capacity; our ability to think, experience and solve problems together with each other and AI. The greatest way to extend human reach is to collaborate with others. We are building consciousness-expanding technology to reduce the friction of communication and bridge minds.
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About The Posemesh
The posemesh is an open-source protocol that powers a decentralized, blockchain-based spatial computing network.
The posemesh is designed for a future where spatial computing is both collaborative and privacy-preserving. It limits any organization’s surveillance capabilities and encourages sovereign ownership of private maps of personal and public spaces.
The decentralization also offers a competitive advantage, especially in shared spatial computing sessions, AR for example, where low latency is crucial. The posemesh is the next step in the decentralization movement, responding as an antidote to the growing power of big tech.
The Posemesh Foundation has tasked Auki Labs with developing the software infrastructure of the posemesh.
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Originally published on posemesh.org