What is xFUND? And how to participate in the ecosystem

Published in

Unification Foundation

4 min readOct 6, 2020

As the industry moves forward in a “DeFi” revolution, there exists a clear synergy between on and off-chain tasks

On-chain governance can be described as things that “need to be done on the computer” — i.e. things that validators can vote on like blocksize, upgrades etcetera. All the things that we herald as “decentralized”.

Whereas the reality is that for every decentralized task voted by the community, there is typically a “centralized” group of people putting these things together and running the thousands of other tasks that are required to keep a native blockchain running smoothly.

So, who are these people and to whom are they accountable? Well if we had a typical corporate structure we would call the “overseers” the Board of Directors. The ones that can hire and fire the C-Levels and give them tasks, direction and high level policy to follow.

So when we say, “off-chain governance”, this is what we mean… The power to do any and all things within the Unification ecosystem that is not explicitly covered by on-chain voting. These things can include grant proposals, approval of partnerships, hiring and firing C-Levels and how to allocate company treasury.

All things critical to an org, but requiring “human implementation” rather than strict on-chain commands.

By the launch of xFUND, we have created an ecosystem where we seek to systematize and make perpetual — through a dual token system — an ongoing quorum through on and off-chain governance.

How xFUND Works

Simply put, xFUND is an erc-20 governance token which is used to propose and vote on issues regarding the foundation as described above. Voting may happen through an implementation of DaoStack or Aragon, we are still determining this as we speak.

The distribution of xFUND is designed in a way to give incentive to validators on the FUND network.

This is how it works:

Every 24 hours at 00:00 UTC we take a snapshot of the “voting power” of every FUND validator on the network (there can be a max of 96).

All of the validators are then placed into a “weighted emissions schedule” based on their total voting power (combination of self-delegated and what other stakers have delegated to them)

The weighted lottery works in a way that there are a number of “entries” generated for each node. So even the smallest node with 1/1,000,000 of the power of the larger ones, will still get an entry. The purpose of this is to encourage filling of the 96 validator spots for better distribution and security.

Then what happens is there is a “emissions schedule ” generated which has 24 draws, each unrelated to one another, so winning an xFUND in the 1st draw does not reduce your odds in the next draw. This will assign 24 winning xFUND tickets to the validator’s ERC20 address.

Here is an example of the snapshot and emissions log 2020–10–06

The validators can then go to our dashboard to claim their accumulated tickets and mint their xFUND.

It should be clearly stated that any xFUND claimed by a validator is fully in their custody. It will be up to individual arrangements between validators and stakers if xFUND will be shared. The network is designed as a fiefdom to reward the validators directly and give them the choice whether to share or keep for themselves.

xFUND Tokenomics and Distribution

The supply of xFUND starts at 0 with 24 being minted per day. Validators can claim these daily or whenever they choose in a batch.

After launch the community may place a “liquidity pool” on Uniswap where fair market discovery may happen.

xFUND Roadmap

1- Liquidity Geyser — If the community chooses to start a liquidity pool on Uniswap, the foundation has agreed to support this pool by taking a portion of the xFUND collected with foundation staked FUND and creating a Yield Farm where xFUND is distributed to those providing for the xFUND/ETH liquidity pool.

2- Governance — shortly after launch, we will begin exploring the implementation of a tech-stack for governance.

There you have it, that is xFUND.

If you want to go deeper into the tech supporting xFUND, our CTO Paul Hodgson will be coming out with a companion technical article shortly.