Unifty Litepaper
What is Unifty?
Unifty is the culmination of grassroots innovation made possible by our team of NFT enthusiasts and DeFi veterans. It is a no-code multi-chain NFT ecosystem, with a continuously growing suite of products, tools, services and micro-DApps for the fast-emerging creator economy. The Unifty economy is built around providing creators the tools and know-how to bring their ideas to reality and monetize them efficiently. That is our core ethos.
Within our ecosystem, creators gain the ability to build powerful NFT-based DApps without needing to know how to write a single line of code. When merged with our dual token model, Unifty paves the way for creators to forge stronger bonds with their community, followers, and consumers, thereby allowing more profitable monetization strategies and revenue streams.
The Tale of Two Tokens
In the beginning, the project’s economic design revolved around a single token model. $NIF was subsequently launched via a fair release straight onto Uniswap. Proof of fairness lies within the fact that there was no VC or external funding which itself acts as a mechanism for organic growth and ensuring that the token develops organically and isn’t dumped by whales or funds. The token was listed during the final days of December 2020. Back then, $NIF was intended to be used for platform access and as a payment token. It also allowed some form of value capture to our early community.
Since then, the product has evolved leaps and bounds as our community has grown by orders of magnitude and our team has grown exponentially. $NIF has also grown since the early days, allowing for simple staking to facilitate the creation of marketplaces and farms. It further had the added benefit of providing discounts on platform fees to stakers. While this has been sufficient for the initial stages of development, we have now redesigned our token economic model to be more resilient, provide consistent value capture mechanisms to holders and be easily scalable as our ecosystem continues to evolve.
As such, the $NIF token will transition to being a governance token, which affords holders the right to participate in the decision-making process for the future of the Unifty ecosystem and its development. This is of significant value to the platforms’ creators and users as they gain power to initiate and vote on proposals which directly impact them and their revenue streams. The previous utility model of $NIF has been integrated with our second token, $UNT which stands for the Unifty Network Token.
$UNT was designed by iterating on the original vision of $NIF which was to facilitate transactions and access to products and services within the Unifty ecosystem. The following are just a few examples of where $UNT will be required as fees:
1. In the creation of Marketplaces.
2. For the creation of Collections.
3. Reduced fees when used to pay for services such as NFT bridge transactions.
4. For setting up Farms.
5. As payment for subscription services to be offered in the ecosystem
Finally, $UNT will be the main reward mechanism for $NIF stakers in the Community Governance Program.
$UNT will be introduced through mining and will be distributed to $NIF stakers pro-rata based on the upcoming Unifty Exhibition Program.
A Brief Look at $NIF Tokenomics
The distribution of $NIF is based on a total number of 5,000,000 $NIF, illustrated in the chart below:
Out of a total of 5,000,000 $NIF
1,000,000 tokens went into initial circulation released to the community via a fair launch on Uniswap.
500,000 tokens are reserved for ecosystem incentives potentially to be given to token holders on other chains in the future, subject to voter approval via governance
500,000 tokens are kept for liquidity incentives
1,000,000 tokens as Team and Advisor allocations that are initially locked for 1 year starting from April 5th, 2021, and further vest over the subsequent 2 years.
750,000 tokens were allocated to strategic investors vesting linearly over 12 months starting from April 5th, 2021.
1,250,000 tokens are stored in the treasury reserve from which 10% are unlocked while the rest are locked until further notice. We do not foresee these tokens to be released anytime soon.
Please refer to our page on Coingecko for the most updated numbers on current circulating supply. This can be found here.
Community Governance
With decentralization being the core ethos behind our design philosophy, we have created the Unifty Community Governance Program, which can be summed up as our in-house tool that allows $NIF holders to issue and vote on proposals and allocate their $NIF to different staking programs. This section will briefly explain how our community governance tool works.
The tool employs a smart contract whose logic is based on two essential concepts, Consumers and Peers.
Consumers are simply defined as grants or allocations that are created to control the $UNT issuance tied to a use-case or a smart contract such as The Launch Vault or Exhibitions. Consumers define the amount of $UNT to be distributed as well as the recipient and under what vesting rules and on which conditions. Peers are defined as use-cases or vaults. Using our previous example, in our explanation of Consumers, the Launch Vault or Exhibitions would be defined as Peers. To further illustrate this, we can mirror this explanation to terms we are all familiar with using the following example:
Now that we have explained the main components of how rewards and staking programs are created and distributed on an architectural level, we can circle back and explain the powers and responsibilities awarded to $NIF stakers when it comes to governance.
The governance tool allows for the creation of several different proposal types, each of which is provided a title, a written description, its voting duration and its properties. These proposal types include:
I General Proposals (No defined parameters but a way for users to voice their concerns or propose new ideas that are too early to properly define) II Adding or Removing a New Peer (i.e. A new staking program or liquidity mining program) III Adding or Removing a New Consumer (i.e. Adding reward rules to a specific peer)
There are also Internal Governance proposal types that focus on the governance rules implemented in the Community Governance tool. The current rules around governance are:
1. A minimum total of 150,000 NIF needs to be staked in the governance contract for the program to be activated.
2. A quorum of 150,000 NIF is required for a proposal to pass (i.e. a minimum of 150,000 NIF need to engage in the voting process on a particular proposal for it to pass).
3. The minimum time a proposal can be up for voting is 48 hours or 2 days.
4. The maximum time a proposal can be up for voting is 7 days.
5. All $NIF staked will be subject to a minimum 14 day lock-up period before withdrawals can be made. Unstaking requires a two-part transaction, the first triggers a 14 day cooldown period, once that period has passed you can unstake your NIF.
Finally, $NIF holders can then stake into the governance contract and simultaneously stake into different reward programs such as the Launch Vault or Exhibitions (defined further below in this document). This is due to our “Synthetic Staking” solution, which means that a user can stake their $NIF into the governance contract and participate in voting while earning rewards in their program of choice, without having to un-stake or transfer $NIF to different contracts. In layman's terms a $NIF holder will stake in the Community Governance contract while “pointing” their $NIF in the direction of their favourite reward program to earn $UNT.
There will be a more detailed paper outlining how the governance tool works released soon.
$UNT Tokenomics and Fair Launch The $UNT token will have a truly fair launch, there will be no pre-mining and no free tokens will be allocated to the team or any existing investors. 100% of the $UNT supply will be allocated proportionally to $NIF holders that are staking their tokens in our Exhibition Vaults (a more detailed write up on the Exhibition program and Vaults will be available later in this document).
An initial amount of 10,000,000 $UNT will be minted and distributed to $NIF stakers in our launch vault over a period of 28 days during Month 1. A further 50,000,000 $UNT will be minted in Month 2 and subsequently, a monthly mint rate that decreases by 5% every month will be activated from Month 3 and onwards. The maximum supply is limited to 1,000,000,000 UNT tokens, However, with the mechanics above, the supply will never reach 1 Billion tokens. In essence, from Month 2 onwards, $UNT will be largely distributed to token holders that stake $NIF in the Unifty Exhibition Program. There will also be a percentage of $UNT rewards allocated to LP (Liquidity Providers) on the Uniswap pairs of both $UNT and $NIF. These numbers will be determined soon.
Unifty Exhibition Program
Unifty Exhibitions allow artists and collectors to showcase their NFTs to the Unifty community and get rewarded for doing so. The current monetization model for artist NFTs is fragmented and lacks efficient information flow between market participants. As such, artists find it difficult to get their creations adequately valued unless they depend on going viral or are already carrying an established brand.
Traditional physical galleries have a key flaw, where artists cannot be sure if they will have their pieces sold or if the gallery will reimburse them for their expenses. In the best-case scenario, even if the artist manages to sell, the commission rates can be quite exorbitant, nearing 50%!
While Exhibitions by nature are designed for artists and collectors to fully showcase their NFT as a collection, our design interface allows Collectors to bid for a specific NFT of their choosing via our single-side Auction system that utilizes $UNT as collateral. A detailed post on our Auction system will be released soon.
Unifty Exhibitions provide artists with a form of guaranteed income with the potential to also sell their NFT through the built-in marketplace. That adds a secondary monetization stream to the artist that is more predictable. Exhibitions also provide a value capture mechanism for $NIF stakers, as they will get to pick which exhibitions to “back” by allocating their $NIF to that Exhibition in return for a majority share of the mined $UNT rewards allocated to that Exhibition.
Exhibitions earn their percentage of the $UNT minted based on a weighted scoring system. The system will be slightly different depending on the type of Exhibition. There are two types of Exhibitions, Artist Owned Exhibitions and Collector Owned Exhibitions. More details on the scoring mechanism will be released to the community in a separate document. $NIF holders will be able to vote on the details of that mechanism and help determine which factors should be weighted more than others and if there are other factors that should be considered.
At an initial level, the main points will include, but are not limited to the:
1. Total number of $NIF staked in the Exhibition 2. Collective appraised value of the NFTs in the Exhibition 3. Number of different $NIF holders staked in each Exhibition 4. Social media following of the artist (in the case of Artist owned Exhibitions) 5. Social media following of the collection (in the case of Collector owned Exhibitions, plus they will be required to setup a Twitter account)
As previously mentioned, each factor will be given a weight and each Exhibition will receive a total weighted score which will determine its share of the $UNT rewards for at least a 14 day period, at which point there will be a rebalancing calculation where each Exhibition is re-assessed based on any changes to their appraised metrics This can include the addition or removal of any NFTs within the Exhibition which will change the appraisal value of the collection, the growth in social media following of the Artist or the number of $NIF staked in the Exhibition.
In Artist Owned Exhibitions, artists will be allocated 20% of the $UNT rewards earned by their Exhibitions, whereas Collector Owned Exhibitions will be allocated 10% of the $UNT rewards earned by their Exhibitions.
We believe that our approach to Exhibitions not only adds a second, more predictable revenue stream to artists and collectors but also turns their illiquid NFTs into yield generating assets. This in turn creates a powerful value capture mechanism for $NIF holders.
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