Maya’s Fair Launch through Liquidity Auction : The airdrop, perfected.

A much more fair model to allocate our native token. Forget about IDOs!

August 22, 2024

Key takeaways

  • Maya’s Liquidity Auction is a launching rara avis in the crypto world. It combines the best of two worlds, a Fair Launch and an Airdrop.
  • The process will help us bootstrap the liquidity that the protocol needs to work and to provide a superior user experience to our swappers.
  • Anybody can contribute any of our supported assets, like BTC, BNB, ETH and even $RUNE.
  • 90% of the $CACAO tokens to ever exist will be distributed to the participants of the auction, proportional to their liquidity contributions. The remaining 10% will go to the ILP reserve.

Different strategies are used to raise funds whenever new crypto projects are born. Most of them involve the creation of a token and there are several ways in which projects can distribute them to their users or community. Some examples include holding public sales (e.g. the 2017 ICO mania), airdrops, through farm rewards and more.

There is one of such mechanisms that is extremely hard to come by: fair launches. Among the few examples that we can name, Bitcoin (BTC) Sushiswap (SUSHI) or Yearn (YFI) all distributed like this.

And although most people love airdrops and being in the ‘snapshots’ or ‘whitelists’, these attractive models are far from perfect. Projects launching this way can have very bad tokenomics (like high Fully Diluted Valuations and low float) or some insiders can know the airdrop’s requirements in advance plus some ways to game it, etc. 

What if we told you that we are airdropping $CACAO while also:

  • Distributing 100% of the $CACAO supply.
  • Publishing the same airdrop rules for everyone, in advance.
  • Having no minimum entry tickets.
  • Having no previous whitelists or preferred snapshots.
  • Avoiding special allocations for larger investors.

Welcome to Maya’s Fair Launch! We like to call it a “Liquidity Auction” because you will be getting your share of $CACAO tokens after adding Liquidity to the protocol, the more liquidity you add, the more $CACAO you will receive! 

In fact, with this model you will technically double your assets (100% ROI) automatically, because you get to keep all the assets that you provided plus receive a proportional dollar value of $CACAO on top of them. Talk about a chocolate-induced food coma!

Because of all these, more than an airdrop, Maya’s is a ‘fairdrop’, just  and  transparent for everyone!

Let’s dig a little bit more, since I can already hear you saying this is too good to be true.

How the Liquidity Auction will work

“Liquidity Auction” sounds sophisticated but it is actually very simple:

  • Anybody can contribute supported assets, such as BTC, BNB, ETH, and even $RUNE, to the auction during a 21-day timeframe by sending them to a specified address. 
  • No KYC or registration of any kind is required, except creating a Maya wallet beforehand (User Interfaces can do this for you, we will release more information soon). 
  • No swaps and no withdrawals will be allowed during this period, only adding and withdrawing liquidity!
  • After the auction finishes, 90% of the $CACAO tokens are distributed to the participants proportional to their liquidity contributions and the remaining 10% goes to the ILP reserve. For example: if $BTC is 40% of the liquidity raised, that pool receives 40% of the $CACAO allocation.
  • That’s it! Participants end up being Liquidity Providers by having their contributed assets + their new $CACAO tokens deposited inside Maya’s pools, facilitating swaps to other users and earning a share of the fees generated.

Advantages of the Liquidity Auction model

Maya Protocol’s token distribution using a Liquidity Auction comes with many advantages:

1. The community ends up owning the token

Decentralized and permissionless, our system governance ensures fair play for all. The team earns a percentage of fees, meaning we only profit when the community does.

2. Symmetry of information

Everyone has the same chance to participate during the 21 days duration of the auction. There are no discounts, no privileged information, front running or unfair allocations.

3. Dynamic inflation

To prevent situations where too much $CACAO sits idle outside of our pools, the concept of Dynamic Inflation has been introduced.

When more than 10% of $CACAO is withdrawn from liquidity pools, new $CACAO is emitted at a rate determined by the amount currently in pools. This new $CACAO is distributed to current depositors and Node operators, keeping all participants in consistent economic conditions. Those holding $CACAO outside of the system face inflationary erosion and a greater incentive to become liquidity providers again.

4. Large incentives to participate

Remember, there will not be any other $CACAO issuances, so anybody that wants to own the token will have to acquire it from somebody that got it during this mint.

5. Simplicity

Only one open permissionless cross-chain liquidity event to rule them all. The rules are clear, everything is managed directly in the Maya Blockchain, making it very secure and open to everyone.

Liquidity Auction Withdrawals Tiers

To prevent rapid withdrawals/dumps right after the $CACAO distribution and subsequent lockup period ends, the concept of Liquidity Auction Withdrawals Tiers has been introduced.

With this model, liquidity providers with longer-term horizons are slightly rewarded at the expense of shorter-term players, and the protocol gets some extra time to gain traction and reach stability. These Tiers work like so:

Risks and Lockup Period Opt-out

  • Warning! If the LA is deemed disadvantageous for any reason (for example, there was too little liquidity raised) and the community decides to undo everything via Ragnarok, Tier 2 and 3 LPs might end up receiving back less than they originally deposited and effectively take a loss.
  • LPs that prefer not to have these types of risks or withdrawal limits can wait for the Liquidity Auction to be over and manually acquire $CACAO from a pool to then add liquidity. LP positions of Wallets entered this way will have no limits or lockups.

The best strategy for aspiring nodes is to participate as a Tier 1 LP, given that they theoretically have a long-term commitment already. This would mean a better shot at having more Liquidity to win liquidity bond wars and churn in.

In Short

The Liquidity Auction is cleverly designed to start a virtuous circle for our protocol. Since there will not be subsequent $CACAO issuance, users that want to own the token will have to acquire it from somebody that participated in this initial mint, making it very likely that the price of $CACAO will be the cheapest - relative to BTC - right after the auction. People investing heavily during the Liquidity Auction is of course what we want, as it leads to deeper pools, reduced slippage and slip fees, attractive arbing opportunities, and overall liquidity depth. Liquidity attracts swap volume!

Maya’s Liquidity Auction represents an incredible opportunity for retail investors to participate in a transparent and profitable ‘Fairdrop’ and we are looking forward to having you onboard!

You can learn more about our Liquidity Auction by reading the first Chapter of our Whitepaper here. And you can stay up to date with us by subscribing to our Newsletter or joining our Discord Server!