ShapeShift Decentralizes

FOX Airdropped to 1M+ addresses

TL:DR Details

Decentralization and Open Sourcing

  • To align with the ethos of decentralized finance, ShapeShift, founded in 2014, has begun dissolving our corporate structure, evolving into a community-owned and governed crypto platform.
  • Our entire codebase and technology shall be open-sourced in the coming months.
  • These changes are designed to bring ShapeShift further in line with the true vision of immutable, decentralized finance.
  • Through this transition, our intention is to build a powerful community around an open-source, self-custody, multi-chain crypto platform for the world.

FOX and the Largest Airdrop in History — Check your eligibility

  • The FOX Token has been imbued with increasing governance powers, and control over the platform is transitioning to the community of users and holders.
  • ShapeShift has executed the largest airdrop in crypto history to over 1 million ShapeShift customers and members of the broader DeFi community.
    • Over 60% of the total FOX supply of 1,000,001,337 tokens has been allocated to the ShapeShift community.
      • In addition, over 120,000 Gitcoin, Uniswap, SushiSwap, Yearn, Aave, Alchemix, 1inch, Curve, Balancer, and 0x token holders, and most THORChain users, are eligible.
      • In total, over 1.1 million addresses are eligible for the FOX airdrop.
    • FOX is now one of the most widely distributed tokens in history.
    • These tokens have never been sold by ShapeShift.

Liquidity mining will begin in 48 hours at 9:00 a.m. MT on Friday, July 16, 2021.

The Evolution of ShapeShift

Since our formation in 2014, our purpose has been to empower the digital asset market in alignment with the ethos of financial sovereignty.

Seven years ago, we pioneered frictionless crypto trading with no user accounts, and no custody of user funds.

  • In 2017, we acquired KeepKey to bring easy cold-storage to our users.
  • In 2018, we built a full self-custody crypto interface that incorporated KeepKey, Ledger, and Trezor hardware wallets with integrated trading functionality across chains.
  • In 2019, we removed all commissions for holders of the FOX Token.
  • In 2020, we acquired Portis to further engage with the burgeoning web3 dapp ecosystem and released ShapeShift’s self-custody mobile app.
  • And by late 2020, we began integrating decentralized protocols directly into the ShapeShift crypto platform to enable immutable, borderless trading with no intermediary, removing ourselves—and our prior business model—from the process.

This evolution enabled us to return protection and dignity to our users, ending KYC and other intrusive financial surveillance practices. ShapeShift will never be a bank. The end goal has been and remains: a world where people are empowered to manage their own financial futures, without sacrificing their privacy and control to governmental and middlemen entities. A world where users can participate in and explore new voluntary forms of financial innovation.

It has become clear to us that decentralization is the only way to achieve borderless, immutable finance. Therefore, decentralizing ShapeShift is how we choose to maintain fidelity to the principles first established by Satoshi and the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Starting today, our process of decentralization will occur in steps:

  • It means ShapeShift will, over time, go fully open-source. 
  • It means ShapeShift will dismantle its entire corporate structure in a way that respects our shareholders and empowers our employees.
  • It means the ownership and governance over ShapeShift’s future moves to the broad and decentralized community of FOX Token holders, starting now.

To our knowledge, no established company has ever decentralized itself to this degree. This is new ground that we hope will inspire others as well.

It is with great enthusiasm and gratitude to the many pioneers around us that we begin this next phase of ShapeShift’s journey.

We begin this new phase from a position of strength. Since 2014, ShapeShift has grown to support a broad community of users and has facilitated a vast number of crypto transactions (as of the end of May 2021):

We’ve continually evolved to offer users access to a range of widely requested, innovative  services and capabilities, without friction:  

  • Trading via 0x DEX aggregation with the best rates available
  • Cross-chain swaps, including native BTC to ETH, via THORChain integration
  • Earn interest by providing FOX & ETH liquidity on Uniswap V2
  • Fully non-custodial, including our secure native software wallet
  • Accessible with KeepKey and most prominent hardware wallets including Ledger and Trezor
  • Fast and private, with no account or KYC required

Is All Corporate Structure Really Going Away?

Learn more about why we’ve made this decision: Erik Voorhees’ Blog Post

FOX Superpower: Governance

The FOX Token has always been our way of giving extra utility to those who support the ShapeShift platform and community (starting with no trading fees in 2019). Now, FOX is becoming the entire control and ownership structure of the project.

With time, governance over the entire ShapeShift open-source platform will move to FOX holders. This will be a process in which decision making moves from the fully centralized shareholder/board structure of ShapeShift today to a fully decentralized community/token structure in the future.

FOX holders will eventually govern all important decisions of the project. This includes governing the ShapeShift DAO—a new DAO treasury endowed with over 240,000,000 FOX Tokens (24% of all FOX).

What types of decisions could ShapeShift DAO governance control going forward?

FOX hodlers are encouraged to engage—discuss and debate ideas, brainstorm the optimal path forward, suggest a route change to the roadmap. Please see the “Important Links” section below for the ShapeShift community chat on Discord, the ShapeShift Discourse forum, and ShapeShift’s governance portal on Boardroom, where we will focus all open discussion and communications for the decentralized community.

ShapeShift will establish a well-funded non-profit organization—a Foundation—with the narrow objective to promote and facilitate a transition to a completely decentralized, community-owned project. As sufficient decentralization is achieved, this Foundation has a mandate to dissolve away.

The ShapeShift DAO is powered by SafeSnap (SnapShot + Gnosis Safe), which means community members can propose and vote on proposals with zero gas fees, and the result of those votes can trigger on-chain transactions.

Voting power applies to those with FOX in their wallets and will soon be upgraded to include FOX in the FOX/ETH Liquidity Pool on Uniswap V2.

Initial governance parameters are as follows:

  • 100 FOX required to submit a proposal (0.00000001% of FOX supply)
  • 0.4% of FOX supply required to vote to reach quorum (4,000,000 FOX)
  • 90% relative vote support to reach “soft quorum”
  • 72-hour minimum voting period

These parameters are subject to change via ShapeShift DAO governance proposals.

Initially, a multisig safeguard controlled by ShapeShift employees has been implemented alongside SafeSnap to mitigate the risk of a malicious proposal stealing funds from the DAO’s treasury. This is intended as a temporary protective measure, and we look forward to working with the community to transition complete control of the treasury to the community of FOX token holders. Verification of the identities and integrity of the ShapeShift employees comprising the multisig keys can be provided to security researchers upon request.

The Largest Airdrop in History—Over 1M Recipients

Check your eligibility for the Airdrop here

As of this post, FOX has been airdropped to the largest number of eligible recipients in crypto history. There are now more than 1 million potential FOX holders who can choose to claim tokens.

This makes FOX Tokens one of the most widely distributed tokens in history. ShapeShift has never sold these tokens; there was no ICO.

Eligible recipients:

  • Over 900,000 ShapeShift customers and KeepKey owners
  • Every customer who has ever traded $1 or more of ETH or any ERC-20 token through ShapeShift prior to June 9, 2021 is eligible:
    • 1-4 trades: Receive 200 FOX
    • 5-9 trades: Receive 350 FOX
    • 10-24 trades: Receive 750 FOX
    • 25-99 trades: Receive 1,500 FOX
    • 100+ trades: Receive 8,500 FOX
  • Every customer with a wallet registered with ShapeShift holding crypto as of June 9, 2021:
    • Receive 250 FOX
  • Every KeepKey customer who connected their KeepKey with ShapeShift as of June 9 2021:
    • Receive 900 FOX
  • THORChain traders of ETH/ERC-20 assets and those who upgraded ETH.RUNE for Native RUNE as of June 16th at 2 p.m. MST:
    • 500 FOX
  • RUNE ERC-20 token holders as of June 9th:
    • 350 FOX

Over 120,000 members of the following communities that have inspired us. You are eligible for 200 FOX if you held more than $1,500 of the community’s and those tokens were not staked on June 9th:

  • Gitcoin
  • Aave
  • Compound
  • Uniswap
  • SushiSwap
  • Yearn
  • Alchemix
  • Balancer
  • Curve
  • Maker
  • BadgerDAO
  • 0x
  • 1inch

Important note: All addresses have 90 days from today to claim their Airdropped FOX Tokens. After that, the amount claimable will decrease 10% from the original amount each day for 10 days, and any unclaimed tokens after that period will be returned to the ShapeShift DAO, further increasing the DAO treasury.

Claiming Your Tokens
For detailed information on token awards and how to claim awarded FOX Tokens, please see this informative Help Desk article.

FOX Liquidity Mining Is Here

The initial round of FOX liquidity mining will begin at 9:00 a.m. MT, Friday, July 16, 2021.

FOX Token holders that provide liquidity to the FOX/ETH pool on Uniswap V2 and stake their FOX-ETH-UNI-LP token in the ShapeShift Staking Rewards contract may earn a proportional share of 15,768,000 FOX Tokens over the following three months. Thereafter, governance will decide whether or not to continue or change the program.

FOX Perpetual Utility — Hodl FOX, Earn Crypto

Other than governance, why should you care about FOX?

FOX has always been a “Perpetual Utility” token—they provide benefits as long as you hodl them in your wallet. You do not need to spend your tokens to derive their benefits.

Here is the non-governance benefits that exists today:

Rainfall

Rainfall rewards FOX hodlers with free crypto when people trade on ShapeShift. The more FOX you hold, the better your chances of winning a Rainfall reward.

For every qualifying transaction on ShapeShift, the following benefits are realized:

  • The user who makes a crypto trade earns more FOX Tokens
  • Another random FOX holder earns free USDC
  • Revenue generated for ShapeShift (if any) through that transaction goes to the  ShapeShift DAO

FOX Fuel: Reimbursement for Gas Fees

Gas fees can get expensive!

FOX Tokens help you offset these costs. 10% of the current market value of your FOX Tokens, as determined by CoinCap.io at the time of trade, can be repaid to you every 30 days in additional FOX Tokens to help reimburse you for gas costs on trades. With enough FOX Tokens, this can potentially cover all of one’s gas costs on trades.

Example: If you have $500 of FOX, you can get reimbursed $50 each month for gas fees on your trades via an equivalent value in FOX (and so on). The FOX Fuel reward is calculated and rewarded when the trade is completed, and the benefit refreshes 30 days after each trade.

Taken together, ShapeShift trades are more competitive than other offerings. In the example below, a 1000 DAI trade yields more than $1000 of output coin to the user via ShapeShift. Uniswap and MetaMask yield negative via slippage and fees.

There are other ways to earn FOX Tokens; read our blog to learn more.

FOX Allocation

The FOX allocation breaks down as follows:

Total Supply: 1,000,001,337 (no inflation)

  • 340,000,000 (34%) granted to the ShapeShift customers and DeFi community via airdrop
  • 320,000,000 (32%) granted to employees and shareholders
  • 242,000,000 (24%) granted to ShapeShift DAO (governance treasury)
  • 75,000,000 (7.5%) granted to the Foundation
  • 13,000,000 (1.3%) retained by ShapeShift during decentralization process
  • ~10,000,000 (1%) already in circulation with >21,000 holders

The active (unlocked/unvested) supply at the time of the airdrop, approximately 438M FOX, is roughly 75% in the hands of the community:

  • 10M + 340M held by community
  • 75M + 13M held by ShapeShift
  • All other buckets are on three-year vesting

Official FOX Token Address: 0xc770eefad204b5180df6a14ee197d99d808ee52d

Distribution and Lockup Schedules

  • No lockup on airdrop recipients
  • All employees and shareholders have three-year vesting via Sablier smart contract, the contracts vest as of June 2nd, 2021 (the grant date), and all contracts are fully vested on June 2nd, 2024.
  • ShapeShift DAO Governance Treasury has a three-year vesting schedule via Sablier smart contract; this contract is also fully vested on June 2nd, 2024.

Next Steps

Got your FOX? Earn a share of 15,768,000 FOX Tokens that will be distributed over the first three months of liquidity mining. 

Join the Discussion at ShapeShift’s Discord.

Important links

Claim FOX airdrop: 

Deposit FOX/ETH on Uniswap to earn FOX: https://fox.shapeshift.com/fox-farming

FOX SnapShot: https://app.boardroom.info/shapeshift/proposals 

FOX Forum:  https://forum.shapeshift.com

FOX Discord: https://discord.com/invite/shapeshift

Tentative Roadmap

The ShapeShift roadmap will ultimately be determined by FOX holders. To get the ball rolling, here are some of the major initiatives from the current ShapeShift roadmap, many of which are already in progress:

Wallet Support

  • Implement support for additional wallets, including but not limited to MetaMask, Trust Wallet, WalletConnect, and Gnosis Safe. We’re considering onboard.js for this.

Open Sourcing

  • Open source all ShapeShift code and infrastructure.
  • Replace or decentralize functionality that currently relies on centralized infrastructure, such as ShapeShift oAuth.
  • Anything that cannot be open-sourced in the short-term will be run by the Foundation with the intention of it open-sourcing and decentralizing when possible in coordination with the community.

Additional Blockchains

  • Add support for a growing list of blockchains, with the ultimate goal of enabling projects to easily add their own blockchains.

DEXs

  • Add support for DEX aggregators on additional EVM-compatible chains.
  • Add cross-chain swapping capabilities for new assets as they become available on THORChain.

DeFi

  • Enable users to provide liquidity on THORChain and earn yield on a growing number of assets and blockchains, including native BTC.
  • Enable users to easily deposit to Yearn vaults, and deposit all revenues earned through Yearn’s affiliate partnership to the ShapeShift DAO.
  • Enable users to view and manage positions across a growing list and variety of protocols (borrowing, lending, yield-generating, etc.). This includes protocols like Aave, Compound, Alchemix, and Liquidity.
  • Enable users to “zap in” to DeFi positions, which would otherwise require multiple transactions.
  • Enable users to transfer assets across blockchains via decentralized bridge protocols.

Layer 2

  • Add support for a growing list of Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, with the ultimate goal of enabling projects to easily add support for their own Layer 2.
  • We have explored implementing support for Bitcoin’s Lightning network, but unfortunately have yet to find a viable solution for supporting Lightning that is both non-custodial and also doesn’t require users to run full nodes. However, if the community can determine a viable path, we would love to support Lightning.

The First Partnership

We would like to propose the first partnership is established with Yearn, whose protocol has a built-in affiliate revenue program (https://twitter.com/iearnfinance/status/1367508483952771075?s=20). ShapeShift users will be able to deposit to Yearn vaults to earn yield on their assets with no added fees, and will even earn some bonus FOX. This will make ShapeShift the best interface for using Yearn, with a higher APR vs. using Yearn directly or through any other interface. One hundred percent of the revenue generated through users’ deposits will go to the ShapeShift DAO, and the FOX Tokens users earn will grant them governance rights over how those revenues are allocated.

FOX Token holders can choose to distribute revenues to holders, hold or allocate them to diversify the treasury’s portfolio, buy back FOX to either burn or to continue funding community incentive programs, invest in other projects, or any other initiatives the community manifests. This no-fee added, affiliate revenue program can be applied to any protocol, application, or service that addresses the needs of crypto users, including fiat on/off ramp purchases (Banxa), trades (THORChain or 1inch), NFT marketplaces (OpenSea), all things DeFi (refer to our list of communities being airdropped to), delegated staking for POS chains (staked.us), even physical item purchases (earn FOX when you buy a Ledger or some MetaFactory swag, and the ShapeShift DAO earns some DAI).

Network Effects

How does ShapeShift capture value in an open source, decentralized world? While open source code can easily be replicated, communities, partnerships, reputation, and the network effects these brew, cannot be.

FOX incentives can kickstart, accelerate, and solidify these network effects while also achieving the necessary, ongoing mission of distributing FOX widely, fairly, and to ShapeShift community members.

Open-Source Partnerships

For protocols, blockchains, and any project willing to share a percentage of their revenue.

Blockchains

Blockchain projects will be able to add support for their own chains and tokens, with the option of sponsor bounties for any or all of the work.

Protocols

Protocols or other crypto services (i.e., fiat ramps) that need an interface, web3/blockchain provider, and/or wallet no longer need to build this themselves; rather, they can integrate directly with ShapeShift at launch and gain valuable exposure to a growing user base and not worry about added fees or the risks and dependencies inherent with closed-source technology.
Any project that is willing to share a percentage of the revenue generated by ShapeShift users is eligible for bonus FOX incentives, as determined by governance.