This week we’re going to look at our plans for how Safe Network Tokens will be distributed to MaidSafeCoin holders, MaidSafe shareholders, developers, resource providers, and others, how this will be managed through the Foundation and how tokens will circulate in the Network economy over time. This is a summary of the main points proposed by the Request For Comment (RFC) on the subject, which will be the basis for an official white paper. And if you’d like to make your own comments on the proposal, feel free to dive in to the dedicated forum thread.
General Progress
First, we’d like to express our appreciation and thanks to @Sotros25 who’s stepping back from voluntarily managing our main social media accounts, where she’s been tweeting the updates, answering punters and promoting our news on many channels. Soton has worked tirelessly and selflessly for the project for a long time, and we’re grateful for all her efforts. Cheers @Sotros25! (We’ll be managing the social media in house from now on.)
We’ve made some good inroads into the single threaded work, converting the sn_node bin, as a whole, to use only one local thread. This has allowed us to start clearing out a lot of locks in the codebase, which in turn lets us remove a heap of async code which was only that way due to those locks. Which is, all in all, looking like a great simplification. It was a pleasant surprise to see (locally) this new single-threaded code producing ~a 25% drop in client test runtime! We’re still actively working on PRs to clean things up, and hopefully we can get a good pattern where we can utilise all of Rust’s borrow-checking-lifetime goodness.
@oetyng has some PRs in doing some housekeeping and adding some work prioritisation to nodes, such that both messages coming in and the resulting work they engender are dealt with in order of importance at the node. This should help the network survive under more harsh conditions than it would otherwise.
@qi_ma is investigating an issue where write and read times for stored chunks appear not to be proportional to size.
@joshuef has made some improvements to the dysfunction checking algo, which has been generating false positives and killing off perfectly healthy nodes as a result.
Safe Network Token Distribution
On the inception of the Network, Safe Network Tokens (SNT) will be distributed to MaidSafeCoin holders and shareholders, with the largest portion held over to be earned by offering resources to the Network. Here’s how we plan to do that.
Let’s kick off with some big numbers. At launch a total supply of 4,525,524,120 whole SNT will be issued. Subject to practical testing, each SNT will be divisible 10^9 times, thus creating a total of 4,525,524,120,000,000,000 available subunits.
Payment to the Network in SNT is required to store or edit data, which is thereafter stored for the lifetime of the Network. These payments will be immediately redistributed by the Network, with 85% going as Resource Supply Rewards (previously called Farming Rewards) and 15% as Network Royalties.
Resource Supply Rewards are paid automatically to reliable nodes that have proved themselves over time (Node Age) automatically when their section receives payment for storing a chunk.
Network Royalties are a mechanism through which developers and other contributors can be sustainably funded, with the approval of the Foundation. Allocation is controlled through two programs: the Developer Program and the Data Commons Program. Recipients might include: core protocol developers, operators and developers of apps (compensated through the Developer Program), and data made freely available for the common good (via the Data Commons Program).
Network Royalties will also be used to cover the costs associated with the operation and work of the Foundation, and the distribution of royalties.
Network Royalty payments through the Developer and Data Commons Programs include grants to fund new areas of research, one-off and ongoing rewards, the value depending on the utility and value of services, software and data provided.
The Foundation may also make ad hoc payments to fulfil its objectives and remit. These payments will be made from a fund called the Network Royalties Pool, with any unspent or unclaimed funds in a given period returned to the Pool for further distribution.
Ultimately, we want to automate these payment processes, but this likely won’t be in place at launch.
Initial Token Distribution
Time for some more numbers.
10% of the total genesis supply (452,552,412 SNT) will be allocated to MaidSafeCoin holders in the form of an airdrop: 1 MaidSafeCoin == 1 SNT.
5% of the total genesis supply (226,276,206 SNT) will be allocated to MaidSafe shareholders, with each share entitling the bearer to 111.5 SNT.
Tokens will be paid out to shareholders in three instalments over the period of a year following launch. Any unclaimed shareholder funds will be held by the Foundation indefinitely.
15% of the total genesis supply (678,828,618 SNT) will be allocated to Network Royalties (see above).
70% of the total genesis supply (3,167,866,884 SNT)—aka the Remaining Tokens—will be distributed by the Network to contributors, such as those uploading data or resources. This will be done in an automated way, over an extended period, corresponding to the rate of Network growth as measured by the volume of data stored by its nodes.
It is assumed that this process, which is subject to further research and development, will be in place for the inception of the Network. If it is not, the Foundation will hold these funds until such time as it is complete.
An alternative mechanism would see the Remaining Tokens generated over time rather than at genesis.
There are one or two other details to be sorted out, so please take a look at the main thread and tell us what you think.
Useful Links
Feel free to reply below with links to translations of this dev update and moderators will add them here:
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As an open source project, we’re always looking for feedback, comments and community contributions - so don’t be shy, join in and let’s create the Safe Network together!
Update came early today! It’s great to see the emerging solidity on SNT distribution. All speed to the MaidSafe team as they push towards launch.
We encourage free speech and would not ask any staff to toe the line or go with the company message. I feel everyone can and would disagree on some points, I know internally we do. Even the consensus/censorship/banning is an area where there are many disagreements and these should be welcomed.