Is ThreeFold a Token Scam?
By: Lucien Lecarme
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Data, Scam, Token Sale, Threefold

How does ThreeFold token economy work?

ThreeFold tokens are backed up by compute and storage capacity put on the TF grid. A healthy token economy in ThreeFold’s world means a healthy relationship between the token price and the amount of ‘farmed’ capacity.

ThreeFold farming started 4 years ago in Dubai when TF Foundation deployed capacity for development purposes. This was before TFT’s were introduced and before any blockchain happened. This capacity was the first genesis pool.

In March 2018, the first-generation Blockchain for the Threefold Token was birthed. The TFT v1 was launched on a blockchain called Rivine. The first genesis pool of capacity had the size of about 700m out of the initial 100 billion max cap, so less than 1%. As this ThreeFold wiki shows, this was centralized capacity coming out of the servers in Dubai and Belgium.

At the end of March 2019, the ThreeFold Community agreed on some changes. First of all, 4 Billion became the max. cap. Secondly, the difficulty level was put in line with the new maximum amount of tokens. These measures had a good influence on the tokenomics.

Today, this initial capacity represents close to 20% of tokens that were needed to get the project going. 8% of these tokens are reserved for contributors, founders & team. (Most of these tokens are still locked up). Another 8% is for technology creators. This value is around $10m with the current TFT price fluctuating between $0,03 and $0,05 ct. The last 4% is reserved for the funding of threefold projects (max. 160m TFT).

This is all written clear and transparent on the Wikis of the ThreeFold foundation. The token wiki explains that these initial tokens, backed up by capacity, “are there for the benefit of the project and ecosystem”. The other 80% can be considered decentralized capacity, created by farmers, most of it in the future.

ThreeFold has a humble over $12,5 m market capitalization while offering a huge load of 80 million GB of green and cheap capacity to the world on a tested and working decentralized grid. Now have a look at ‘competing’ Filecoin. Filecoin just reported to offer 1 billion Gigabytes in Storage capacity, 12,5 times what ThreeFold offers. Filecoin’s market capitalization, however, is 1,25 billion, which reduces ThreeFold’s worth 1/100 of Filecoin’s market cap. Is filecoin’s worth inflated? I am not here to make this project wrong, you can do your own investigation.

In the case that ThreeFold would only achieve a 1% market share in future capacity, this still would lead to an expected demand of 5 billion USD worth of capacity. Data is the gold of the future. You can use the ThreeFold Grid simulator to calculate different parameters like token price and growth of the grid in the coming years.

For me it’s clear that ThreeFold token is far from being overhyped, on the contrary, I would say. The team and developers stayed focused on delivering innovation & the product. That’s a huge green flag. It is only very recently that ThreeFold actually did some serious marketing when entering the Liquid exchange. ThreeFold entered platforms like Ivan on Tech, Girl gone Crypto and the more serious Forbes and Cointelegraph, just to name a few. The focus was building an impressive open source wiki and finding reputable partners like HP, Solidaridad and Decentranet first.