IVO — Rethinking Ways to Reward Early Users

After spending time with numerous early-stage projects and countless community users, we’ve come to a hard realization that giving out tokens directly to users can neither get projects faithful users they need, nor get users rewards they deserve. So, we’ve devised a whole new way to get tokens distributed — via Vesting Vouchers — and have reason to believe it can work.

Initial Voucher Offering (IVO) Explained

The Vesting Voucher is a revolutionary NFT structure that enables any project to form strong, organic relationships with the users — and vice versa.

We encourage all early-stage projects to use Vesting Vouchers to distribute (or sell) tokens as well as to build scalable networks of users. We call this type of token sale “Initial Voucher Offering” — or IVO for short.

The concept of the Vesting Voucher is based on two important realities. Firstly, native tokens are a crucial medium through which a crypto project can connect with the users in any real way. Secondly, the NFT as an asset carrier has a superior capability to store and express rich and specific information inside it. Vesting Vouchers bridges the two realities and thus makes it possible for anyone to lock native tokens into NFTs any time, in any way. In this process, spot tokens are converted to “vesting tokens.”

At the first glance, Vesting Vouchers might seem like a simple concept for token lockup, but as a tool in practice, it’s effective and neat, because a) literally zero coding is needed to use Vesting Vouchers for token lockups. That is to say, you don’t have to be tech-savvy to know how to lock tokens creatively (i.e. freely modifying How and When they shall be released). And b) Vesting Vouchers frees up liquidity for the token assets, all thanks to the incredible accessibility of the non-fungible tokens.

From a project’s perspective, adopting Vesting Vouchers means zero cost to implement rules for releasing tokens distributed to users. From users’ point of view, Vesting Vouchers is a low-cost, transparent, high-liquidity and decentralized solution to manage or get access to allocations. For both parties altogether, forming a strong project-user relationship built around cost-efficiency and flexibility has never been easier.

How Would IVO Help Solv Protocol Reward Early Users?

In today’s crypto world, attention is the scarce resource, and a plethora of new products emerging every day brings down the time and energy average users are willing to spend on each. (And understandably so.)

So, in order to get users to play the long game, teams should make sure their interest and the users’ are well aligned. The best way to do so? By using vesting tokens.

Take Solv’s IVO for example. On Monday, December 13 at 13:00 (UTC) our team is set to issue $SOLV allocations via Vesting Vouchers, which will start releasing tokens linearly over six months after the public sale launch (through either a DEX or CEX).

But here’s the twist. Not only is the exchange in TBD, Solv’s IVO also has a TBD date for the public sale! (Well, actually not really a TBD date since we’re sure it’ll happen no later Q3, 2022 or even at the end of this year.) The point here is that the Vesting Voucher allows projects to go ahead and set a preferred vesting period despite having a TBD starting date. Fair to say that nothing else gives a project this level of flexibility around vesting tokens.

Furthermore, we’re also going to give select 1500–3000 Whitelist winners an opportunity to purchase up to $400 worth of tokens via our platform. Coupled with accommodation for a TBD date, the advantage of the Vesting Voucher in bringing tremendous flexibility and a group of qualified early users to the issuing project is apparent.

For us, airdrop is far from the only good approach to reward early users. In fact, the key to forming a robust network of early users is to make sure they are getting a far greater deal in the IVO than would the institutional investors from private rounds.

Here at Solv, we believe in giving retail investors an opportunity to fund early-stage projects: between private rounds (mostly targeting strategic investors) and the IDO (targeting the public), there should be a niche financing solution designed to serve retail investors that don’t fall into either group.

Solv Protocol is dedicated to openness and freedom in building an infrastructure based on the use of Vesting Vouchers. We believe that such an infrastructure will not only help projects form strong networks of users, but will also help retail investors take part in funding projects that have yet to reach significant valuation.

We look forward to the IVO becoming the cornerstone for strong and long-lasting project-user relationships, and we hope that for both parties, the IVO will be a win-win.

We’re about to take the show on the road — care to stick around for a bit? :)