Shyft Network — Token Distribution and Economics
By: Shyft Network
Tags: Tokenomics, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Network, Defi

Barbados, March 24, 2021 — The Shyft Network core team is proud to announce the details of its SHFT token economics and distribution schedules within the Shyft Network protocol.

The Shyft Network is a blockchain-based solution for centralized and decentralized technologies, like decentralized finance (DeFi). It’s a technology layer that aggregates and embeds trust into data stored on private and public ecosystems, enabling an opt-in compliance layer across all systems.

Shyft Network was designed as an interoperable standard for use cases that require multiparty trust and validation. We took a fundamentally different approach to data and identity and thanks to its founders’ long history with Bitcoin, dating back to 2010. The vision of Shyft Network was one that had a long-term view on the future of where our ecosystem was headed and what would be needed to protect decentralization and privacy while enabling new markets and users.

The Shyft Network enables identity verification, validation, and the sending of credentials and other data across multiple different blockchains and networks. It is a solution and compliance primitive to the entire decentralized ecosystem, with a focus on solving some of the largest global challenges around regulations, compliance, data privacy, and trust and coordination.

Balance and Decentralization

When designing the token economics and distribution schedules, we were careful to structure the various buckets/outflows to maximize our impact and collaborative structures across the ecosystem.

When designing this system, we took to heart the lessons that our ecosystem painfully learned over the last decade; one key goal is to provide distribution and allocation across use cases and community infrastructure enabling perpetual support and longevity to all functions that make networks successful across phases of their development. Resilience, adaptability and decentralization are guiding values of our work.

This economic structure was built and refined over the last 4 years and included the guidance and direction of our closest partners and advisors, whose capabilities complement the Shyft Network Core’s team, helping us make headway into our product focuses like compliance and identity. We are confident that this strategy will get us to product & community readiness, and puts the hard work into a system that allows the community to take over and continue to advance the ecosystem forward!

The Network distribution is largely programmatic through distribution contracts which are closely coupled with the inflation rate that is used to pay for federation network security, Byfrost Bridge node security, and Community DAO (Shyft Community Runtime Inflation). The distribution below spans over 10 years with distributions focused on ecosystem pillars and critical infrastructure to support long-term growth of network usage, and meet demand balances to ensure a verifiable and scalable liquidity base.

SHFT Overview

Name: Shyft Network

Symbol: SHFT

Type: Native Layer 1, ERC-20 token compatible

Decimals: 18

Initial Circulating supply on launch: 3,800,000

Circulating supply 12 months after launch: 507,432,184

Circulating supply 7.5 years after launch: 1,910,000,000

Node Inflation rate: set at 6% of the initial universe, released on a per-block basis, perpetually

The SHFT Token

SHFT fuels the Shyft Network; think of it as gas that powers the engine. SHFT is a means of payment, a mechanism for bonding value, and an instrument for governance value capture. SHFT, depending on the use case, can be utilized in a multitude of ways which includes a payment and authorization system for long-term validation.

SHFT is a layer 1 currency for identity and data transmission, as well as a governance mechanism for coordination across ecosystems that enables entity-to-entity governance, compliant asset creation, and a system for compliant Defi and other applications. Enabling a new side of the existing ecosystem could greatly expand the size of market participants and increase the size of asset participation across all decentralized projects, protocols, and marketplaces.

The Shyft token, when used across use cases created on Shyft Network, enables assets and metadata to be added into this compliant layer-2 smart contract system, acting as a wrapper for these asset types and a directory for all Dapps that support the ecosystem. The SHFT token on other chains acts as a layer two gas and currency to pay for the compatibility, composability, and routing channel architecture that is required to create, utilize, and transit compliant (rule based) assets across all 3rd party applications (ie. Dexs, lending pools, etc.). Shyft Network’s native token becomes useful as a bridged currency in liquidity pools through multiple infrastructure and cross-chain Defi deployments. You can read more on the SHFT token here.

Token Distribution

The SHFT tokens are distributed into a number of tranches, designated for specific activities to benefit the network. These values and distributions are built into the core distribution contracts for automated deployment. You can view this as a form of pre-defined inflation across the network, spanning beyond 10 years.