Announcing $FLX Token and Mainnet Launch Details

Flux announces its LBP on Balancer on Dec 1st and Mainnet Launch details

6 min readNov 15, 2021

It has been a busy month for us — our engineering team alongside the community validators and staking service providers have been working tirelessly to fine-tune our mainnet launch experience. Meanwhile, rarely a week goes by without the community asking about our mainnet launch ( if we only had a penny for every “wen token” batted our way ), but with the launch of our decentralized oracle to our first Layer One, NEAR, $FLX will start to power the next generation of defi!

Economically Securing Data Feeds

Oracles are the most important building blocks for decentralized applications that need information about the ‘real world’ to function. There is currently no cost-effective way to protect data inputted by data providers — the people who keep the blockchain running. The data market is complex, with many moving parts and pieces of data interacting in various ways. This complexity makes it nearly impossible to implement robust solutions without spending millions of dollars. With the rise in data manipulation, there is a real need for a utility token that will create incentives for users to be involved in curating data as well as penalize those who submit fraudulent data.

Flux Protocol is designed to ensure that the end-user has the power to act as an arbiter by positioning them to validate or invalidate the accuracy of the data that is presented powered by the FLX token. The token will be utilized by data providers to stake for oracle interface rights, provide data on the network, and challenge data on the protocol.

For every data request on the network, validators have to put up $FLX tokens as bonds to stake on the right outcome for requests on the network. This bonding mechanism secures the inputs needed to validate transactions on the network, ensuring that honest validators are favored by honest users. By default, the outcome with the most tokens staked on it is adjudged to be the right result. However, this can be challenged by staking on a different outcome. As the participant commitment increases, the bond required for participants to challenge increases accordingly. These escalating bonds incentivize users to act honestly, while also providing negative incentives for acting maliciously.

“Flux is the first of its kind oracle design that creates a new security model for DeFi. With the launch of Flux, DeFi will, for the first time, leverage a completely decentralized infrastructure. We are proud to be working with projects like the Graph to ensure the whole stack is decentralized, including the data layer.”
Jasper De Gooijer, Co-Founder of Flux

Community Curated and Governed

Any user can spin up a validator node on the mainnet with no minimum staking requirements to resolve data request outcomes created and curated by Request interfaces. These interfaces are elected by the community to execute data requests from users on the network and can only be elected after proposing to the DAO. The Flux DAO is responsible for approving the whitelisting of new protocols.

Anybody holding FLX is a member of the DAO. They can also propose the inclusion of any protocol into the whitelist by submitting a proposal for the rest of the DAO to review and vote on. The consensus for any proposal is 70% of all votes after which, there’s a 24-hours grace period before the proposed change is implemented. This grace period allows validators who are not in agreement with the proposal to exit before its implementation.

The Launch Event

Flux Protocol will launch NEAR mainnet on or before the 30st of November. This launch is intended to be decentralized from the start, requiring validators and request interface to have $FLX tokens in order to process and validate requests on the network. However, the decentralization of the launch mainnet is only as good as its token distribution model.

Having reviewed various distribution models and how often those who are willing to champion the cause of the project either get “priced out” of participation or succumb to the caprices of Lady Luck during the token distribution event, we’ve opted for a model that allows everyone to participate in the event while also letting the free market determine the value of the token. The model we have chosen is a Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) and distributed via a Fair Launch Auction ( FLA).

“FLAs provide a project with a fair distribution mechanism which ensures the community is able to take place in the listing of $FLX without ever-increasing gas fees or front-running exposure from bots or arbitrage traders,”
Peter Mitchell, Co-Founder of Flux

The liquidity and token distribution challenge that new protocols face in establishing their network effects are immense. The LBP is an open model that allows anybody to participate in the creation of a token community and its liquidity while bestowing shared ownership across the community as a whole.

Fair Launch Auction offers the following benefits:

Price discovery: At the beginning of the token distribution, the price of the token starts high and decreases on a pre-configured price decay curve. This decay curve can be resisted by auction participants that interact with the sale and purchase the token. Any participant can buy into or sell into the auction at any time, always maintaining a fair price.

Open and permission-less: The LBP has no whitelists, listing requirements, or hard caps. There is no minimum or maximum requirements for allocation, providing full control to the participants.

Fair distribution: FLAs change the launch model — instead of users competing with bots and transactions with the highest gas fee they are able to participate in the auction without the risk of front-running.

Capital efficiency: The initial price of $FLX will be magnified up to 95% relative to the USDC collateral deposited along with it.

The FLA will be the last opportunity to acquire $FLX before pools and incentives go live. The details for the event are as follows:

Auction Date: Dec 1st, 2021
$FLX Max Circulating Supply: 1,000,000,000
Starting Price per $FLX: $2.00
Ending Price with no Buy/Sell action: $0.1035
$FLX Initial LBP Supply: 15,000,000
$FLX Initial Weight: 95%
$FLX Final Weight: 50%
$USDC Initial Supply: $1,578,950
Hourly Rate: -0.006250
Duration: 72 hours

Modeling Potential Results

Since the free market will be deciding the value of the asset, it will be impossible to predict the final outcome. However, we can model the outcome of four potential scenarios for the event.

LBP Without Any Bull/Sell Orders

Amount Raised: $0
Amount Raised per hour: $0

LBP With a Low Raise

Amount Raised: $5M
Amount Raised per hour: $69.4K

LBP With a Medium Raise

Amount Raised: $15M
Amount Raised per hour: $208.3K

LBP With a High Raise

Amount Raised: $30M
Amount Raised per hour: $416.7K

FLA Prerequisite

The $FLX launch will take place on a frontend called Copper Launch. Copper Launch is an intuitive interface for Fair Launch distribution, allowing users to easily swap into the liquidity pool while providing information on the token distribution, price, and decay mechanism for due diligence.

After the auction has concluded, the Flux DAO will supply liquidity to various dexes with liquidity mining rewards.

In order to use Copper Launch, you will need:

An ERC20 wallet address that you own the mnemonic/private key to e.g Metamask
Some ETH for gas fee
USDC to participate in the FLA pool

In the next article, we’ll be showing you how to participate in the FLA.

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