Core Contributor Escrow Announcement

As the more astute members of the Synthetix community are aware, there have been two major token events in the last two months. The first was on the 13th of March 2020: a special day in Synthetix history, marking the two year anniversary of the original HAV token launch on mainnet. The second was yesterday, the 30th of April, the first vesting date for the SNX inflationary rewards.

The vesting schedule for the core contributors (specified during the token sale back in 2017) was two years with tokens unlocking quarterly. This means that as of the 13th of March this year, all core contributor tokens were fully vested. With that said, more than 95% of these tokens are currently staked, so are unlikely to be sold in the short term. However, given that these tokens are unlocked, the core contributors have decided to show their continued commitment to the project and renew the token escrow period for an additional year.

The core contributor and advisory allocation was originally 20m tokens. Over the last few years a number of people have left the project, representing ~5m tokens, and new people have joined, so the total tokens being escrowed is ~30m. The yield last year for active stakers was around 100% if you started staking on the 13th of March 2019. On that date ~15m tokens were controlled by current contributors so it is fairly clear these holders are still holding their original tokens.

The complexity of executing this escrow process is high due to the fact that most of these tokens are currently being staked as collateral. It will take a month or so to write the contracts to execute these transactions and upgrade the current escrow contract to cater for this new vesting schedule.

The new mechanism will allow core contributors to call a contract that will execute the migration of their SNX back into the escrow contract, with a vesting schedule starting from the anniversary date on 13th of March 2020 running through to the 13th of March 2021. As previously mentioned, this is a psychologically important date in the community. The escrow process will also update all inflationary rewards and roll them into this quarterly schedule, which means no tokens will vest until the 13th of June 2020. A SIP documenting the process will be released shortly. This function is of course public, so diehard community members are more than welcome to join us in re-escrowing their tokens as well :)

We are only just getting started, and the Synthetix core contributors have never been more excited by the prospects for growth of the Synthetix protocol. We want to demonstrate this commitment and give back to the community that has supported the project so amazingly by committing ourselves to another year of token escrow.