wen FLOAT launch?

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Float Protocol

4 min readApr 6, 2021

In light of a successful distribution and other algorithmic stablecoins launching in recent weeks, we are frequently asked when Float Protocol plans to launch. In this article, we set out the timetable so you can start marking your diaries.

Background

For those who don’t know, Float Protocol is a stablecoin offering short-term stability and long-term purchasing power protection. This means that:

It isn’t $dollar tied.
It can provide a proper denomination of stability for crypto instead of that of TradFi.
Unlike other stablecoins, Float’s target price changes a little bit daily depending on what happens to demand for it and the crypto market.
In the short-run you won’t notice the difference, in the long-run the changes could be significant ( +/ 0–20% in a year) to ensure your wealth maintains purchasing power.
If it is popular/unpopular, it will keep slowly adjusting up or down to reflect the reality of demand for itself and price inflation in crypto.

In terms of distribution, we launched our governance/support token, BANK, via a democratic launch where over 3,000 addresses and $1.5bn of capital took part. We also have a deep liquidity pool for BANK to be used as a vital part of the system.

Additional reading:

FLOAT and the Money Gods

We compare FLOAT to RAI and FAI in terms of peg, stabilisation and risks/trade-offs

floatprotocol.medium.com

We are all Satoshi

Many people ask why we decided to be the Abbey Road Hackers and adopt the Paul M/John L/George H/Ringo S aliases. We…

floatprotocol.medium.com

Announcing Float Protocol and its democratic launch

Floating, low-volatility currency for web3, by a team of anonymous researchers.

medium.com

It’s been great so far, but we are just getting started:

Internally, we set ourselves as few milestones before launching:

Create a system people believe will work (through a rigorous ideation process at the Encode Club hack and peer reviews by experienced developers) 🎯
Create a fair launch to distribute the BANK token widely (we successfully distributed BANK to over 2000 active DeFi governance participants, capped at $30k each) 🎯
Achieve awareness for what we are building (we were the biggest farm during our Phase 2 distribution week) 🎯
Launch the Protocol ⏳ (👇)

Pumped to launch

Monday 12th April: Code Freeze 🧊

We will be finishing up development of the V1 smart contracts by Monday 12th April. No more changes to the code will be made after this date. A big change in recent weeks has been the auctions, which can now be called on-demand, and a new mechanism for controlling the target price. Both of these will be outlined in full in our interactive litepaper (see below for details). The code contains the following elements:

🔨 Auction Mechanisms (on-demand to automatically offer to mint or buy/burn FLOAT)
💸 Monetary policy (target price changes)
🛒 Basket (used to buy FLOAT and support it’s price)
🔮 Price oracles (to tell the system what the price of FLOAT and ETH is)
🔥Token minting/burning (for FLOAT and BANK during auctions)
🏦 Treasury (used to fund development and growth moving forward)

Monday 12th April to Monday 3rd May (3 weeks): Audit and peer review period 🔎

Like our Democratic Launch and Distribution contracts, we will be using peer reviews again. These are leading and experienced developers who have built production smart contracts who will be dedicating their time to ensure the security of the protocol is watertight. As a reminder, the contracts we wrote for the distribution held over $1.5bn with no issues.

We will also be engaging traditional audit firms alongside the peer review process as an additional check.

Thursday 6th May to Sunday 9th May (3 days): Minting ceremony 🚀

Over a three day period, you will be able to buy FLOAT for the first time. In a change of plan, after seeing other protocols offer incentives for minting their stablecoin, we won’t be offering rewards for participating in the mint process. Instead, we will encourage people to buy FLOAT to use it for its original purpose: as money, as alternative to ETH as collateral, as a digital denomination for crypto (more details to be released).

The 5% rewards reserved for the minting ceremony will be allocated to incentivising the FLOAT-ETH (more specifics on that soon)

Monday 10th May: First Auction 🔨

24h after the end of the minting ceremony, we will run the first auction. As a reminder, our auctions are cool because:

They’re on demand. If someone thinks FLOAT is off its target price, they can start one at anytime and instantly take the arbitrage opportunity. (initially there will be a 24h “waiting period” between auctions)
The Protocol will automatically either offer to mint/sell or buy/burn FLOAT at decreasing price increments.
Profits from expansions (minting and selling FLOAT to close the arbitrage opportunity) go to BANK holders.
The Protocol uses its Basket (supply of cryptocurrencies) to buy FLOAT and then burn it when it is below target. Neatly, when the protocol buys FLOAT below target, it actually increases its Basket Factor (the % of Basket relative to circulating FLOAT). More to come in our Interactive Litepaper.