Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author: Azuma (@azuma_eth)
At 23:00 Beijing time on July 16, the Solana ecosystem liquidity staking layer project Sanctum officially opened the airdrop claim inquiry window, and plans to officially open airdrop claims through the Jupiter LFG Launchpad at 23:00 on July 18.
As the top project in the second voting phase of Jupiter LFG Launchpad, Sanctum has always received high community attention in the Solana ecosystem. In the past few months, Sanctum has achieved rapid progress in data with the help of the first season points event Sanctum Wonderland S-1. As of the time of writing, the TVL is temporarily reported at US$910 million, making it the fifth DeFi protocol in the Solana ecosystem in terms of TVL.
Project Analysis
In April, Sanctum announced the completion of its seed round of extended financing, led by Dragonfly, with participation from Sequoia, Solana Ventures, CMS Holdings, DeFiance Capital, Genblock Capital, Jump Capital, Marin Digital Ventures and others. Although the amount of this round of financing was not disclosed, Sanctum revealed that the total financing of the project has reached US$6.1 million.
Unlike conventional liquidity staking protocols, what Sanctum is doing is more like helping Solana build a more unified liquidity staking paradigm to solve the liquidity fragmentation problem of major liquidity staking tokens in the current Solana ecosystem (LST, such as Sanctum’s own INF and other tokens such as jitoSOL, mSOL, bSOL, etc.).
By building a unified liquidity layer around liquidity staking scenarios, Sanctum can use multiple modules such as Reserve (supporting instant unstaking services for all LSTs), Router (supporting conversion between two LSTs that usually have no transaction path), and Infinity (supporting conversion between all LSTs) to help users achieve extremely fast and lossless redemptions, or convert between major LSTs with extremely low wear and tear.
Token Economic Model
As early as the beginning of June, Sanctum’s founder FP Lee disclosed the project’s preliminary token economic model, but then made some fine-tuning to the detailed allocation - lowering the strategic reserve share and increasing the LFG Launch share.
Sanctum's protocol token will be named CLOUD (the token contract address was determined last night: CLoUDKc4Ane7HeQcPpE3YHnznRxhMimJ4MyaUqyHFzAu). In addition to basic governance utility, FP Lee also mentioned that potential partners may need CLOUD to qualify for Sanctum's verification program, which also adds a certain practical value to CLOUD.
The total supply of CLOUD will be 1 billion, with the following distribution:
Community Reserve 30% : The community reserve should be used strategically to expand Sanctum’s market share. The community will ultimately decide how to use this reserve.
Strategic Reserve 11%: The team will use this portion of the reserve to develop the Sanctum ecosystem, such as future acquisitions, strategic investments, ecosystem partners, donation programs, market making, etc.
Team 25% : locked for one year, then released linearly over the next 24 months.
Investors 13%: Sanctum has sold some tokens in the past at valuations of 50 million and 60 million, most of which were sold in 2021. These tokens will also be locked for one year and then released linearly over 24 months.
Initial airdrop 10%: will be distributed to the community during CLOUD TGE.
LFG Launch 10%: Used to inject initial liquidity into CLOUD’s Launchpad in Jupiter.
LFG donates 1%: This portion of the share will be donated to Jupiter LFG. According to past practice, Jupiter will generally airdrop it to LFG voting participants.
In terms of circulation, CLOUD can achieve a maximum initial circulation rate of 20% at the beginning of TGE, including 10% initial airdrop share and 10% LFG Launch share, but the unsold tokens in Jupiter Launchpad will be transferred back to the strategic reserve.
Points activities and airdrop scope
Previously, Sanctum announced that the initial airdrop will be distributed mainly to users participating in the Wonderland S-1 event.
According to Sanctum’s official disclosure, the S-1 activity attracted a total of 314,367 participating addresses, with a total accumulated points of up to 2.5 trillion. After eliminating 61,181 suspected witch addresses, it was finally determined that there were 108,185 Profiles (a DID product launched by Sanctum, one Profile can correspond to multiple addresses) that were eligible for airdrops.
FP Lee has previously confirmed that Sanctum will continue to launch other rounds of activities to distribute subsequent airdrops. FP Lee originally planned to launch S-2 immediately after the S-1 event, but later decided to postpone the launch to allow for a richer design in order to give users a different experience. As for the specific launch time of S-2, there is no specific information for the time being, but it is certain to be after TGE.
Dynamic airdrop mechanism
Sanctum has put so much effort into designing the CLOUD airdrop that many users still don’t know how much they can get.
Sanctum officials have also emphasized that "the amount displayed in the current query interface is not the total amount, but the amount that can be claimed immediately." The reason for this is that Sanctum adopts an original classification and dynamic airdrop mechanism.
Aside from the airdrop that Jupiter will use its own share to distribute to its ASR users (expected to take place in October), Sanctum has divided this airdrop into two categories - Capital and Earnestness. Each category will be allocated 50 million CLOUD, totaling 100 million CLOUD.
Capital shares will be distributed to all users who participate in the Wonderland S-1 event. The amount of airdrops will be proportional to the amount of points accumulated by the user (each Cupcake obtained by attracting new users is equal to 20,000 points), but there is a minimum threshold requirement of 20,000 points. Users must apply for it by registering for Sanctum Profiles.
Earnestness shares will be distributed to users who truly understand, explain, and promote Sanctum on social media. To this end, the team proactively browsed millions of posts on Telegram, Discord, Twitter, Youtube and other websites as of July 1, and screened out more than 2,000 "sincere contributors" (specific distribution is shown in the table below). It is worth mentioning that Sanctum connects addresses to social media accounts through Sanctum Profiles. Since some qualified social media accounts have not yet registered Sanctum Profiles, their shares will be temporarily reserved, and the rules for redemption will be released later.
Both Capital and Earnestness shares use a dynamic amount mechanism, which means that the amount of tokens a user can obtain varies depending on how early or late they claim. In simple terms, the later you claim, the more tokens you get.
However, the time requirements for Capital and Earnestness shares are different: for Capital shares, if you want to claim the full 100%, you have to wait 14 days; for Earnestness shares, if you want to claim the full 100%, you have to wait 180 days.
Eligible users can claim their airdrop rewards at any time before April 14, 2025, but claiming early means that users will give up their remaining shares, which will be returned to the community reserve for future airdrops and community programs.
Idealism and reality controversy
From its early high-profile declaration that "no listing fees will be paid to any CEX" to this complex airdrop design, Sanctum seems to have always been suffused with an idealistic tone, but this in turn has also attracted a lot of seemingly unnecessary controversy.
As far as this airdrop is concerned, the controversy mainly focuses on two aspects.
The first is the controversy over the transparency and fairness of airdrop distribution, especially the controversy over Earnestness. Sanctum's original intention was to screen out real community contributions through active audits to avoid excessive community fatigue or witch proliferation caused by the adoption of task models (such as Zealy, Galxe, etc.), but this inevitably created a certain opacity - are there objective standards for active audits? Is it reasonable to allocate 50 million tokens to thousands of Earnestness qualified addresses? Is this unfair to Capital qualified addresses that have deposited real money? None of these questions have been effectively answered.
Second, there is the controversy over the dynamic amount. It is not difficult to guess Sanctum’s original intention, which is to dilute the early airdrop selling pressure through the dynamic game mechanism, so that the market has more time to adjust the supply and demand of TGE tokens in the early stage, but this also brings additional complexity to the airdrop. Especially at a time when the market is increasingly missing the “simple is just” Uniswap airdrop, this design will inevitably attract some resistance.
Valuation expectations
Finally, let’s talk about a topic that users are most concerned about - how much should CLOUD be valued?
Currently, Drift, the contract trading platform on Solana, has launched CLOUD’s pre-market trading contract, which is currently quoted at 0.3147 USDT, corresponding to an FDV of approximately US$310 million.
In addition, judging from the liquidity distribution on the Jupiter LFG Launchpad, the upper limit of the market making price is also set at US$0.5.
Considering the current positive market trend and the fact that the initial circulation of CLOUD will most likely be reduced due to the dynamic amount mechanism, the above two prices (0.3-0.5) may be a reasonable valuation range.
