When raising capital for a project in Web3, many teams decide to have private token pre-sales to their early investors. As a result, they end up having allocations of millions of coins ready to be dumped into the markets as soon as possible. We believe this strategy is far from ideal and unfair, especially from a crypto-purist point of view. 

When planning our project, we wanted to avoid having any pre-sale allocations of $CACAO. Still, we also needed some financial bootstrapping to help fund the development of the protocol. This is why we designed a special investment token, $MAYA, and why it has unique characteristics to it. Even if having two tokens might be a little confusing for some people, we believe they allow us to take off under the fairest and most impartial conditions possible, including launching with our Liquidity Auction model.

How do $MAYA tokens work and how are they different from $CACAO?

$MAYA tokens deliver value to their holders because they perpetuate 10% of all the fees generated by the Maya Protocol - which mostly come from users paying fees for swapping their assets against our reserves. 

They are essentially a tokenization of the ecosystem’s cash flows, unlike $CACAO, which works as a medium of exchange inside the protocol and is used to pair assets inside our pools. They also don’t grant any governance voting power whatsoever. $MAYA holders will be paid out in $CACAO every 24 hours depending upon their proportion of $MAYA holdings and how many fees are generated by the network. 

Because there will be no $MAYA pools or trades inside our Exchange, we suspect they will also have less visibility and liquidity. This policy is in place to convey to our community how committed we all are to the project in the long run, none of our investors have any interest in big pumps of their price to sell them any time soon. 

In fact, our founder team’s coins are even programmed untransferable so that they’ll own them forever. For every 9$ earned by $MAYA holders, the founders earn 1$. Talk about a long-term commitment to a project!

Who will own $MAYA tokens?

Many of the Maya working team members own some of these tokens too. We believe this incentivizes them to see the protocol grow and to continue working hard for it. Moreover, we decided to reward all eligible $RUNE holders and our early node operators with $MAYA tokens as well, as an acknowledgment of the THORChain protocol and a way to say thank you to the community.

The complete distribution of $MAYA tokens is public and can be seen inside Part 2 (page 24) of our official Whitepaper. We will also be happy to discuss all related to our tokens or their distribution on our official channels, including our Discord Server or Twitter profile. We hope to see you there!