TL;DR: Transaction fees on the Trustlines Blockchain will be paid in the blockchain’s native coin: the Trustlines Network Coin (TLC). A Merkle drop on Ethereum will distribute Trustlines Network Tokens (TLN), which can be converted into TLC using a token bridge. The Merkle drop is used as a tool to:
- Reward early contributors, e.g. validators, testers, developers and others,
- Target potential stakeholders of the Trustlines Network, e.g. individuals/ projects aligned with the mission of Trustlines, who may turn into users of the Trustlines technology stack,
- Make TLC available to a wide audience consisting of addresses and individuals from within the crypto and community currency ecosystems by providing them with TLN that they can convert into TLC via the bridge.
TLN won’t be pushed onto accounts, but will instead have to be claimed from the Merkle drop smart contract. To increase your chances of being eligible for the Merkle drop you can send an Ethereum address you have ownership over to @TrustlinesFound on Twitter.
Introducing the Trustlines Merkle drop
As outlined in the Trustlines Blockchain announcement, the Trustlines Blockchain requires transaction fees to be paid in the cryptocurrency native to the blockchain: the Trustlines Network Coins (TLC). However, in order to reach a broad set of individuals, a Merkle drop (a “non-spammy” version of an airdrop) of Trustlines Network Tokens (TLN) will be conducted on Ethereum. TLN are ERC20 tokens which can be converted to TLC by sending them to a bridge contract.
While determining the optimal distribution method for TLN, we picked best practices from, and innovated on top of, traditional early contributor schemes and newer models like smart drops. The thereby designed method aims to address those most likely to benefit from and be part of the Trustlines Network ecosystem now or in future. We implemented the method in the form of a Merkle drop to avoid spamming recipients and the chain and to have the recipients actively claim the tokens.
The Trustlines Merkle drop is a smart contract deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. It contains a list of addresses and the amount of claimable Trustlines Network Tokens (TLN) per address in the form of a Merkle root. In order to claim the tokens, recipients will have to provide a Merkle proof to this contract which shows that they are entitled to TLN.
The Foundation aims to distribute up to 70% of TLN of which 50% will be allocated in the first Merkle drop. More details will be communicated once the final Merkle drop list has been created.
Send us your ETH address via Twitter!
We offer the option to self-register for the Merkle drop online using “Proof-of-sociality” via a friends-of-friends principle. If you want to increase your chances of receiving tokens from the Merkle drop, simply send a DM with your ETH address to the Trustlines Foundation Twitter account. Please note, that you can only send one ETH address per person. If you send us multiple messages, we will use the latest incoming ETH address.
You can check out this blog post for more details on the “Proof-of-sociality” process, which we initially designed for the validator candidates.
The Merkle drop recipients & key figures
Since we couldn’t possibly know all of the future users of the Trustlines Blockchain yet, we decided to choose a token distribution method which allows to provide TLN to many recipients as widespread and as fair as possible. Our motivation behind distributing TLN freely is to provide a wide range of potential users and partners the liquidity to use the Trustlines Blockchain.
The current high level distribution plan looks as follows:
The Merkle drop will include recipients from two buckets:
- A wide target audience
- A collection of early contributors and stakeholders
The wide target audience will consist of ETH addresses from two data sources:
- Collection of ETH addresses, that underwent some form of identity verification in the past. We chose addresses from past token distribution events in order to decrease the risk of sending too many tokens to one individual with several ETH addresses.
- Self-signups via Twitter using the “chain of friends” technique.
The bucket of early contributors and future stakeholders will contain the following Trustlines ecosystem members:
- Validators and validator candidates
- Directly and indirectly contributing developers
- Advisors
- Testers
- Projects with an aligned vision/mission
- Projects which develop software components for the Trustlines Protocol or its ecosystem
- Potential future users (incl. projects) of the Trustlines Protocol
- Individuals helping with awareness education
- All addresses included in the Ethereum token sale (genesis block)
Please feel free to reach out to us via Twitter DM if you are a project planning on building on the Trustlines Protocol or contributing to it to be considered for future token distributions!
The top goal of this Merkle drop is to make TLN available to those who will utilize it, hence the choice of the recipients in the second bucket was driven by likelihood of adoption and contribution to the Trustlines ecosystem.
Checking eligibility and claiming your TLN tokens
Once the Merkle drop is live, you can visit the Trustlines Merkle drop website to check if any of your ETH addresses are eligible to withdraw TLN. Then you will be able to create the necessary Merkle proof or claim your tokens directly via a web3 browser integration. You will find all the details on how to claim your tokens step-by-step on the website.
To ensure future economics of the Trustlines Blockchain, claiming tokens will be only possible in a time window of 2 years. The amount of claimable TLN will decrease linearly over these 2 years.
Token details
TLN will be created by deploying a smart contract on Ethereum with the following token specifications:
A mono-directional token bridge from Ethereum to the Trustlines Blockchain will provide the functionality to exchange TLN to TLC.
Timeline
The current plan is to conduct the Merkle drop in Q4/2019. You will be informed via our social channels as soon as the Merkle drop is live. Once the Merkle drop is live, we will share a list of all recipient addresses as well as the total number of tokens allocated in the Merkle drop.
Again, make sure to send us your ETH address to @TrustlinesFound on Twitter to be included in the recipients pool!
If you are interested in learning more about the technical details of the Merkle drop concept, we recommend having a look at the Trustlines Merkle drop code on Github or read more about other Merkle drop related topics, e.g. Livepeer’s MerkleMine.
Best wishes,
The Trustlines Foundation
To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter or join the discussion on Reddit!