A Truly Fair Token Launch

6 min readOct 9, 2020

In the midst of the cryptocurrency industry’s ICOs, IDOs, IEOs, presales, and liquidity mining programs, the fair launch has been a proverbial holy grail that has been attempted dozens of times over this past Summer of 2020, and very few, if any, actually achieving them fairly. There was once a fair launch, many years ago. It was spawned by one Satoshi Nakamoto, with the issuance of Bitcoin through proof-of-work mining in January of 2009. There were no VCs, no seed rounds, public sales, KYC, front-running, exchanges, etc. This was the first fair launch. A transparent, immutable ledger made available to anyone and everyone with an underlying asset that anyone with a GPU can earn.

Pretty much none of that was achieved by the token launches over the past few months. We’ve seen a flurry of gimmicks pop up one after the other, as duplicates of projects that took years of hard work such as Uniswap and Curve, with very little if any improvement or creativity put into them beyond token allocation and issuance methods. The absence of long-term fruitfulness of these food token projects were made apparent when the market crashed down on tokens such as Kimchi, Sushi, Lobster, Spaghetti, etc. Badger DAO is an attempt to change this and restore integrity to decentralized finance.

The current “Fair Launch” paradigm

No audits
Raise no capital from investors
Anonymous developers
No vesting period for team tokens
Liquidity pools that get front run
Rug pulls
Code landmines
Multi-sig governance
No timelock

If this wasn’t bad enough, these kinds of projects are a breeding ground for whale games. A big investor given insider information can bootstrap liquidity for these projects at the floor price, right before any promotion or real product development begins and draw in the retail crowd. Once the price pumps, the whale systematically exits his position leaving retailers with governance tokens that plummet in value by the day.

So What Makes a Fair Launch?

👉 A fair launch should incorporate an even playfield for investors of varying resource capacities and builders of all competencies.

👉 A fair launch should hinge on a transparent team of people willing to stake their reputation on the project they are raising capital for. They should be very reachable people in the very beginning.

👉 A fair launch should have audited assets and products at the time of launch, with no central points of vulnerability. If there are admin keys, they should be burnt. If they can’t be burnt, they must default to a 48 hour timelock to protect stakeholders from any underhanded changes that may be malicious to the product ecosystem.

👉 A fair launch should retroactively reward community members that share the same ethos of their project and have taken actions in the past to give your business the opportunity to thrive now.

👉 A fair launch has to occur without a private investment round, with no incentives that greatly undercut the majority of future stakeholders. For everyone who is not an early builder, the opportunity must be stumbled upon like a shiny rock on the sidewalk. It may not seem like much, but it might attract you enough to pick it up, observe it, and decide whether or not you want to claim it. All potential community members must be presented with Badger token as close to this manner as possible.

🦡 The Badger Governance Token Launch

The Badger token will launch with a 90% ownership by the Badger builder community and the Badger DAO. They will receive these tokens based on using our products and retroactive actions they’ve taken that helped accelerate BTC in DeFi.

We don’t just say it’s fair we prove it’s fair. Leading up to launch we’ll share a transparency report that transcribes our code in an easy to read format for non-technical people. This will highlight claims we make that are enforced with code. Like no minting functionality, no private keys held by the team, control being placed in the DAO, team time-lock etc.

There will be a 10% allocation to the founding team put in a time-locked address with the ability to use for voting and weekly unlocking over 12 months. At every block Badger is mined, a percentage goes to the time-lock address. This will ensure that the founding team has a stake in the future of Badger DAO and are incentivized to contribute to factors that could lead to its success. They will be leading the operations of the DAO on a day to day basis.

All products and tokens, such as the Badger Setts (reminiscent to Yearn vaults except for tokenized BTC only), Badger token, and DIGG token, have all been audited by established auditing firms before launch. All smart contract risk has been assuredly minimized for this launch, eliminating the position where investors must decide between participating and risking falling victim to contract exploits.

To earn Badger token, users will need to use our Sett (vault) product over a limited period of time. They will earn a standard yield from its automated strategies on top of the Badger governance token as they’ve proven to see value in the product. We want them to own the direction of it moving forward. There won’t be arbitrary farming distributions for the sake of merely drawing in liquidity.

To try and eliminate the whale games, every day a user continues to stake their assets in a Sett, the high Badger reward multiplier they will receive. Over the course of the entire launch users that stick around will receive 3x the amount of Badger compared to others.

As you saw in the first piece by Badger DAO, the founding members are all humans with full names, faces, and verifiable backgrounds. You can approach them on any channel and get a response, as you would an actual human being- because that’s who we are. We are real people building cool things for DeFi heads and Bitcoiners, while giving full liberty to the future of Badger DAO to choose what it wants to build.

Remember that shiny rock on the sidewalk analogy? Yea, we meant that. All future stakeholders of Badger DAO may in fact be a part of the Badger token launch without even knowing it. That’s right. You might wake up one day along with thousands of newly inducted Badger DAO stakeholders with some Badger tokens in your wallet. Why? Because we want to include people who share our ethos and mission to bring BTC to DeFi. These are all the clues we can give. Until next time.