Introducing the Capital Distributor: Automating onchain incentives
Distributing capital has been expensive, labour-intensive, full of legal uncertainty, and rife with mistakes. Today, we’re changing that.
Incentives and rewards are the lifeblood of onchain ecosystems.
They drive liquidity, attract builders, and align stakeholders.
But distributing capital onchain has never been easy. Most projects today rely on Merkle distributors, which work for one-offs, but fall short for ongoing programs: constant root updates, repeated transactions, and centralized operational risk.
Today we’re changing that with the Capital Distributor: a new component of the Aragon stack that makes capital distribution automatic, trustless, and endlessly extensible.
With the launch of their airdrop, Boundless is the first to put Aragon’s Capital Distributor into practice. It’s a familiar model, but now automated, showing how the system can make today’s standard tools lighter and tomorrow’s growth programs possible. From airdrops to mining emissions, the Capital Distributor provides a brand new approach for projects to build sustainable ecosystems easily and securely.
A new opportunity for protocols and ecosystems
For too long, distributing capital has meant operations overhead. Every cycle required updating Merkle roots, publishing lists, and pushing transactions, driving up costs & logistical complications, and risking mistakes along the way.
The Capital Distributor flips that model.
At its core are two simple but powerful modules:
- Strategies that decide how much someone can claim, whether through a Merkle airdrop, a gauge tally, or staking rewards.
- Action Encoders that define what happens when they claim, from requiring delegation to auto-staking rewards or routing a portion as fees.
By separating these layers, projects can design distribution logic as simple or complex as they need, and extend it with just a few lines of code. Everything plugs directly into the Aragon stack, so new strategies and encoders are usable out of the box.
That flexibility opens the door to far more than airdrops, changing the game for projects designing for the long-term.
With the Capital Distributor, protocols can now bootstrap liquidity with ongoing incentives, reward governance participants, distribute staking rewards, or fund ecosystem integrations and liquidity mining emissions, all without having to manually update lists or push transactions.
From manual operations to modular rails
The Capital Distributor is designed to replace the operational grind of distribution with automated rails that just work.
Once deployed, it calculates claims automatically, pulling data live instead of relying on static lists. Projects can “set it and step back,” while the system keeps running, giving contributors and communities more certainty that rewards will arrive as promised, and removing the need for manual updates and operational overhead.
By automating the process, protocols can set expectations their communities can rely on: emissions that run without operator interference, incentive programs that don’t require endless maintenance, and integrations that are supported by rails rather than one-off contracts.
The benefits compound:
- Automation: Strategies pull live data to calculate rewards in real time. Set it up once, and it runs indefinitely without ongoing updates.
- Trust & Certainty: Projects can guarantee emissions or rewards over the long term, which builds credibility with their ecosystem.
- Operational efficiency: Removes the heavy overhead of managing Merkle roots or manual reward updates.
- Flexibility: Modular design with strategies and action encoders makes it easy to tailor for different needs.
- Ease of integration: Developers can build strategies or encoders with just a few lines of code, and they’ll automatically work in their existing Aragon build.
- Legal clarity: The Capital Distributor removes the need for operators to handle funds directly. Reach out to your lawyer to get more info on why this might be important.
It’s a shift from centralized ops-heavy distribution to decentralized onchain rails that run themselves.
Airdrops, automated: Boundless goes live
Boundless will be the first to launch on the Capital Distributor, distributing their airdrop with a Merkle strategy.
Boundless shows exactly what this feature unlocks: a cleaner, automated way to get tokens into the hands of their community, without the overhead of constant updates.
Boundless is first out the gate, but the Capital Distributor is designed for anyone who needs to put capital to work, reliably, transparently, and onchain. It’s the starting point for how projects can use the Capital Distributor to run incentives, rewards, and airdrops at scale.
Getting started
The Capital Distributor is now available as part of the Aragon stack.
If you’re a project looking to distribute capital across your onchain ecosystem, reach out to the team directly to get started.