Why a new token?

If you haven’t asked yourself this question, pause. Ask. We’ve become desensitized to everyone creating a token for everything. Why are we introducing a new token? Does it have a truly distinct purpose? And most importantly, why not just expand the role of VPND indefinitely to fill this new role?

The VaporFi ecosystem already has a well-designed token with VPND, and with the recent transformation to its emission mechanics — it’s ready for the next chapter in its constantly evolving role and value proposition. So why did we elect to build a new token and its economy from the ground up instead of extending the role of VPND?

Most projects launch a token, or additional tokens for one or more reasons. Some selfish, others more functional or practical in nature. Typically, when a token is launched, the project team conducts an initial sale of the token — using the funds to generate capital to build and operate. They will then also allocate a percent of the total supply to themselves to be used as payment or incentives for their team. We believe both are tremendously flawed and ultimately hurt the community. We’ll talk more about these fundamental flaws in our next section.

So why not build a new layer of utility around VPND?

Simply put, VPND is not designed in an optimal manner for what we want the economy around VaporDEX to look like and how we want it to function. It is designed and optimized for its role as a mining token, but not for what we need it to do with VaporDEX and our growing ecosystem.

VPND has four specific elements to its design and history that make it impractical to use as our DEX governance token.

• High maximum supply

• Full supply already in circulation

• Branding aligned specifically and explicitly to our original product, VaporNodes

• Challenging marketability due to the prevailing sentiment around the original NaaS token economy model

With this in mind, we determined that launching a new token for the community, but not in the standard fashion, would be best for VaporDEX and the community. Let’s explore how we’re breaking the mold on DEX tokens and how we hope to inspire the next generation of governance and harvest tokens for DeFi products.