Contract Update, Vesting, and Staking Announcement
On the 3rd of May, the day we launched our token contract, someone trying to invest in ORAO sent 19,980 USDT to our contract address. You can see the transaction here on etherscan.
This is not how trading works. There has been no sale since March, and even back then, you could not join the sale just by throwing money at an address. Especially not a contract address. And to top it all off, he sent the money directly from an exchange. Which means, we couldn’t even see who the money came from, all we knew was that it came from the Huobi hotwallet.
The ORAO token contract was not written to support non-ORAO transactions. It was written to support vesting and the claiming of tokens as they unlock. Moreover, it was written to support interactions only with specific addresses, approved ahead of time when the contract was first created. So naturally, when this user sent 20,000 dollars to the contract address, nothing happened.
The user soon contacted members of the team. There were significant language barriers, and it took some time to explain to him the nuances involved. Ultimately, we determined that the only way to help him was to update the contract and add functionality for the contract to send money back to him.
Updating a token contract is kind of a pain in the ass. It’s where all the important rules for vesting and token supply are stored, and so if you expand or change the contract, well now nobody knows what else you might have changed, and you need to do a new security audit. Security audits by reputable firms cost several thousand dollars.
We considered just making the user pay for all the costs around the contract update. Without the update there is absolutely no way to retrieve his funds, after all. But, that wouldn’t be very nice. And so instead we have been considering what else we would do if we were going to do a contract update anyway.
Token Vesting Update
Over the last few weeks, a number of projects have chosen to update their vesting schedules, due to explosive market volatility, gas fees which have been bouncing between 40 and 400 gwei, etc. Other projects to look at for examples of these updates include DAFI and Hord.
Among other issues, these volatilities hurt later stage investors more deeply than they hurt early investors, whose allocations are significantly larger per person. $100 fees are easier to stomach when you are claiming $10,000’s worth of tokens than $800, for instance.
For these reasons, we have decided to follow DAFI, Hord and others, and slightly update our vesting schedule. The next unlock will be set for the 30th of July. This should allow the wider market to settle down and pick a trend, and also allow gas fees to come down significantly following the implementation of optimistic rollups and EIP 1559. The vesting amounts and percentages will not change, and starting with July the unlocks will be set to always fall on the 30th. This means if you invested in March, you will unlock 15% in July, August, September, October and November, and the final 10% in December 2021. Naturally, no team or adviser tokens will unlock this year, and no tokens at all will unlock during the delay period.
Introducing ORAO’s Staking Program
As we approach the launch of ORAO’s oracle mainnet, we have been finalizing the reward structures for validators, minimum token requirements, etc. We have received a great deal of feedback and requests from our community, and one feature that has been in high demand is a simple staking option.
Therefore, we will introduce one. Of the total supply of one billion tokens, 200 million were set aside for validator rewards. Per popular demand we will be expanding this program to include straight forward staking as well.
ORAO is an ambitious oracle project. Nevertheless, in the early days of the network there may not consistently be high demand for data products until the network can prove itself and grow over time. A staking program will allow early supporters and investors to engage with the network and receive rewards over time, regardless of short term market movements or data demand.
The staking program will launch around the launch of the mainnet, and more details will be announced as we draw nearer to the release.
If you have questions, or anything else you would like to discuss, you are most welcome to join our Telegram group and talk to members of our team and our community. To learn more about ORAO, also check out our Medium archive and our website.
