Announcing: The Arweave Community Token Sale, Part Two
The Arweave journey began over a year ago, and since then we have built an amazing community that believes in the project, and our goal of building information permanence.
We’re very pleased to announce that we have now successfully completed our community token sale part one, dedicated to those community members who have been there since the beginning of our journey. We allotted over £650,000 (~$900k) worth of tokens from our private sale to these community contributions, because we wanted to make sure as many of our long-term supporters as possible had the chance to participate.
Over the past year we have flown largely under the radar, allowing our team to maintain their focus on shipping our innovative technology ahead of our mainnet launch on the 8th of June (just under 3 weeks now!). Throughout this time, we haven’t undertaken much marketing activity, and so just now the wider blockchain community has begun to discover our exciting project and understand the unique features and solutions we provide. Now, we have over 1,000 people joining the Arweave community every day! As a team we had to sit down and work hard to determine the fairest way to include these new community members in the upcoming sale, which we are calling the community sale part two.
Many people asked us to simply cancel the upcoming sale altogether, and airdrop the tokens instead. However, we realise that denying people that have recently found the project the chance to participate would be frustrating. We considered increasing the overall hardcap of our token sales, but decided against this. We are sticking with our £6.4m (~$8.6m) total hardcap for the combined token sales. Although high hardcaps are quite common in the wider cryptocurrency community, the truth of the matter is that many projects do not need the amount of money they are raising. For example, Ethereum was able to change the entire blockchain world, while enriching an entire community instead of just their own founding team, based on initial contributions of only around $18mm.
After talking to numerous founders of top projects, and taking their expert advice into consideration, we have decided to re-allocate space from the private sale to the upcoming community token sale part two to accommodate additional community members. This ‘community sale part two’ will have a cap of £500,000 GBP (~$675k USD), and will be dedicated to community members who have recently discovered the project. This additional allocation has been taken from what was originally allocated to institutional investors in our private sale, because we want to take care of our community above all. You’re the ones that are going to continue telling your friends and the crypto community about Arweave, so we want to thank you for that.
This still leaves us with the question of how to let thousands of people participate fairly in the community sale part two.
That’s why we’re instituting a ‘proof of interest’ system for our community token sale part two
This community sale part two is designed to include community members, as they believe in what we are building, and want to help make our goals a reality in the long-term.
This sale will have a hardcap of £500,000 GBP (~$675k USD), much of which was originally allocated to strategic and institutional token buyers in our private token sale. These institutional partners have already introduced the Arweave project to many potential partner-projects and other services that will help the project grow. In order to make room for the community sale part two, we have pushed the institutional AR purchasers down to the smallest quantities possible. £500,000 GBP (~$675k USD) may not seem like much, but along with the community sale part one, and the seed sale last year, the community accounts for a large portion of the combined sale hardcap.
So, what is ‘proof of interest’?
We don’t want there to be a ‘gas war’ as people try to enter our sale, as this isn’t beneficial to individuals, the project, or the community as a whole. We understood by the thousands of whitelisting applicants we’ve received that without designing a solution, gas wars or other unwanted outcomes would have been inevitable.
Let’s start with a story of how this idea came to life. Over the past weeks, our community Telegram group has grown from 3,000 people to over 25,000 people! These are a group of people that care about the project in the most amazing ways.
People from all corners of the globe have approached us, bringing ideas of what to build on top of the Arweave, ways to spread the word through blog posts explaining what we’re building, and many other exciting ways to build and strengthen our community even further. These are the people that have already demonstrated they’re here to build a genuine community through education, and creation.
Arweave is not a short-term project, instead growing in strength year-on-year as together we continue to expand the network and build up the volume of information stored on the blockweave. That’s why we’ve decided to add an additional step to whitelisting for our community sale part two that will help prioritize our dedicated community of Arweavers, who are here with us for the long-term. Because we are implementing this system, we’re no longer referring to this token sale as a ‘public’ sale, but as an extension of our ‘community’ sale, as allocations will only be available to committed members of the Arweave ecosystem.
In order to help us reward and prioritise the members of the community that will help grow the project, we are splitting applicants into the following categories:
Creators
Arweave’s unique technological features allow many applications and pieces of software to be created for the very first time. Many developers have already approached us with suggestions of apps and software that they would like to build on top of the Arweave. The creators category isn’t just for developers, though — already, people are writing blog posts, creating videos or podcasts, and showcasing the unique use cases that Arweave helps to enable, and we would love to encourage this!
Archivers
Arweave’s provision of truly permanent storage offers a vast range of opportunities for collecting and preserving vital pieces of information. We want to encourage archivers to build a vast trove of human knowledge and experience inside the Arweave, such that it is permanently available to all those that will follow in the future.
Traders
This describes people who primarily want to buy, sell, or hold AR tokens. Traders form an important part of the token ecosystem, as they provide tokens to those who want to purchase tokens to use for data storage on the Arweave network.
Miners
Many people are already preparing to start mining activities on the network, vital work for the perpetuation of all the important information stored on the blockweave. Mining activities on the Arweave network are a little different than with traditional blockchains, due to our proof of access consensus mechanism. You can read more about this in our explanatory blog post here.
Already people are asking to store amazingly sentimental belongings and information on the Arweave, so that they can be perpetuated forever. All of this is in addition to the more traditional types of information that people may seek to archive — for example, historically or societally important documents and records, scientific or research data, and many more possibilities.
Help us get the word out by creating and sharing blog posts, tweets, articles, videos, about anything you want archived permanently on our genesis block.
To help us understand how you plan to contribute to the Arweave community you’ll need to submit your proofs via our ‘proof of interest’ form. After you complete the initial whitelisting application via our website, you will receive an email with instructions and a link for completing the proof of interest form. If you have already completed the initial whitelisting process via our website, you will be receiving an email shortly containing instructions and a link for completing the proof of interest process.
Once we have received all of the applications, we will contact individuals with information about what allocations we can offer.
We are excited to support you all as we work together to make the Arweave a success!
Best regards,
-arweave-team
Below we’ve included the most commonly asked questions about the community sale part two, which we will keep updating to make your life easier.
When will the community sale part two happen?
The token sale allocations will be announced once the proof of interest applications have been received and decisions made. After we make allocation offers the transfer period for making payments will run for 4 days.The sale will conclude before our mainnet launches in the 8th of June.
We are not currently accepting any payments, so please be aware of scammers! If you are in any doubt or have questions about anything, please email us directly at team@arweave.org.
What countries cannot participate?
As per advice from our legal team, we cannot accept funds from the USA, China, North Korea, or Iran.
Will there be a lockup period on tokens purchased in the sale?
No.
When will tokens be released?
After the main Arweave network launches on June 8th.
What is the minimum or maximum you can purchase?
We will let individuals know about their specific allocations via email in the near future.
Is AR an ERC-20 token?
No. Arweave is a new form of blockchain protocol and so we will be issuing native tokens at mainnet launch.
Hardcap?
The combined hardcap for all Arweave token sales is £6.4mil GBP (approximately $8.7mil USD). The hardcap for the community sale part two specifically is £500,000 GBP (approximately $675,000 USD).
When will you close the whitelist for the sale?
The whitelist will be closed shortly before we make our allocation decisions, so that we can consider all applications fairly and in detail.
