Tokenomics and Comps Analysis

Tokenomics

The ANKR token is an ERC-20 standard with main use cases are utility and governance. Most of the tokens are used as a service payment within the ecosystem – node deployment and API services. Despite employing an earning mechanism, there is no inflation integrated to the token itself.

The total supply of tokens is 10 billion. 80% are currently in circulation; the remaining 20% would be used for distribution programs, developer grants, and provide liquidity to future listing in exchanges – by August 2022, 100% would be unlocked. 2% (equivalent to 200 million tokens) have been burned in efforts to earn $SPARTA more here. As a staker, users are required at minimum ANKR equivalent of 2 ETH to guarantee services to the network. There is no delegated Proof-of-Stake at present.

The governance mechanism of ANKR are as follows: creating a proposal requires the proposer to lock 5 million ANKR (equivalent to 0.05%) → queues for 2 days whilst governance admin verifies its propriety → proposal approved, then voted upon certain period of days set by the proposer → proposer’s ANKR is locked for 2 weeks → implementation.

Competitors

The network successfully raised $18.7 million through an ICO on September 21, 2018. ANKR decided to list its first public sale in OpenToken – ecosystem for hosting token sales. At that time, the ICO price of 1 ANKR was equivalent to $0.0066 with 35% of token available in the sale.

Following through the network’s public sale, ANKR has gone through several venture rounds, several of its notable and lead investors include DHVC, Pantera Capital, and NEO Global Capital. In November 2019, 2017, ANKR raised $120K from Ryan Frang – angel investor. The first venture round was on June 15, 2018 – alongside $12M raised by an undisclosed number of investors. The most recent venture round was on June 21, 2018 which successfully raised $15M by investors such as JD Capital, JLAB, Block VC, Mapleblock Capital, Link VC, and OK Blockchain Capital.

In essence, ANKR is solving these underlying problems that other similar cloud platform could not:

• Hardware challenge of distributed/decentralized cloud networks to support initiatives

• Incentive for harnessing nodes within a network or community

• Inherent inefficiencies of economies under centralized authority

QNT

Tokenomics

As a platform that provides an Overledger Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) gateway, the QNT holds a crucial role in the network. The underlying technology behind Quant is the Overledger OS and the Overledger Network; Overledger OS is the front-end of the platform where users could access it and operate between several blockchains and the Overledger Network is the main hub for all the blockchain connected. The QNT is regulated by FINMA as an ERC-20 utility token with goals of payment for digital access to the interoperability nature of several blockchains in the Quant Network service. The access price is a fiat rate’s equivalent to QNT decided by the in-house oracle market price.

Initially, the state of QNT’s token is unclear – there is no mention of creating a token in the whitepaper and the CEO (Gilbert Verdian) declared of no plans. QNT started off with initial supply at genesis of roughly 45.5 million tokens, according to an interview with Gilbert this was the max supply. Though, just a few months after TGE, the tokens are presumably burnt 66% of total supply from their twitter account. This was refuted from their medium post, stating that only 9.5 million QNT is burnt (20.8% of total supply).

The current distribution is as follows: Total Supply – 14.61M, Public/Circulation – 9.96M, Company Reserve – 4.65M.

Another important note is that the QNT as a payment for digital access would be locked up for 12 months, further pressuring price action.

Competitors

The company successfully raised $11M from an ICO in early May 2018. The price is $1.58 per QNT, soft cap is $16M and planned hard cap is $40M. Following the ICO, the network successfully attracted Alpha Sigma Capital and Antonio Furtado through venture round and secondary market, respectively, with undisclosed value invested.

XYO

Tokenomics

Long has the crypto space implemented smart contract mechanisms in the network, however relatively without real-world use cases. The XYO Network aims to solve this issue by creating a platform for Internet-of-Things devices to communicate with a certain goal leveraging geospatial location.

The XYO token is created with the goal of creating a decentralized system of location oracles tamper-resistant to attack and producing the highest certainty of query. To understand the tokenomics itself, further insight into the network is required. XYO has four primary components: Data Gatherer (Sentinels), Data Relay (Bridge), Data Store (Archivist), Answer Aggregators (Diviners). The token is mainly used as a reward payment system. All the components are rewarded $XYO when their information is used to answer a query after being published in the Proof-of-Origin chain (XYOMainChain); this system is similar to PoW chains, however a simple smartphone would be sufficient.

A brief explanation regarding the general mechanism of the network and why XYO is important are as follows: Sentinel’s IoT devices (smartphone, tablet, etc) gather data → bridges relay the data from sentinel to archivist → archivist assembles the data → diviner fetches a user’s query → diviner collects data from archivist → diviner formulates answer and proposes a block containing all the QnA and reward.

Think of it like this, XYO is the ‘gas’ needed to produce a query to the real world. An example of the query would be “Where is my package with XYO address 0x1928384756…”. The user could then set a desired confidence level and XYO gas price at query creation. The amount XYO required is dependent on the level of difficulty the query is; tracking one single package compared to tracking a whole armada of trucks are completely different after all.

The token has a fixed supply after the main sale (13.9B), 8% held by the foundation and 0.02% held by the dev team. The only burn mechanism is all the unsold/unallocated token after the token sale event. No future plans for the XYO generation.

Competitors

The network successfully raised $12M of planned $48M through an ICO in late march 2018. Arthur Linuma, a notable investor from ISBX, invested in the company through ICO. An important note, XYO publicly shares their financials through their Reg A+ equity offering. As of June 30, 2019, the company has $22.3M net working capital.

As of a reddit post 2 years ago, XYO applied to be an NPO foundation – essentially no competitors per se. Through the industry approach, however, several companies such as Tile (non-crypto), Apple (Airtags), $IOU, $FOAM, $PHT (in terms of reward system), and $ETN are all possible competitors of the network.

LPT

Tokenomics

Livepeer is an Ethereum protocol that hosts the platform for startups or organizations to add live or videos. Streamlining the cost and process behind social media platforms, the protocol acts as a decentralized marketplace for developers to build applications that revolves around live or transcoded video – a clear example to this is TikTok.

Generally, there are three roles in the network: developers that are building the next-gen streaming platforms through an API subscription, network security through staking LPT, and video miners that are running a livepeer node and transcode video on GPUs.

The primary purpose of LPT is to coordinate, bootstrap, and incentivize participants to ensure that the network remains as cheap and effective as possible. Other use cases of LPT include bonding mechanism in a delegated PoS system, in which the stake is delegated to transcode videos; routes the work throughout the network in proportion – coordination mechanism; standard unit of account specific to the ecosystem.

To understand the token deeper, four actors in the network: broadcaster – publishes the original stream, transcoder – convert the stream into an accepted format, relay node – distribution of videos, consumer – node requesting stream. As an example, a broadcaster sends a live video along with broadcaster fees in LPT to the network → Livepeer transcodes into all the formats → Orchestrators secure the livepeer integrity through contribution in computer’s resource (CPU, GPU, and bandwidth) → LPT rewarded to orchestrator from the % of broadcaster’s fees.

The LPT token itself is inflationary that will be generated every round, in which 1 round is equivalent to 5760 Ethereum blocks – roughly 22 hours. Leading to an inflation rate of 0.02185%, the total supply is 24.9M. The unique mechanism in Livepeer is the inflation rate adjusts automatically depending on the amount token staked out of the circulating supply, dubbed ‘participation rate’.

Competitors

The platform raised an undisclosed amount of capital through an ICO in late July 2018, there is a total of 6.3M LPT for sale with the price of $25. Preceding the ICO, the platform has raised $3M through seed round with investors: BoxGroup, Distributed Global, Digital Currency Group, and Charge Ventures. In mid-2019, Livepeer successfully raised $8M in series A with Northzone as the lead investor and 7 other investors. The platform raised $40M in total through series B with lead investor Digital Currency Group and other 10 investors.

It is complicated when comparing Livepeer towards other companies since LPT is the infrastructure to build upon, not a standalone platform. However, several companies could be partially compared to Livepeer, such as $VID (standalone decentralized video platform), $HNT (P2P system), $THETA, Amazon (transcoder), and VideoLan (multimedia player transcoder).

FTM

Tokenomics

Fantom is another Ethereum-killer blockchain that aims to improve several fundamental infrastructure. The platform operates in a Directed Acyclic Graph, indicating that it is not a blockchain in essence, however the means of communication is through nodes gossiping to each other.

As a blockchain that is attempting to solve the blockchain trilemma: scalability, security, and decentralization, Fantom created a native token $FTM as the means of transaction. The primary use cases for the token are security to the network through staking, governance voting, and payments (fees).

Fantom leverages a unique PoS consensus mechanism – Lachesis – that leverages the DAG nature of the blockchain. Currently, there are 58 active validators in Lachesis with a requirement of $1M locked to be a validator. This indicates that roughly 32.22M tokens are locked in the network neglecting DeFi and other TVL from FTM itself.

FTM has a fixed total supply of 3.175B with an inflationary model to expand the ecosystem and distribute the unallocated tokens. The team anticipates a 5% annual inflation rate that decreases as more users join the network, 20% of which are intended for rewards and incentive purposes. At TGE, the token distribution is as follows: 40% token sale, 30% market development, 15% advisors/contributors, 15% team and founders. Half of the allocation to the market development would be used for R&D.

The only burn mechanism that FTM employs is during the governance process. A proposal requires 100 FTM to be submitted, of which the tokens are burnt. However, this could be disregarded since it is merely a drop in the ocean compared towards the reward inflation distribution.

Competitors

Fantom successfully raised $39.6M, slightly above the hard cap, with the tokens available for sale at 1.27B (40% of max supply) through an ICO back in mid-June 2018. Prior to the public sale, the foundation raised a total of $40M through venture rounds with investors such as Kosmos Ventures, Signum Capital, Obsidian Capital, Nirvana Venture, Link VC, JRR Group, Hyperchain Capital, Elysium Venture, DHVC, Bibox Fund, and Arrington XRP Capital.

Since most of Fantom’s fundamental systems are mainly from Ethereum with the key difference in blockchain architecture, it is reasonable to compare FTM with other Ethereum alternatives: Cardano, Avalanche, Solana, and slightly Polygon. Based on the TVL, these five blockchains could be compared with Avalanche leading, continued by Fantom, Solana, Polygon, and Cardano’s Ronin.