Decrypt Reader Token: What Comes Next

In March, Decrypt launched our DCPT reader token, and the first “season” was sponsored by Filecoin. Now that the end of our first season is in sight, we’re ready to talk a bit about how it went, what we learned, and what’s in store for the token beyond Season 1.

In just over three months since the start of our first season, we saw over 74,000 new wallet activations, with a broad and relatively even distribution of 21 million DCPT tokens. We wanted to minimize the emergence of whales and token farming with a daily issuance cap, verified account registration, and a one-wallet-per-device policy, and generally succeeded to that end, with the top wallet holder having just shy of 0.03% of the total DCPT supply.

For our first reward drop, we offered 150 custom NFTs to our token holders. We have since granted these NFTs—and by extension the owners of the 120 wallet addresses that hold them—unique content voting rights on our Snapshot page, where members can vote on what educational content they’d like to see next on Decrypt.

We learned a lot during Season 1, along with a few humbling lessons. 

First, it was challenging for our small team to build new token functionality and at the same time create and release on-chain rewards. While rewards were a good place to start, sidechain capabilities and the ecosystem of Solidity smart contract functionality continued to grow. The DeFi “Cambrian explosion” has resulted in proven on-chain governance and coordination tools that we want to provide to the Decrypt community.

In the next iteration of our token protocol, we plan to completely rethink our token so that it doesn’t just serve as an in-app engagement tool, but instead becomes the platform for an industry-leading, community-governed Web 3.0 publication. As a first step, we will be graduating our reader reward token from the OST platform to Ethereum mainnet.

We are immensely grateful for the assistance of the OST team and supporters along our path. The OST platform offers a unique way for us to deploy in-app token functionality that satisfied the requirements of regulated mobile app stores. It also is one of the few solutions that can handle the scale of our rapidly growing reader base.

After Season 1, we plan to launch a broader protocol in the coming months with better interoperability and a more powerful feature set. Most importantly, this protocol will build on top of the initial distribution of DCPT tokens provided by Season 1. We plan to offer a 1:1 swap or distribution of our OST-chain DCPT token for this new ERC-20 token, which will have no economic or ownership value but exciting new audience and community features which we can’t wait to share. The mobile app will continue to show DCPT balances for users that signed up before the end of Season 1, at least until we complete the migration, but new app users will not see a reference to DCPT and no users will be able to earn more DCPT after Season 1 ends.

This new protocol effort is our top priority, and we want to focus on it 100%. As such, we are pausing new reward drops, at least until we’re ready to share more details about the initial protocol work. We do not plan to mint more DCPT on the OST chain at this time. Once all 21 million DCPT are distributed, we will pause new token issuance and re-assess in light of the new protocol’s goals.

We’re very excited about this new direction, and will be sharing more details soon. Consider this a pre-announcement, and stay tuned!