Token Buyback Transparency Report
Why did we buy back ANT and how we will disclose these events
We care about our community. Blockchain projects are a different kind of organization. They live in the open, welcome new contributors and are transparent by default.
Before our token sale event, we published a Pre-Sale Transparency Report. We've promised to deliver regular transparency updates on our use of funds (more on that soon). All the code in our GitHub repositories is open source and anyone can follow the development that's going on. We've instated public meetings for the community to follow and take part in our decisions and progress.
Aragon's Token Buyback
Today, adhering to our high transparency standards, we're ready to take the first step in our plan to extend our level of transparency --- which is why we're reporting our token buybacks.
In our Intended Use of Revenue post we outlined the broad estimated allocation of our funds. As the development of our project has continued, we've been able to narrow down some of the use cases of which we'll use our funds for.
Why did we do this
ANT is a great tool for us to incentivize contributors. Having a wide, varied community of contributors from different backgrounds is important. This is something that we see as an essential part of any blockchain network. Thus, seeing people commit code and close issues through GitHub or come up with great ideas that we haven't thought of, is something we want to reward.
Running hackathons where the prizes are paid in ANT. Events where anyone can take part, technical or non-technical person alike. This is one way to incentivize the community to participate and contribute. Aragon has been designed to be modular and have outside developers build on top of what we create. This incentivizes contributions and seems like a natural use case of ANT for us.
Sometimes we may need to hire contractors or part-time team members for specific tasks. We can use ANT for the payments of these tasks. This will result in more token holders that are incentivized to do a good job on the project.
Another use case where proper incentives are important is bug bounty programs. We want as many eyes on the crucial parts of our code as possible. People who will have a stake in the project will be more likely to want to make sure everything is working as expected and secure.
We also want to reward the people working hard every day on this project --- our employees. We set goals and milestones that we want to achieve together. With this approach we'll create incentives for our team to do a great job on time to reach these goals.
How does this work?
As our Aragon Network Token was launched, 70% of the tokens were sold to the general public. The Aragon Foundation received 15% of the tokens. We have a strong belief in Aragon and the Aragon Network, which we're currently building.
We began buying our tokens back a couple weeks after the token sale had closed. The Aragon Foundation has so far bought around 734,000 ANT back since the token sale.
We may, or may not, buy more tokens in the future. Should we do so, we will report accordingly any significant buybacks. And all of them, including those done so far, will be made public in our quarterly transparency reports.
We will be distributing these tokens in the aforementioned use cases in the future. This is NOT a buyback program to increase the token's price. We will always perform these operations when we are confident that we will not significantly alter the market. This is done to align incentives for the project and everyone participating in it.