Aqualis Tokenomics Update v3

Summary of Updates

AQL token price has been halved for whitelist sale and public sale, seed and pre-seed price remains the same. Previous whitelist contributors will receive an airdrop.

Core team allocation has been reduced by 50%

Advisor allocation has been reduced by 50%

Seed sale allocation has been reduced by 80%

Public sale allocation has been reduced by 67%

Public sale fund raise target reduced by 83%

Operations budget allocation increased by 65%

Deposit incentive/fairlaunch allocation increased by over 100%

Token Price

This is in fact the second time we have reduced the price of AQL tokens. The first time back in August represented a drop of roughly 37.5% following the bearish sentiment presented by the market. Since then, it is clear with BTC and ETH dropping over 70% since ATH, and many altcoins dropping 80–90%, a 37.5% drop was not cutting it, hence the additional 50% reduction.

Shift from Team to Community

The second major update is the shift of tokens from the team to the community.

Initially, the team looked at dozens of DAO tokenomics, from "fairlaunches" to VC funded ones. Aqualis decided to do a mix, with a fair launch allocation, VC allocation and team allocation. Despite the team allocation being modest, a 7 year vesting period was also applied, the longest vesting period of any DAO tokenomics we saw at the time.

As part of this update, we have reduced the core team and advisor allocation by 50% while retaining the 7 year vesting schedule. This is simply because with the help of the bear market, costs have been significantly reduced, thus we have used less capital than anticipated to produce our current smart contracts.

Reduced Funding Required

Frankly, the team did not expect to get this far without using any external funding. In fact, we are on track to complete our entire phase 0 release without touching any of our external funding wallet. However, auditing will likely require chip into this slightly.

Due to this, the seed sale allocation has been significantly reduced by 80%. Furthermore, the public sale allocation has been reduced by 67%.

Increased Rewards Required

For those who have read our whitepaper, you will know that 100% of the public sale actually goes to the protocol owned liquidity (PoL) to power the protocol's liquidity pools. With a reduced token price and public sale allocation, PoL has been significantly reduced. Due to this, we have moved all of the AQL token reductions into the fairlaunch allocation, thus increasing the reward pool for deposits into the protocol.

Although this is not ideal, Aqualis recognizes this is a necessary step to ensure the protocol runs efficiently from the onset. Further adjustments can be made via the DAO once rewards are live.

Ultimately, once the PoL has enough funds to support the protocol, rewards will be significantly lowered, or turned off completely to ensure a sustainable token design.

Conclusion

These updated tokenomics now brings Aqualis into the present market conditions. Although this has ultimately changed our strategy of creating a self sustaining platform using PoL, we believe it is necessary to succeed in these market conditions. We will use a hybrid model combining self-sustaining and fairlaunch to optimize efficiency and emissions. We hope this is further evidence to the community that the Aqualis team is adaptable and always looking at the bigger picture.