FREEEEEEEEEEE MONEY SEASON IS HERE!
For myself and my fellow Cosmonauts, it seems like 2021 has blessed us almost on a weekly basis with oh-so-wonderful gifts of free tokens in the form of airdrops and stakedrops.
The latest in a string of freebies, today's post is about Desmos, yet another new token within the Cosmos ecosystem that aims to send ripples through the galaxy and all that inhabit it.
Desmos: Democratizing Social Media
According to their whitepaper, Desmos has some rather ambitious aims, directing their energy towards the social media realm (look out, Hive?)
Due to their business model, centralized social networks (“CSNs”) need to treat their users as
products. This creates problems which include privacy breach and unreasonable censorship. To
change this, we need to change the business model of social networks from the ground up. By building the social networks based on tokenomics, the users will be incentivized to become
responsible owners of their social networks. Ultimately, this will change the dynamics between
various parties and bring us a more open, liberal and censorship-resistant social network.
To achieve this goal, I introduce Desmos, which is a native blockchain specifically designed
for supporting user-centric social networks.
Its flagship feature is Desmos Profiles, which will serve as a cross-chain social identity. It is similar to Keybase, Google Login or Facebook Login, but decentralized. Desmos Profiles will first serve the blockchains which have enabled inter-blockchain communication (IBC) connectivity such as Cosmos Hub, IRISnet, Crypto.com chain, Persistence, Osmosis, Akash, Sentinel, Regen Networks and of course Desmos chain.
As an active player in the IBC ecosystem, they will utilize the features of other projects such as
Band Protocol, Akash, Oasis, Osmosis and Cosmos Hub to bring synergy and create more
exciting use cases.
Network effect and staking
In the context of social networks, network effects mean that every new user added to the
network makes the network more valuable for your next user.
This is the reason why social networks use a significant portion of their investors’ money to acquire users
After they have acquired more users, they use the improved metrics to raise more funds which
will then be used to acquire more users. The social networks that can repeat the above
cycle as many times as possible until the marginal benefit outweighs the marginal cost of
acquiring the user will become the winners.
This is the reason why centralized CNs need to treat their users as products and rely on a corrupted business model as described in earlier sections (see Solving the world’s problem).
By providing staking rewards to incentivize early participation, they may change this.
“Borrow the growth from the future”
The social network is basically a marketplace of sellers and buyers of attention. Instead
of relying on investors’ money to acquire new users, what if we rely more on users to
acquire new users by word-of-mouth and quality contents? By tokenizing quality user
engagements which can lead to a more robust network effect, we can borrow the growth
from the future to replace the heavy need for capital immaturely.
Greg Osuri, the Founder of Akash Network, has elaborated on this idea precisely in his blog post:
“For a market that relies on network effects to unlock value, it’s critical to sustain
demand or supply until equilibrium is achieved.”
We are inspired by the inflation model of Akash which plans to bootstrap a free market
by subsidizing supply. In their case, this supply is cloud compute. The same holds true
for Desmos with a different supply: attention. We subsidize engaging users who can
bring new users to the network.
Inflation rate
To incentivize early adopters to join Desmos, they will use a relatively high initial inflation
ranging from 40% to 80% annually. Then it will be halved every year until it reaches
2.5% to 5%. It will stay there until the maximum supply of 500M DSM is reached. They
estimated the maximum supply will be reached in 16 years:
Airdrop/Stakedrop - Time for the Moneyshot!
Alright, so now that you've all read the nitty gritty details behind Desmos, let's get down to what you really want - airdrop claim details!
The team at Desmos was very generous when it came to this stakedrop - roughly 10 different factors qualified/increased the amount of DSM tokens that you're able to claim, based on how many of those qualifiers you met.
Staking OSMO, ATOM, REGEN, and various other Cosmos Ecosystem tokens made you eligible, along with other factors, such as:
- Stakers who have done below will receive more amount of DSM airdrop:
- Staked more with non-zero commission validators
- Staked more with Forbole validator
- Have not staked with centralized exchanges
- Have not staked with validators operated by foundation/official team of the projects
They have applied functions with different parameters so that the above stakers would receive a fair amount of DSM which provides a reasonable motivation for them to become DSM stakers and liquidity providers (wen Osmosis?… … Soon!). If you have staked the above tokens but have received no or small amount of airdrop, this may due to below reasons (non-exhaustive):
- You have not staked the tokens as on the above snapshot time
- You have staked less than 1 voting power (eg. 1 $ATOM in the case of Cosmos Hub)
- You have delegated a significant proportion of your tokens to centralized exchanges or 0% commission validators
View the image below for a breakdown of how this airdrop was calculated:
So enjoy! Once again, be sure to visit their airdrop checker link and enter any of your Cosmos wallet addresses (if you use Keplr, it will automatically read all wallet addresses and find out exactly which qualifications you meet, and display them and the amount you're eligible to claim):
https://airdrop.desmos.network/
That's all for now! Stay tuned for more - I'm now an active Cosmos ecosystem Validator (I have a validator live on the $JUNO network (#104/125), and a mainnet validator live for the newly launched Comdex token ($CMDX), ranked #37/64! Be sure to view my validators, and support small validators - staking with me helps me to provide more sentry nodes, and devote more of my time to launching more nodes - I also will be able to lower fees, as more people stake with us :)
GhostStake JUNO Validator: https://www.mintscan.io/juno/validators/junovaloper193xl2tqh2tjkld2zv49ku5s44ee4qmgr65jcep
GhostStake Comdex Validator: https://www.mintscan.io/comdex/validators/comdexvaloper19qz6sgw7llrft2x05lp4swy569e5sla6gl3cuu
I'll be releasing guides on launching and managing validators, as well as other goodies, for those of you that are interested, so stay tuned and hit that follow button! Also, please be sure to follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ghoststake