Vesting to Resume July 30th, plus Staking, Mainnet Updates
Vesting will resume as planned on the 30th of July. For those who participated in the sales in March, this means you can expect 15% of your tokens to unlock on the 30th, then 15% per month going forward. Your final tokens will unlock five months from now.
Staking Update
Details are being finalized for our staking program. It will use a structure with monthly accruing interest, with APY dependent on the lock up period chosen when staking. The size of your stake will not matter — we do not want to punish smaller holders by giving better returns to whales.
When initiating staking, you will be able to choose between staking with no lockup, or with a lockup of between 3–24 months, with increasing APYs the longer you lock tokens in for. After the lockup period ends, your staking is automatically converted into unlocked staking, until you withdraw your tokens or lock your stake in again. If there is too much interest in the staking program, we may have to put a cap on the total amount of tokens that can be staked, in order to safeguard liquidity and not burn through reserves too quickly. The exact APYs will be announced shortly ahead of the launch.
The staking process will require users to interact with a smart contract. It is absolutely critical that you do not send tokens from anywhere other than a private address that you and you alone control the seed for. If you send tokens from gate.io, or any other place that is not your private wallet, you will lose the funds. To reclaim your tokens at the end of the staking, you will need to use the same address as you sent the tokens from.
The tokens used to pay this accruing interest will be taken from the Validator & Staking rewards allocation, which makes up 20% of the total supply of ORAO tokens. The staking program will go live in mid-August.
Mainnet Release
When we initially planned out our roadmap, we set the release of the mainnet for the end of July. At that time, our plan was to build initially for Polkadot, in pursuit of maximum interoperability. Unfortunately, over the course of 2020 and 2021, it has become increasingly clear that Polkadot itself would not be ready by the end of July. Therefore we have had to split our development efforts between building on the one hand for Polkadot as it comes closer to a launch ready state, and on the other hand we have had to build for other ecosystems earlier than originally planned, such as Ethereum, our partners at Elrond, and others.
This means that our mainnet launch will not be ready at the end of this month. There unfortunately is not much we can do about the fact that the baselayer we were building for has not itself launched its mainnet.
The ORAO network performs well on our developer test net, but we do not have a date set for the public release. It will depend on a number of factors, from security testing to ongoing partnership negotiations with data buyers.
As always, you can learn more about ORAO by visiting our website, digging into our whitepaper, or joining our Telegram channel to speak directly to members of the team and our community.
