We want to thank everyone that showed up and took the time to participate in the first Avalaunch IDO. For us, it was incredible to see the community come together and finally experience what we had been working on all these months. We were able to secure a meaningful allocation for our large user base and, we believe, took the first steps toward setting a new standard in the launchpad space.
However, our work is never done. While the event was a great success, our commitment to you, our community, is to always push harder and further. The minute the sale closed, we immediately began brainstorming about how we could do better. Even after months of design and development, rigorous QA, and many rounds of user testing, there is simply no replacement for real users — and we were fortunate enough to have thousands of them.
In this article, we want to detail what we learned, the feedback we got from the community about what could be improved, and the improvements we made to the application to make for a better sale, with bigger allocations, that could service more people around the world.
In short, here are the most significant changes to the platform that will be developed, audited and deployed in time for the next sale:
- Introduction of a refundable registration fee. Payable in AVAX, this is to ensure that the people who register for the sale truly intend to participate. When you claim your allocation, this fee is immediately refunded. Currently, this fee is 1 AVAX.
- Longer rounds. Each round will now take place over 12 hours, instead of 3.
- A reordering of the rounds. The order is now: public, validator, community staking. This will ensure that the largest percentage of the tokens available will end up in the hands of XAVA stakers.
- All unsold tokens go into the final staking round. Instead of the unsold flowing into the next round, unsold tokens from the public and validator rounds will be set aside and given to the final community staking round.
- Updated AVAX price. As the rounds are now much longer, the price of AVAX will be updated every 30 minutes, to account for any volatility in the market during this time period.
- Infrastructure upgrades. We are beefing up our servers and infrastructure to meet the massive demand (in some cases thousands of requests per second) we saw during the first minutes of each round.
While this brief outline will likely be sufficient for most users, we’d like to elaborate on the reasoning behind these updates and how we think they will lead to a better experience for Avalaunch users.
Refundable Registration Fee
When a user registers for a sale, they will be asked to deposit a “Refundable Registration Fee,” paid in AVAX, which will be returned immediately after claiming their allocation. The fee will be communicated prior to the registration opening. It will also be available for review in the UI.
The need for this fee became apparent after our first sale. We had hundreds of users who registered but did not even attempt to participate. For a platform that offers guaranteed allocations, this is not ideal. If a user registers and doesn’t show up, that allocation moves into another round when it really should have been distributed amongst those that took the time to participate.
With a better sense of who is actually likely to show up, we can more accurately model the fairest distribution of tokens which results in better allocations for everyone. The fee gives us much more confidence that when a user says they want to participate through their registration, they mean it.
Unclaimed Registration Fees
If a user registers, deposits the fee, but doesn’t participate in the sale, they will forfeit their AVAX and it will be collected by the platform. Following the sale, this AVAX will be used to market buy and burn XAVA, allowing for a shared benefit for all token holders through deflation of the token.
The use of the collected AVAX may change in the future, but for now, the buying and burning of XAVA will be the mechanism by which we reward our community.
Reordering of Rounds
Our primary goal is to distribute as many IDO tokens as broadly as possible. However, in that framework, there is a hierarchy, and at the top is our Avalaunch token holders. The new order will ensure that the largest percentage of the tokens available for sale will end up in the hands of XAVA stakers. The new order is as follows:
- Avalanche Validators
- Public
- XAVA Stakers (Community)
In our first sale, the validators went first, then the community, and then staking. Since we saw many people register but not show up, and unsold tokens were moving into the next round, this left more tokens available to the public than we would have wanted. With this new ordering, the registration fee, and the change to the handling of unsold tokens in each round described in the next section, we believe our XAVA stakers will receive the most allocation possible.
Unsold Tokens in Each Round
In our first sale, all unsold tokens flowed into the next round, ending with the public. We believed it would be best to let the community go first, have their chance at an allocation, and the remainder would be offered to the public. For the reasons outlined above, this turned out to be imperfect. It worked very well, but we want better.
Going forward, all unsold tokens in both the Public and Validator rounds will be set aside, combined, and offered to XAVA stakers. Through this, we guarantee our community stakers and holders remain at the “top of the food chain.”
Some type of “last chance round” after Community where people could rush to claim the remainder was also considered, but this strongly contradicts the methodology consistent across the rest of the platform. The last thing we want to see is a measured, thoughtful allocation process punctuated by a frenzied war for the few tokens leftover.
If there is anything left unsold after the Community round, the tokens remaining will be returned to the team.
As always, our commitment is to keep thinking and building. These upgrades represent the latest additions to the platform, but certainly won’t be the last.