Opals Litepaper
The crypto world stands at a crossroads. What began as a movement to build durable digital institutions has become obsessed with narratives and quick flips. The memecoin mentality reduced projects to casino chips with hidden allocations, while even the most promising teams get trapped managing token vesting schedules and mercenary capital instead of building.
We're here to change that. Opals brings back the radical idea that smart contracts should be actual contracts - unbreakable commitments that outlive their creators. Not financial instruments, but digital constitutions. Issued and enforced by code, for the duration of the project.
The Future of Tokenomics
We believe that tokenisation is a powerful tool, that every project should create and distribute digital assets to their community, contributors and advisors from day one. Once members own asset they become invested and aligned with the success of the project. Conversely, tokenomics and the allocation of tokens should be delayed as long as possible until either the product has PMF (Product Market Fit) or the community forms an identity. The risk lies in allocating points or tokens before product market fit leads to token speculation before the TGE, or worse, cannibalising your primary sale or ICO. All digital assets pre TGE should be non fungible (NFTs). This allows for projects to mint and distribute Cards from day one, and later, when it comes time, allocate via tokenomics for each Cart collection, or at the CardID granularity. You need to all the Cards distributed to be able to do such tokenomics, otherwise you get stuck in the airdrop meta which is retrospective and impossible to get right.
The Opals Method
We see capital formation as a 4-stage process over time:
Create - Mint and distribute digital assets from day one. Collectables, not points to community / team / advisors based on contributions.
Sell - Limited edition Patron Cards to raise capital towards token liquidity
Launch - When communities reach critical mass, patron sales accumulate, eventually launching a token when a set price cap is reached.
Claim - Card holders, both contributors and patrons, can claim tokens over a set vesting period, with diamond hand mechanics.
Components of this model has birthed projects like Infinex Protocol ($60M raised through Patron NFTs) as well as TrueMarkets Patron Cards. Even Pudgy Penguins resembles the core of this model of building a community represented by NFTs, and later, once there was a critical mass, issued the $PUDGY token and allow for NFT holders to claim. The only difference is we want to add some extra token engineering tools for teams and communities to replace clout with trustless onchain agreements,
The Path Ahead
We're a team of cypherpunk veterans who've weathered three market cycles, now joined by DAO builders and DeFi pioneers looking to develop this new primitive - not another launchpad, but the foundation for projects that need to survive.
The endgame is simple: make "rugpull" an archaic term. Let builders build without becoming liquidity managers. Prove that decentralized projects can outlast centralized corporations. Ethereum enabled this future - Opals delivers it.
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