Note:
This post has been published originally on medium.com on June 18th, 2021.
Hey everyone!
Markus (seliqui) here, the ‘Whale’ of the FRACTION Token Project :)
It’s been quite a ride since the FRACTION Token launched on xDaiChain.So I thought it’s a good time to give some insight into what lead to the project in the first place, what happened after the launch and where the project is heading to in the future.
As you may have noticed from the current website, the FRACTION Token project is set up with a “being as open, honest, transparent and upfront as possible”-approach. That’s why I tried to provide many links/proofs and explanations to make sure everybody is aware of what’s going on. I’ll try to keep that up in this post as well. Also this is my first Medium article ever, so please cut me some slack in case this gets weird ^^
Before the launch: The road to “Own a FRACTION”
The idea of a crypto-token with total supply of only one is actually really old (especially in comparision to how time flows in the cryptospace). I think the first time we were talking about it was during one of the BlockchainHub Graz Meetups in 2016(ish). Of course back then there were no widely available decentralized exchanges (DEX), so it wouldn’t make much sense to deploy something like that (except for fun) since a CEX-Listing would’ve been too expensive. The idea lay low for quite some time, and since it’s not THAT of an original idea, other tokens with a total supply on 1 came&went (at least I do remember hearing of one from time to time) — but not a single one took off in a noticeable manner, afaik.
We at the lab10 collective started working on the ARTIS blockchain and since 2019 on the Minerva Wallet. Then, in early 2021, the Minerva Wallet Team launched the MIVA Token. Already familiar with using Uniswap/Honeyswap, I had to take a closer look into Liquidity Pools on Honeyswap and could experience on-the-fly how a Liquidity Pool starts, gets filled up and which interactions result in different outcome on the price.
That’s when I opened the idea-drawer in my mind and pulled out that old One-Total-Supply-Token thingy. At the same time the NFT-Hype was getting really real and I thought this idea would fit exactly inbetween.
Here’s the funny part: You’d expect that everything started by minting the token itself first. But in reality it went like this:
After a couple of beers (cheers, btw) I had this picture in my mind of how the token symbol could look like. Initially I thought I’ll keep half of the Token and the other half gets into a Liquidity-Pool. That’s why the Token-Symbol is one half solid and the other half breaks up. So I started up Cinema4D, cut a circle in half, placed an ‘ExplosionFX’ Object into the right one, adjusted some values and rendered out the first draft of the Token-Symbol. Voila!Then I thought: Wouldn’t it look nice if the fractions moved in a loop to indicate that the token will break up and expand over time? Hopped over to Adobe Illustrator, vectorized the first draft rendering and started adding the Animations as CSS in the SVG File (so I could use it on the Web). Tadaaa!
That animation started to be kinda hypnotizing if you look at it long enough — and while staring at that loop, it made me think about what someone would need to actually start a project like this.
The steps I came up with were:
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You’d need someone who can mint the Token
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You’d need someone to design the graphical stuff
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You’d need someone to develop the website
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You’d need someone to write the contents
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You’d need someone to start the Liquidity Pool and provide the initial funds to fill it up
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You’d need someone to get the Token in the official listing on Honeyswap
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You’d need access to a Community
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You’d need someone who coordinates everything and keeps the ‘greater picture’ in mind
And it turned out that for all these, I could at least answer with “yeah, basically I could do that”.
The good thing is, because of my involvement in Minerva/MIVA and that team’s connection to 1Hive & xDaiChain (lab10 collective is a xDaiChain Validator), I knew that I had some advantage over just some other dude who wants to start a project like this.
Of course the FRACTION Token wouldn’t have such an awesome start without the pre-work of the lab10collective/MinervaWallet-Team (especially Thomas, Didi & Peter) and also the folks at 1Hive and Superfluid — their groundwork made the FRACTION Token Project possible in the first place.
So I thought about how I could explain to someone what the project is about and started drafting a small onepage-website. Since I already knew that I would need a Contract-Address for the Layout, I hopped on over to tokenmint.io and minted one. Boom!
Since the MIVA Token was already out and we were talking internally quite often about the benefit of it being a SuperToken (the first native one ever) — so you can stream it — I thought it would be awesome to have the FRACTION Token also as a SuperToken right away as well (instead of having it wrapped later on to add that functionality). On that part a huge “Thank you” to Didi from the lab10 collective who took the time to adjust the MIVA contract and deployed it during a beer-drinking-videochat-session ^^ I might sell off the “Genesis Event Screenshot” as a NFT some day and split the income with him :)
That evening marked the “point of no return” — I already had spend quite some thoughts,time&work on it and now with someone else’s time also spent on it, I knew I had to stick to it and start the project as soon as it was in a publishable state. Also it was getting more and more obvious that, while still being considered a fun/art-project, it could be also a nice advertising/marketing instrument for the MinervaWallet and the Superfluid Streaming Protocol.
Thankfully I could reuse quite some things I already had on my hands from building the Minerva Wallet Website (here a big thanks to Peter from the lab10 collective for the scripts to get the Price/Poolsize/Tokenholders).
The website got overhauled a couple of times to represent the launch StatusQuo and also provides links/proofs/explanations to live up to the “honest & upfront as possible approach”.
And then on April 20th, at 13:37 the project officially went live.
After the launch: Token went live on xDaiChain/Honeyswap
And oh boy, those next 48 hours were quite some experience ^^
Filled up the initial FRACTION:xDAI Liquidity Pool on a 0,5:1000 ratio (which gave the Token a price of 2.000 $/xDai) and just 5 hours later the Tokenprice tenfolded to 20.000 $. Then, after 12 hours the Tokenprice reached BTC’s then current price and only 40min after that it surpassed BTC’s all time high with 71.000 $. The price then climbed and climbed steadily. And after getting added to the official Tokenlist, it skyrocketed for a few hours and reached its current all-time-high at 461.025 $ on April 22th at ~03:00 CET.
All time high token price at 461k on April 22th, 2021
Of course, such a surge isn’t sustainable — especially for a Token with a Liquidity of 50k on a DEX that has a total Liquidity of ~10 Million.So the price started to fall again and settled in between 100k and 150k.
At the top of the token list on info.honeyswap.org on April 21th, 2021
At that point, the Token was still the one with the highest price on Honeyswap.
Then the token got listed on CoinGecko — which was essential, because that allowed Minerva Wallet and the Superfluid Dashboard to display €/$ Values — and the Tokenprice climbed again to 356.764 $ on April 30th, 2021.
With that — honestly really unexpected high value — I also got confronted with some new questions. Like the fear of rug-pulling or that holding 25% of the token supply bears the risk of me destroying the market by selling huge amounts.
The high price sounds super fancy, but actually it’s a superficial number (the less you sell from the token, the closer you actually get that displayed price. It’s the price and marketcap at the same time). But for me as the project owner, that high price was a blessing and a curse at the same time. It’s great to see that price go up and up and up, but it also limited my ability to adjust the project later on.
*For example:
*Shortly after launch, the ARTIS 2.0 launch got postponed because of the unclear Status of the OpenEtherum Client. That raised the question of what to do with the remaining 12.5 % that are currently reserved for an xATS LP Pool. As a lab10/ARTIS team-member, it would’ve been fairly straight forward to supply the needed xATS for such a pool. But for everything else, I would have to spend more of my own private money to supply additional pools. Which, at a then current price of 100k would have been 12.500 $ out of my own pocket. And that on top of the already ‘invested’ 1000 xDai (and 3–4 weeks of unpaid work). Plus the Whale Account got locked down by streaming the 25% over 2 years to a circulation account. And I could also not extract anything from the Liquidity Pool since even a very small amount could get interpreted as the beginning of me abandoning the project starting a downward spiral that could kill the project eventually. That’s why — if you look at the Wallets&Contracts — the Whale-Account(s) only deployed the Contract, provided Liquidity and nothing else so far. At the moment of writing, I didn’t made a single cent off this project so far.
That’s also one of the main reasons I had to lay off the focus on the project for a bit and continue working within the Minerva Team on the Wallet and also other projects in my own company. You know… to pay bills and get nice things like food & water :)
What’s next
I guess that’s the section you’re actually here for, right? :)
For some time I wasn’t sure what’s better: Stay silent and surprise everyone with new things, or lay it out and take the risk that someone copies your idea and you get even more pressure to finalize something (plus limit your ability to simply scrap an idea if things don’t work out as planned). Also announcements tend to start a price increase which — as stated once above — makes it harder for me to allocate the funds for new Liquidity Pools.
I decided to lay out what I’d like to do with the FRACTION Token in the future, because it became more and more obvious that most of the things I’m planning in my mind will take quite some time, and it would be sad if people get the impression that the FRACTION Token is about to quietly disappear into the night.
***Note:***There are multiple obstacles for every future plan and I’ll try to point out a few of them so you get a better feeling of how much time it can take. Also, certainly things can change fast in the crypto-space, which may result in adapting the idea, delaying it or in the worst case, even scrapping an idea altogether. Again, whenever possible, I’ll try to be as upfront as possible.
Expanding the token to other Networks & Decentralized Exchanges
The first rule of the FRACTION Token is you do not talk about the FRACTION Token… no wait. It’s that the total supply is 1. So simply deploying the same token on other Networks & DEX’s is. not. an. option. here.
The total supply should always stay 1. Which means the token must be bridged and, in the best-case scenario, can even get swapped cross-chain (Connext is something I’m having a close look for that). But certainly, MIVA will be making that cross-chain jump first and FRACTION Token will benefit from everything I/we learned from there. Also, if Minerva doesn’t support the Network, the Token will not get bridged there. Minerva should be the central point of interaction with the Token.
As for now, the “Roadmap” looks like this
> Currently: xDaiChain & Honeyswap
>> Next: Polygon/Matic & Quickswap
>>> Maybe: Binance Smart Chain & Pancakeswap
>>>> Goal: Ethereum & Uniswap
*A few Obstacles/Questions/To-dos:
** Getting the funds for filling up Liquidity Pools on other DEX’s
* Getting the Token added on those DEX’ official lists
* Allocating the right amount of the Fraction Token to move there
* What happens to the Streaming Feature if that protocol isn’t available there?
* Make sure that the current circulating supply is and always will be only 1
* Update the Website & UI / DApp to represent that new Status Quo
* Get also a CoinMarketCap listing
Streaming Farms
Providing enough liquidity is a challenge and Minerva took an innovative and new approach to this problem with their Minerva Streaming Farm.
There is currently a FRACTION:MIVA Farm available, but at some point there should also be a Streaming Farm for the biggest FRACTION Pools, that also returns FRACTION as a reward-stream.
*A few Obstacles/Questions/To-dos:
** Allocating the right amount of the FRACTION Token to pay rewards
* Where does that amount come from?
* How to approach if the Token is on Multiple Chains?
* Where to exchange FP-NFTs if on Multiple Chains?
* Expanding the current DApp built by the Minerva Team
NFT Collection
The basic idea is to generate an NFT-Collection where every part of the Token-Symbol (25 pieces) is a separate NFT that is only available once. The complete Collection would resemble the Logo/Token-Symbol as it is right now.
So once again, you’d only ever be able to ‘Own a FRACTION’ of the Symbol.
*A few Obstacles/Questions/To-dos:
** Create the Graphics/Animation/NFTs
* Real-Life counterpart?
* Which Platforms? Differences between Platforms / Networks?
Scavenger Hunt
Anyone read ‘Ready Player One’? :)
This is, most likely, the one thing that excites me the most and will also take the longest to set up. Hopefully, it will also take the longest until completed.
The idea is basically this:
There will be 10 laser-engraved Titanium plates that have on their frontside general informations like the Logo, Website-URL and Description. On their backside, the Seed & Private Key of a wallet that holds 1 xDai & 0.01 FRACTION Token (Amount not yet fixed). Then, these 10 Titanium Plates will get hidden all over the world, and on the Project’s page there will be clues on how to find them. Whoever finds the Plate, has the Seed/PrivateKey and therefore owns the FRACTION-Part. Riddles should get harder every time and maybe even depend on each other. We’ll see :)
There are already things in preparation for this.
*A few Obstacles/Questions/Todos:
** Create the Graphics/LaserPlates
* Get the plates / laser engrave them
* Distribute the Plates all over the world in places that will last some time and are publicly available. (No, there won’t be a Plate on Area51)
* Come up with riddles (no shit, Sherlock!)
* Create Project website for this. Display if funds have been moved (= mark plate as found)
* Consider opening up an outgoing stream over something like 25 years, so in case a plate really gets lost forever / destroyed, the funds aren’t lost as well.
***Shout out:
***The whole project so far wouldn’t be possible without the lab10collective/Minerva-Core team (especially Thomas, Didi, Peter) and it’s Partners&Collaborators like 1Hive, xDaiChain, Superfluid, Eporio, Connext, BinarApps, etc… who continuously surf the wave of being on the frontier of this technological field. And most certainly, everything that’s planned can’t be done without their help&support. So the more you support them, the more they are able to support me on expanding the FRACTION Token!
Conclusion:
All of that will take some time, since it’s usually not only a few clicks and everything’s in place. After deploying something new, there also needs to be an adaption/overhaul of the current (fairly simple) website, new announcement graphics, time to communicate everthing and, of course, fixing things that go sideways on an “asap” approach all-the-fucking-time…
Do you remember I wrote at the top “yeah, basically I could do that”?Well that also means that there’s only one person that does it :)
What I learned over the last months is: Deploying something can be fairly quick, handling the outcome is something completely different.
Please do understand that, yes, the project is still ongoing, but realistically speaking, it’s just a side project. As stated on the website multiple times, it doesn’t have any real life use case or value. I understand that people who buy-in want to see the price go up-up-up, but everybody should be aware that this is a fun/art/meme/whatever token, and just because you want to make a quick buck, I will not let myself get pressured into making some announcement or release something that’s not in a state I’m comfortable with. Either you’re interested and willing to wait&see what’s coming, or sell the Token and find something else to play with (*Sidenote: I highly recommend reading Lukso’s “A note on communication” here on Medium, even though I’m aware that FRACTION is a fun project and LUKSO is actually building something of value). *So if it comes down to putting my time into the FRACTION Token Project or the Minerva Wallet (or projects of my own company), the decision I’m about to make should be clear to anyone. Because I like food, water and not getting evicted from my flat because of unpaid bills ;)
But I am, most likely, the one person who wants to see it succeed the most, so the point of this whole talk is to give you the big picture: You know what I have planned for this project and know that I’ll keep moving it forward — just remember to align your expectations accordingly.
FRACTION Token to Titan! Still a moon, but a better one.
If you want to reach out, you can do so via twitter.com/@Fraction_Token or join the Minerva Discord (there’s a separate #fraction-token channel).
Cheers,
Markus / seliqui