Token sale cap clarification

Aragon -

tl;dr: Our cap is not $100m, or near that amount

We have had a lot of questions about our hidden cap mechanism.

Since it's pretty new to the token sale world, we understand the confusion and want to provide a simple breakdown to clarify.

Meet the Hidden Cap

First, the hidden cap is only known by Jorge and me.

The goals of the cap are to:

  • Incentivize small buyers — Big buyers (whales) usually need to know more detail (such as cap) before purchasing tokens.
  • Even token distribution — By reducing whales, we will have a more even token distribution. This is important for building the Aragon Network governance mechanism.

The cap will be revealed during the sale. Once revealed, it becomes the hard cap. Either Jorge or I can reveal it. In addition, we have also set up bots that will track and reveal it.

Because we want our token sale to last long as possible, if there's initial FOMO we will immediately reveal it.

Meet the Hard Cap

To illustrate the hard cap and it's purpose, here's a scenario where it would be needed:

  • The hidden cap algorithm fails, and as a result the sale goes up to 10 million ether
  • An attacker manages to break the contract and steal that ether
  • That attacker would then have 10% of ether in circulation, and as a result could damage it and potentially lead to a hard fork

To mitigate the risk of the above scenario (however unlikely), there's a hard cap coded in the contract. Essentially, it's just a line of code that cannot fail.

We take security very seriously, and we are very cautious. We will not risk damaging Ethereum under any circumstances. And the hard cap included in the contract is a safety mechanism to prevent that.

You can also review ANT's independent audits by Jordi Baylina and Piper Merriam.

Thanks,

The Aragon Team