Astar will allocate 350,000,000 ASTR tokens from the treasury and increase the team’s allocation to 10% of the initial supply. This will increase the budget to hire the best talents and scale Astar’s core team. Since the treasury does not have this amount today, we will allocate the amount from the future treasury.
Background
- Astar allocated 5% for founders and employees, including our future employees. In order to stay competitive, our allocation has been much lower than other projects within the ecosystem.
- As a result, it has become significantly harder to hire the best talents from all over the world, as we cannot offer reasonable token allocation to new employees.
Vesting
- The tokens will be locked for one year and distributed linearly over 3 years (in total 4 years).
- Because the treasury doesn’t have 350M, we will split this over 4 years. Each year we will lock 100M from treasury and linearly release.
- February 2024: lock 100M from treasury and linearly release over 1 year (end 2025)
- February 2025: lock 100M from treasury and linearly release over 1 year (end 2026)
- February 2026: lock 150M from treasury and linearly release over 1 year (end 2027)
Additional Context
Astar Network is a project that started in 2019. Our mission is to make a community-driven smart contract platform for multichain. This is why we have conducted lockdrops and have never raised funds from community members (retail investors). The funds we own only came from institutional investors like Binance Labs and Coinbase Ventures. Hence, our hiring budget and token incentive for existing/future employees are smaller than others. So far, many core members at Astar Network are passionate about web3 and Astar’s potential. They don’t care about the token allocation at the moment. However, Astar is growing very fast. We must expand our team size 2-4x in the coming years and hire tier 1 senior-level employees with sufficient and strong experiences, such as c-level people who used to work at unicorn companies and big tech giants. The problem we face is the lack of token incentives for future hires because the initial allocation of 5% is much smaller than other blockchain projects. Even within the Polkadot ecosystem, our allocation is less than half the amount of the other teams’ budgets. For Acala, you can see below that it’s even 4 times larger than our budget.
Acala: Acala - The DeFi & Liquidity Hub of Polkadot
Moonbeam: Glimmer (GLMR) Token Info & Tokenomics | Moonbeam Foundation
Polkadot: https://messari.io/asset/polkadot/profile/launch-and-initial-token-distribution
Astar: $ASTR Allocation | Astar Docs
We were aware of this issue earlier this year. And decided to wait to distribute ASTR tokens to existing employees and contributions before the launch. For example, I (Sota) am the longest contributor to Astar Network, and I have been working on Astar for 3 years now. However, we have yet to distribute tokens for my contributions before 2022 to ensure that we could operate with a 5% allocation. Astar does not intend to pay tokens for pre-launch contributions, but it is unrealistic to expect everyone to share 5% of the tokens when the number of employees grows to a hundred.
Token Distribution Mechanism
To clarify this proposal, I would also like to explain how we distribute our tokens to employees. This is a typical black box for many crypto projects, but we want to make a transparent community so we disclose the mechanism.
To make a long story short, we distribute tokens with 6-month vesting with 4 cliffs. There is a token option contract every 6 months. The amount of tokens members can get from a certain cliff can increase depending on their time in the Astar team. The essence here is that the longer people work, the more tokens they can get. This incentivizes people to stay at Astar. If a person leaves during the vesting period, the person can’t receive any tokens. I have created a diagram below to give more context.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to ask here.
