Protocol Fees Have Been Eliminated, Core Protocol And Smart Contracts Have Been Open Sourced, Engineering Team To Join Helium Foundation to Advance Solana Innovation​

We’re excited to announce that Strata Protocol has been acquired by the Helium Foundation!

As part of the acquisition, the Strata brand, launchpad, and core protocol IP have all be open sourced, and all protocol fees have been cut to zero. Strata is now a public good.

While Strata is an incredibly useful toolset, it is even more useful as a public good than a monetized product. Strata is most commonly used for ephemeral operations, like pricing an NFT launch. Since its inception, Strata launchpad has minted millions of tokens and helped small and large teams alike get their social tokens off the ground.

Unfortunately, ephemeral operations relying on fees mostly lead to forks that remove the fees. Strata has seen great adoption, but is not easily monetized without building a completely new product. Instead of creating another new product, the team has decided to move to Helium to solve novel problems using our knowledge and our technology from Strata.

Starting in November, the full protocol team will effectively transition into key engineering roles at the Helium Foundation with the goal of helping the Helium community implement HIP 70, Helium’s network migration to Solana. The Strata team will primarily be handling the protocol side of the migration, as well as implementing all of the Solana smart contracts and interfaces.

While at Strata, we developed novel ways to calculate bonding curve rewards that take into account not only the supply of the token but also the tokens in reserve and time elapsed. This tech will become the core of Helium’s SubDAO treasury management system. We will also make good use of Strata’s typescript utilities, including its advanced account fetching cache that greatly reduces the burden on RPCs.

Helium needs a reliable, Solana-native engineering team to help drive this migration, and it just so happens that the technology we’ve been working on solves many of the technical challenges Helium faces. The Strata team also craves the ability to continue solving novel problems that push the space forward. In sum, this was a fortuitous match for both of us.

Aside from the tech overlap noted above, the team is excited to explore the problem space that Helium is tackling. With the move towards decentralization, a decentralized data network owned by its users and operators is incredibly exciting—imagine using decentralized 5G on your Solana Saga phone! Strata’s team also comes with experience scaling data infrastructure. The Helium network has now reached a scale where real pain-points are being hit, and we are looking forward to digging in and solving them.

We’re immensely grateful to our users. Thank you to everyone that believed in us, and that used Strata. You helped us refine our thinking and our tech, and make fungible tokens more accessible to all.

In case you were wondering, there is no action required for Strata users. Every token created through Strata is a normal SPL token with Metaplex token metadata. Creators have full permissions over their tokens; they do not need Strata for any essential operations. If they opted to create a fully-managed token backed by a bonding curve, the bonding curve will continue functioning as designed.

Launchpad fees have been dropped to zero and all of the codebases are open sourced. To ensure a successful transition to a public good, we will continue to monitor the discord for the next few months for any questions the community has. We will also be maintaining the launchpad and Strata contracts, though we will not be adding any new features.

We recommend that anyone who wants to persistently use Strata fork our contracts and deploy their own instance. All of our SDKs already support passing a different program ID as a parameter.

We’ll have lots more to share soon...

But to give you a sneak peek:

Our team has already written a majority of the smart contracts needed to drive the Helium Ecosystem on Solana. They are all open source, and you can take a look at them here!

We’ve always had a strong open source culture at Strata, and we plan to continue that development ethos at Helium as well. For example, we have already made several additions to Anchor that almost eliminate the need for custom SDKs. If you’re a developer, it’s worth looking at the thin sdks and tests around these new smart contracts. Here’s a few:

• Circuit Breaker - A generic contract for rate limiting mints or transfers from a token account. This can help slow down or stop exploits as they are unfolding. For example, this can allow you to “stop transferring from this token account if more than 20% of the funds have been transferred out in the last 24 hours”
• Lazy Distributor- A generic contract for rewarding tokens to network participants based on an off-chain calculation. This architecture reduces the amount of transactions that need to occur on chain, improving scalability.

It has been an absolute pleasure building Strata over the last couple years, and we are extremely excited to be continuing on the forefront of Solana tech!

You can follow our progress at the Helium Engineering Blog.

Today we're sad to announce that, after multiple conversations and contemplation amongst the team, we have decided it is time to sunset Wum.bo.

If you participated in Wumbo/OPEN, you should use the following interface to recoup your SOL.

Everyone who participated can claim a share of the reserves of the Open Collective. This works because $OPEN uses a bonding curve directly to SOL, and team never took a cut of $OPEN (it had 0% royalties). As of writing this, $OPEN has around ~$166k worth of SOL in its reserves. This sol will be split evenly for each $OPEN. We have made $OPEN, along with every social token based on $OPEN, a fixed price bonding curve. There is no advantage to cashing out before anyone else.

For example, if there were 100 SOL in the $OPEN reserves, and 1000 $OPEN tokens, each $OPEN holder would be elligible to claim 0.1 SOL.

Thanks for giving Wumbo a try. Our team greatly appreciates you and your early support!

Wumbo was our first foray into building on Solana and we learned a lot. In solving the challenge of launching Social Tokens on Solana, we found we needed to solve launching tokens in general on Solana. This caused us to create Strata, which has greatly improved the experience for launching and offering tokens on Solana. With this, the team opened ourselves up to more than just Social Tokens. GameFi tokens, NFT project tokens, bounties for collective efforts, DAOs, subDAOs the list goes on.

Unfortunately, of all of the token types, social tokens have seen the least adoption. Across the board Social Tokens have struggled to find product market fit.

As such, we have decided to sunset Wum.bo to focus our work elsewhere. There were multiple facets to this decision, but the main considerations were a lack of adoption, the team not having the proper skillsets to push adoption, utility, and lingering questions about the role of individuals vs communities in tokenized economies.

The Team​

The success or failure of Wum.bo is ultimately on us, the team. We failed to deliver the revolutionary application that we had hoped to deliver.

The Wum.bo and Strata team has some of the best builders on Solana. We do not, however, have the kind of marketing and infleuncer relationships that can find PMF for Social Tokens. Our original thinking was to make social tokens so accessible that fans could lead the charge. After watching Bitclout, this seemed a reasonable approach. Give the community the ability to leverage tokens, and similar to what we saw with NFTs, wait for a wave of innovation. This wave of innovation never came, which meant we needed to push the innovation. That brings us to utility.

Utility​

Without utility, social tokens struggle to gain traction. While speculation held during the early days of social tokens, yielding massive hype as in Bitclout, eventually speculation fails. We ran several experiments from 1/1 art raffles, to bounties that allow you to sell and crowdsource your time, to token gated chatrooms. None of these saw increased adoption, usage, or utility in social tokens.

Community vs Individual​

The main issue when pitching Social Tokens to creators was that, to them, asking fans to buy their token felt like asking for charity.

Creators did not want to ask their fans to buy a self-serving token. It is one thing to ask your community to buy into a project, another completely to ask them to buy a token in your likeness. The future of Social Tokens likely will not revolve around individuals, but instead around communities and small projects. More and more brands, DJs, and personalities are opting to launch NFT collections. These share a lot of the same vision of the "Social Token Revolution" that we had envisioned.

Sometimes technology accomplishes your vision, but in a different way than you had expected.

Going Forward​

The team is taking a hard look at everything we are working on, and re focusing on what matters. Thank you for joining us on this journey with Wum.bo!

Wum.bo extension uninstall instructions​

• Navigate to chrome://extensions/

• Locate the card for the Wum.bo extension

• Click the remove button and follow any additional prompts

As builders, we strive to make history even when the market is bearish. Genopets helped us make history by raising over $1.8 million dollars using our Liquidity Bootstrapping Curve (LBC) for their KI Token launch. We joined forces with the Genopets team to support the launch of their KI token using Solana’s first permissionless liquidity bootstrapping protocol, the Strata Liquidity Bootstrapping Curve.

Through this liquidity bootstrapping, Genopets were able to create some of the deepest liquidity for their holders on Orca. The project did not collect any funds from this raise, rather, they used the funds to ensure that KI holders could continue trading the token for the foreseeable future. We hope to see many other projects adopting this model to supply liquidity to their holders.

Genopets is a project that is familiar with making history. They are the world’s first move-to-earn NFT game. Genopets offers a unique mobile RPG experience with an evolving spirit animal NFT personalized to you. You can battle your pets with friends to earn KI Tokens. These KI Tokens are the all-important in-game utility token for the Genoverse. They can be used for crafting, refining, and terraforming.

The Launch​

Genopets sold out their KI token with nearly 7 hours remaining on their LBC. With no bots or clickfarms, the Genopets team was able to bootstrap liquidity while giving their community a fair price.

From the outset of the three day launch, there were a good volume of transactions. In the beginning, this demand failed to match the falling price of the LBC. This is standard in an auction, as the price is meant to fall to the fair price.

The auction started at a price of $0.50 cents, accompanied by a gradual fall to between $0.07 and $0.11. In the graph below, you can see the moment the fair price range was discovered. After about 2 days, demand started to match the fall in price, and in the graph below, you can see the demand spiked when participants saw a great price.

Using Orca.so, the Genopets team created an Automated Market Maker with a pool using the $1.8 million raised. The price discovery mechanism enabled the Genopets team to find the true value of their token by bootstrapping that liquidity raised via price discovery directly from the LBC right into an Orca liquidity pool.

We would like to congratulate our friends at Genopets on a smooth and successful sellout of the KI Token, as well as the Genopets community for their new KI tokens! We also love the phenomenal custom UI skin the team created for their LBC launch. This custom skin demonstrates the ability to customize the underlying components of Strata to fit your needs.

We look forward to making more blockchain history, and seeing the new ground that the Genopets team is sure to break. If you wish to launch a token or an NFT project with Dynamic Pricing, you can use our launchpad at app.strataprotocol.com. If you need any assistance feel free to hop into our discord and we’ll help you set it up.

Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with our friends at Metaplex that natively integrates Strata’s Liquidity Bootstrapping Curves (LBCs) into Metaplex’s CandyMachine creation process, bringing dynamic, community-driven pricing to public mints and a better user experience for creators and collectors alike. LBC mints are live today. Read the docs or watch this video to learn how to use it.

Since the days of yore (read: 1 year ago), minting NFTs on Solana has been done with a fixed price. NFT Collections set a supply and a price, and hope that they sell out. When the SOL community was small, this methodology worked well. With increasing attention, mispriced mints have led to headaches for everyone involved and the network itself.

An overpriced mint will not sell out, forcing projects to cut their collections short. An underpriced mint invites hoards of bots that can clog, and in extreme cases stop, the Solana network. Add to this situation that projects are now being listed on exchanges during the mint, and you have a recipe for disaster. Price discovery is happening anyway, and the profits are going entirely to flippers and bots.

The solution: Dynamic Pricing. By partnering with Metaplex, we are pushing price discovery to be the new default for public mints. While whitelist mints can still be fixed price, price discovery is a necessity for public mints. Price discovery during the mint means that there is no advantage to spamming transactions or clicking “mint” before someone else. During a Dynamic Pricing Mint, the price floats according to supply and demand. As a minter, you decide what price you are willing to enter. As a creator, the proceeds of the price discovery help fund the project instead of short-term flippers.

How does Dynamic Pricing work?​

Imagine you are auctioning an item, but you do not know what it is worth. A good auctioneer will first establish a baseline price, then let participants bid the price up. The price starts high, falls until someone bids, then rises with every bid. For example, if we were auctioning a grill, the auctioneer may start the price at $1000. Then $500. Then $200, where someone makes a bid. From there, the price may be increased through bidding to $350.

How can this work with an NFT collection instead of a single item? The Strata Protocol LBC (Liquidity Bootstrapping Curve) does this by setting a starting price that falls over time and increases with each purchase.

As an example, let’s take a look at the Divine Dogs Dynamic Pricing mint. Based on previous mints, the team estimated that the collection would sell out completely for somewhere between 2 and 2.5 SOL. Thus, they set a starting price of 3.3 SOL and a minimum price of 1.1 SOL. The plot below is the actual sales history of the mint.

The price fell to around 2.6 SOL, followed by large demand from minters who thought the NFT was worth 2.6 SOL. As the price ran up, more minters bought, driving it up further. At 2.8 SOL, demand normalized and the price began to even out. The jagged lines down to 2 SOL show the users trying to time the dip. At 2 SOL—likely a psychological number—we can see the price rose rapidly as minters assumed the current price was the lowest they would see.

The Strata + Metaplex Partnership​

We’re huge fans of Metaplex and already built a way to create dynamic pricing mints on Metaplex Candymachines, but the experience is far from seamless.

The goal of this partnership is to drastically lower the barrier to entry to dynamic pricing mints, hopefully making the LBC mint mechanism a default for creators, collectors, and the Solana Network at large. The partnership will support deep, native integration in Metaplex including updates to the metaplex CLI and documentation that make dynamic pricing the default for public mints. Metaplex believes, as do we, that dynamic mints are ultimately better for creators, collectors, and the Solana Network.

Better for Creators,Collectors, & Solana​

The dynamic pricing model is more equitable for both creator and collectors. Using this mint method collectors have a fairer chance to mint, the community incentivises collectors that are long-term holders vs. short-term flippers, and creators usually end up raising more money through effective, community-driven price discovery.

A Fair Chance to Mint​

During a fixed price mint, the average collector does not stand a chance at minting a NFT. Professional scalpers deploy bots that submit millions of transactions while the average retail collector can usually only submit a handful. Even with anti-botting strategies, click farms stand a far better chance at minting NFTs than the intended minters.

With dynamic pricing, every mint participant has a fair chance to mint at a price they deem fair. This is a step-function improvement in inclusion and accessibility for mints that radically expands participation from the hands of the elite few to a true-fan community of many.

Disincentivize NFT Scalpers​

A classic NFT mint works a lot like concert ticket sales. Scalpers take the majority of the tickets and resell them to true fans, who are forced to pay a premium. The artist sees none of those profits.

With NFT communities, this situation is even worse because, in addition to creators getting harmed, the Solana Network is also spammed by bots and flippers trying to make a quick score. An NFT community seeks long term holders. True believers that want to see the project succeed long term. The Strata LBC combined with Metaplex makes it easy to disincentivize NFT scalpers and incentivize long-term community members.

Creators Can Earn More​

Creators have the potential to earn more using Strata’s Dynamic Mints in Metaplex. Creators do the heavy lift to bootstrap communities, and we think they should be rewarded for it—but not at the expense of the community. Since the money that would be going to bots is now going to the creators, projects will have a better chance to achieve their funding goals—from a more qualified community base.

This should, in theory, make projects more likely to succeed by aligning the interests of creators and collectors.

Better for Solana​

At the end of the day, minters are not the only victims of botters. Botting is clogging the network and will continue to do so unless something changes. Botters take advantage of the fact that mints are first-come-first-serve at a discount price. They submit millions of transactions so they have a better chance of being selected to receive the discount. With a dynamic pricing mint, this kind of behavior would only drive up the price and hurt the bots. As a result, bots are disincentives to participate, which improves the performance of the Solana Network for everyone.

Get Started​

Jump into our docs here to learn more or watch the following video, which shows setting up a dynamic pricing mint with a whitelist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28CwS1QYAo

• Follow Strata and Metaplex on Twitter
• Join the Strata and Metaplex Discords
• Our source code for this integration is here

A major tenant of blockchain architecture is composability. By sharing state, dApps can create rich interactions that are not isolated to a single walled garden. A token can have uses throughout the ecosystem, not just in a single application.

Solana and Ethereum take vastly different approaches to this problem. In this post, we'll explore the composability patterns on both and the consequences of these design choices.

Ethereum Composability​

Ethereum Composability looks a lot like interface-based inheritance in classical Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Ethereum makes use of a set of Standards - Well-defined interfaces for common tasks, such as creating a token. The most well-known standard is the ERC-20 token standard:

interface IERC20 {
    function transfer(address to, uint256 value) external returns (bool);
    function approve(address spender, uint256 value) external returns (bool);
    function transferFrom(address from, address to, uint256 value) external returns (bool);
    function totalSupply() external view returns (uint256);
    function balanceOf(address who) external view returns (uint256);
    function allowance(address owner, address spender) external view returns (uint256);
    event Transfer(address indexed from, address indexed to, uint256 value);
    event Approval(address indexed owner, address indexed spender, uint256 value);
}

Here's an overview of Ethereum's account structure:

A smart contract (in this case, a single token), resides at a particular address. Both the data and execution logic for that token are stored at that address. For example, the data to find all holders is available at that particular address.

In ethereum, you can compose contracts by storing them in your contract's state:

contract FooContract {
    IERC20 myTokenContract;
}

Similar to OOP, Ethereum is a system of smart contracts adopting interfaces so that they can interoperate together. "If it quacks like a duck, then treat it like a duck"

Solana Composability​

Solana Composability looks a lot more like Functional Programming (FP). The execution logic for a smart contract (on Solana, called a program) exists separately from the state.

With Solana, data is still stored in accounts, but all of the data for a given program is distributed across multiple accounts. Every account in Solana is owned by a Program. If this were a SQL database, you could get all of the state for a given program by running:

SELECT * from solana.accounts WHERE owner = <program_id>

Where is a Solana program stored? The compiled code is also stored on accounts. The Solana runtime knows how to execute the binary for these special accounts. You can think of a program call as a function execution over some state.

Since we looked at ERC-20, let's look at spl-token. First, let's take a look at a Token Account:

pub struct Account {
    /// The mint associated with this account
    pub mint: Pubkey,
    /// The owner of this account.
    pub owner: Pubkey,
    /// The amount of tokens this account holds.
    pub amount: u64,
    /// If `delegate` is `Some` then `delegated_amount` represents
    /// the amount authorized by the delegate
    pub delegate: COption<Pubkey>,
    /// The account's state
    pub state: AccountState,
    /// If is_native.is_some, this is a native token, and the value logs the rent-exempt reserve. An
    /// Account is required to be rent-exempt, so the value is used by the Processor to ensure that
    /// wrapped SOL accounts do not drop below this threshold.
    pub is_native: COption<u64>,
    /// The amount delegated
    pub delegated_amount: u64,
    /// Optional authority to close the account.
    pub close_authority: COption<Pubkey>,
}

This struct will be stored on a solana account for each unique holder of a token. The account is changed via function calls, for example:

Transfer {
    /// The amount of tokens to transfer.
    amount: u64,
}

There's some major differences to note here:

• Solana has one token program for all of the spl-tokens in existance. Eth has a program for each token.
• Solana state is stored separately from execution logic.

Composability works via composing functions. I can write a function that takes in an Account from the spl-token program, and then calls Transfer.

Solana Composability - Inheritance​

Solana Program calls depend on the arity and ordering of account arguments. Making matters more complicated, every account used by an instruction must be passed to the instruction.

The upshot: If my implementation of a function requires more or different accounts than yours, they are incompatible. This makes inheritance difficult to impossible.

Solana Composability - State as an Interface​

With Solana, the State is the interface. Composition can be broken down into systems of state and actions on that state. What does this mean? If Program A wants to interact with Program B, it can either

• Directly call Program B
• Write State that is expected by Program B

The latter has massive implications for composability. Instead of needing to agree on an action based interface, Solana programs can agree on intermediary state. Tokens are the most common form of state.

• Program A gives the user token A
• Program B lets the user exchange token A for NFT C

In Solana, Program B is blissfully unaware of Program A. In Ethereum, program B would need a reference to the token program of A.

Composability Example - Solana vs Ethereum​

Let's say you want to mint an NFT such that the price increases for every NFT purchased. The De-Facto way to mint a collection on Solana is the CandyMachine.

The problem: The CandyMachine takes a fixed price in either SOL or any SPL token.

On Ethereum, you may extend the interface of the CandyMachine contract and add your pricing logic. On Solana, you could do similar -- fork the candymachine and upload your own program. We're devs, and code duplication is bad! Instead, we can string two programs together!

To achieve this, we can tie a Strata Bonding Curve to a Metaplex Candymachine. A Strata Bonding Curve allows you to create a pricing system such that every new token minted is more expensive than the one before it.

The integration is straightforward:

• Step 1. Create a bonding curve with desired pricing characteristics that lets users buy Token A
• Step 2. Create a CandyMachine whose price is 1 Token A

At minting time, the minting UI:

• Uses SOL to purchase a Mint Token, Token A
• Uses Token A to mint an NFT from the CandyMachine.

The intermediary state between Strata and Metaplex is Token A. Importantly, neither the Strata nor Metaplex contracts know about each other.

Solana vs Ethereum Composability - Consequences​

Neither composition strategy is inherently better. As you will find with FP vs OOP, there are plenty of flame wars arguing which is better. There are, however, notable tradeoffs.

Tradeoffs - Speed​

Solana's programming model lends itself to massive amounts of parallelization. Because every piece of state is identified as read-only or writable, the Solana Sealevel runtime is able to run many transactions in parallel knowing that they will not interfere with each other. This is a core tenant of Solana, and why it has a much higher TPS than Ethereum.

Tradeoffs - UI Compatability​

Ethereum's interface model makes it easy for one UI to integrate with multiple smart contracts implementing the same interface. This makes forking considerably easier on Ethereum than it is on Solana. Example: On Ethereum, if you fork Uniswap and match the interface, you will have out-of-the-box support in multiple user interfaces. On Solana, you would only have support if you did not add any accounts to the function signatures. Solana user interfaces tend to be heavily coupled to particular smart contracts.

Tradeoffs - Open Source​

Neither Ethereum nor Solana has contracts that are open source by default. However, Solana has a good amount of closed source contracts that hinder composability. It is much harder to compose with something when you can't see the code. That being said, there is a strong culture of open source within Solana that is actively pushing for contracts to be open. Strata is, and will always be, open source.

Tradeoffs - Program Proliferation vs State Proliferation​

Ethereum's model leads to a lot more programs and a lot more bespoke code running on chain. This makes it way easier to override behavior (for example, taking fees on token transfers). On Ethereum, forking is easy and encouraged.

Solana's model leads to a lot more state, and programs that act as state changing primitives. This makes it preferable to create chains of logic where generalized contracts interact with other generalized contracts. On Solana, forking adds complexity for any UI-only dApps. This causes a push for well-thought-out battle-tested contracts, like the Metaplex Token Metadata Standard.

Tradeoffs - Complexity​

Solana tends to be more complex from a planning and architecture standpoint. You need to think hard about the state you're outputting, and how it can be used in other contracts. Stringing contracts together can be painful if this is done incorrectly.

With Ethereum, as long as you have a reasonable interface you can get away with ugly state.

Strata - Composability First​

The future of Solana is chains of primitives working together. We can model tokens, and systems of tokens, using various primitives like Bonding Curves, Fanout Wallets, CandyMachines, Governance, and Multisigs.

For example, using these primitives Grape has been able to set up a multifaceted DAO with SubDAOs:

With systems like this, the question shifts from "How do we develop an individual smart contract?" to "How can we compose and orchestrate existing primitives?".

Interested in Learning More?​

• Join our Discord
• Our source code is here
• Follow us on Twitter
• We’re Hiring! Apply here

In this article, we'll cover how to create a Solana token on Strata. Launching your own Solana token can be daunting. There are a lot of considerations, and we’ll try to cover those as well.

First, what does it mean to “Create” a token? Creating a Solana token tends to come in 3 steps:

1. Creating the token. How do you actually create a Solana token that will show up in wallets like Phantom, Slope, and Solflare?
2. Distribution. How do you get this token out to the community? How do you sell an initial supply to your community?
3. Liquidity. How does your community continually have the ability to buy and sell this token?

How to Create a Solana Token Easy Mode - Fully Managed Tokens​

Let’s say you do not want to worry about steps 1 through 3. You just want a token that people can buy and sell right now. When users put SOL in, they get the token out. You will not manage the token supply or pricing, and will instead take a royalty on sales (similar to an NFT). If you would like to create a token where you manage your own supply, you can skip to Creating a Token

For this article, I’m going to create a Solana Token called NOAH. Since it’s a small token, there’s no guarantee that there will be a counterparty to any trades. Instead, by using a Strata Fully Managed token, the protocol will be the counterparty to every trade.

Head over to the Strata Launchpad. Select “Create a Token”

Select Fully Managed:

Fill out the name, description, and photo for this token:

Then, select a price sensitivity. Utility is generally a good place to start.

Next, I'm indicating that this is a Social Token. I want this token to link to my wallet, so that it can be bought and sold in apps like Wum.bo. We’ll use SOL to price this token. When users put in SOL, they’ll get NOAH out. If this token isn't associated with a person, project, dao, it's fine to leave this toggle off.

Since I have set the royalties to 5% NOAH on Buy, I will get 5% of every NOAH token sale. If there are 100 NOAH tokens minted via the protocol, I will have received 5. I can also take SOL on buy/sell.

Done! You now have a tradable token! You can see this token on devnet here.

You can skip the rest of this guide, as it only applies to tokens not having their liquidity managed by Strata.

How to Create a Solana Token - Self Managed Tokens​

A self managed token is one where you decide the supply, and have full control over distribution. You will want to think about who should have this token, how it gets distributed, and the percentages/amounts for each party. You can see an example of this kind of workup here

Step 1: How to Create a Solana Token - Creating the Token​

This is the easiest part. Head over to the Strata Launchpad and select Create a Token

Select self managed:

Fill out your token’s information like the name, symbol, image, and supply:

Click Create Token. Strata will create the token and you should be able to see it in your wallet.

Step 2: How to Create a Solana Token - Distribution​

You have a token in your wallet, but how do you distribute it? You can send the token to people using your wallet, but what if you want to sell the token? This is called “Liquidity Bootstrapping.” In the previous step, you will have been greeted with a screen like this. If not, you can get to this screen by clicking “Sell a Token” on the launchpad.

Here, you have a choice. Do you want to sell the token with price discovery or for a fixed price?

Price Discovery​

If you expect the token to be in high demand, this is the best option. This option lets the market and your community decide on a fair price for the token. This uses the Strata Liquidity Bootstrapping Curve (LBC), which is similar to an LBP on Ethereum. The protocol will sell the token using a process similar to a dutch auction. The price will fall over time, and increase with every purchase. This creates a price discovery, which you can read more on here.

When selling a token with price discovery, the price will float throughout the launch period. You can control the following settings

Options​

• Starting Price - The starting price when the LBC launches. The price will drop quickly in the beginning and more slowly as time goes on. We suggest you set this price at the highest price you expect the token to sell for. This is not the maximum price. If the token is in high demand, it could sell for an average price higher than the starting price.
• Minimum Price - The absolute minimum price you would like to accept for these tokens. The price will never fall below this threshold. A minimum price that is too high may mean that the token does not sell out. This price should be within 5x of the starting price. If the starting price is 5 SOL, the minimum price should not be less than 1 SOL. The larger the difference, the faster the price will need to drop.
• Number of Tokens - How many tokens do you want to sell in this LBC?
• Interval - How long should this LBC go on for (in seconds)? This period is the time during which the price will fall. We recommend you set this period long enough so that everyone gets a chance to participate. Windows less than 15 minutes (900 seconds) are not recommended.
• Launch Date - When should the LBC start?

Fixed Price​

This option sells your token for a fixed price to anyone who visits the sales page. While this leads to predictable liquidity, it is also vulnerable to bots looking to buy your token and flip it on a secondary market. As a general rule of thumb, if your token is in high demand and you expect the fixed price to be less than the aftermarket price, you should use Price Discovery.

Bootstrapped Liquidity​

After you finish launching your token, you’ll be able to distribute the funds from the sale back to your wallet. When using the wallet that launched this sale, you should see a form like this:

Step 3: How to Create a Solana Token - Liquidity​

Now you have both your token and SOL in your wallet. Your community has tokens which they have purchased. How do you enable trading on this token? The best way to enable trading is via an Automated Market Maker (AMM). The most common form of this is a Swap (think Uniswap). On Solana, you have a lot of options when it comes to swaps. We will do a more in-depth post on this step later, but for now you can look at several different options with some of the features:

• Cykura - https://cykura.io
  • Open Source
  • Concentrated liquidity
• Invariant - https://invariant.app
  • Soon to be open source
  • Concentrated liquidity
• Raydium - https://raydium.io
  • Closed Source
  • Provides liquidity to a Serum order book
• Atrix - https://app.atrix.finance
  • Closed Source
  • Provides liquidity to a Serum order book

Let’s say you bootstrapped $200,000 in liquidity with a finishing price of $0.50 per token. After the liquidity bootstrapping is finished, you could go create a pool on any of these services with:

• $100,000 USDC
• 200,000 Your token

This will start the price of the pool out at $0.50 with $100k in liquidity. You can then invite your community to provide additional liquidity on this pool.

We are thrilled to announce a $1.5 million strategic round for the first permissionless token launchpad on Solana led by Multicoin Capital with participation from Solana Ventures, Starting Line, Asymmetric Partners, and Alameda Research.

Several notable angels also participated including:

• Bill Lee, the co-founder of Craft Ventures
• Chris McCann, a Partner at Race Capital
• Saurabh Sharma, a Partner at Jump Crypto
• Tristan Yver, the Head of Strategy at FTX.
• Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning, founders of Audius

Our funding announcement heralds the Strata Launchpad, the first permissionless no-code token builder on Solana. Our Launchpad makes it simple to launch tokens for Creators, GameFi, DAOs and Sub-DAOs as well as a social mesh for creating networks of social tokens. Launching a token should be as easy as launching a website with Shopify or Wix.

This funding will be used to further build our team as we help the community launch their tokens and expand the use cases for Strata tokens within the ecosystem. We’re hiring in both engineering and business development!

We would also like to thank the Solana community and our advisors for supporting us on this journey. From the various hackathons and hacker houses to the tireless work from the community on tools and composable protocols, we truly stand on the shoulders of giants.

Strata Protocol​

Strata is the best way for creators, builders, and entrepreneurs to integrate tokens, and novel experiences around tokens, into the heart of their communities. Strata Launchpad, a no-code token builder built using Strata, makes it incredibly easy to create and launch tokens with a few clicks.

Strata has a variety of options for launching social tokens, ranging from fully managed AMMs with frictionless token swaps to Initial Token Offerings (ITOs) using a technical innovation called a Liquidity Bootstrapping Curve (LBC). The LBC is similar to Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools (LBPs) on Ethereum, though notably they do not require any initial liquidity. These technologies enable price discovery and allow for Strata tokens, such as social tokens, gamefi tokens, or sub-DAO tokens, to start trading day one.

Strata tokens are built for composability. Tokens created with Strata are just normal SPL Tokens with Metaplex token metadata. This means they will work with your existing wallet and can be used out of the box in a wide variety of DeFi protocols. Strata is fully open source, and comes with a suite of developer tools so that you can embed your token anywhere.

Strata ships with a social framework that allows networking interrelated tokens to bind their directional success. Most notably, this framework can be used to create Sub-DAOs where the Sub-DAO token is directionally bound to the parent DAO. Viewed through a social lens, token collectives are a crypto-linked way to create micro economies within a larger organization. Like-minded creators can pool resources together and bond their directional success to other members of the collective.

Strata Protocol plans to work with the Solana Ecosystem to facilitate the launch of new tokens and develop them in innovative ways. The ease of our launchpad opens up the token economy to new users facilitating the growth of web3 by lowering the barrier to entry.

Strata Protocol is allowing tokens to be used with previously unexplored utilities. Strata’s diverse toolkit has already enabled platforms such as wum.bo to create social tokens for hundreds of users. GRAPE protocol has created Sub-DAOs using Strata Protocol enabling their community to monetize their skillsets via social tokens. Strata Protocol bounties enabled the Pandas Not Plastic campaign to raise over 1000 Sol for charity.

What’s coming next​

Integrations! We are going to add support for using your Strata token in a variety of places, from NFT marketplaces to governance and DAOs.

Our goal is to help the community innovate. Want to launch a token but not sure how? Feel free to reach out on twitter and we can help you brainstorm!

Where to find us:​

• Follow us on twitter
• Join our discord
• We’re Hiring! Apply here
• Our source code is here
• Our audit via SlowMist for the token bonding contract here

What is Blockasset?​

Blockasset is a platform on Solana for verified athlete tokens and NFTs. They specialize in social crypto assets for athletes. Athlete tokens on blockasset are a new p2p economy that rewards community engagement and early adopters. Blockasset is pushing the bounds of fan engagement in the sporting world.

Let's take a closer look at these Athlete Tokens, how they work, and how you can get your hands on one.

What is an Athlete Token?​

An athlete token is a subset of social tokens. Owning a social token is like joining a fan club. It gives you access to exclusive content, and can be exchanged for priceless experiences. For example, these athlete tokens will give access to training sessions, VIP sporting event tickets, signed merchandise and more. While an athlete token could increase in value, they are not an investment or security. Instead, the primary use of an athlete token is to be consumed.

The value of an athlete token is related to the power of the community behind them.

$BLOCK is the token of blockasset. You'll use this token to interact with everything in the Blockasset ecosystem, including to purchase these athlete tokens.

How does it work?​

Blockasset is using Strata Protocol to do permissionless launches of their athlete tokens so they are immediately tradable. No need for market makers or LPs. Strata seamlessly handles the supply and liquidity.

While this sounds complex, from a fan perspective it's as easy as clicking "buy".

tl;dr: The price of the token goes up as tokens are purchased and down as tokens are sold, following a mathematical curve

This is accomplished using an Automated Market Maker (AMM) called a bonding curve.

The best way to visualize this process is with poker chips. Imagine there is a cash register. When you put dollars into the register, the cashier gives you chips (tokens). When you return the tokens, the cashier gives you dollars back. When you give Strata Protocol $BLOCK, it gives you Athlete tokens. When you sell them back to the protocol, it gives you $BLOCK. The more of the athlete token in circulation, the more $BLOCK it costs to purchase a token and the more $BLOCK you receive by selling tokens.

Athlete tokens are currently priced on a square root curve. This means the price is related to the square root of the total supply of athlete tokens. Here's a visualization:

The launch day prices may differ, but the curve will have the same shape.

🔥 Sponsored Burn 🔥​

If the price of a token is related to the number of tokens in circulation, how does burning tokens raise the price?

In a typical sell operation, your athlete tokens are burned in exchange for $BLOCK tokens. This means that both the supply goes down and the amount of $BLOCK in the cash register. What happens if you don't take any block from the cash register? This should make all existing athlete tokens worth more $BLOCK.

When athlete tokens are burned for experiences, all circulating athlete tokens are backed by more $BLOCK. This leads to several innovative tokenomics models.

Royalties and NFT Holders​

When an athlete token is purchased, a percentage of the sale is taken in royalties. This functions similar to NFTs, where a percentage of each sale is sent to the creator. The blockasset team will be routing a portion of these royalties to the athlete, and a portion of the royalties to NFT holders based on rarity. This means that NFT holders will accumulate athlete tokens which they can exchange for experiences.

The Fair Launch Window​

When an athlete token launches, the price will be fixed for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, the athlete token will gradually transform from fixed price to a square root curve. This results in upward price pressure with increased price sensitivity.

If you would like to learn more about this process, you can read on here

If you have been following closely to our small corner of the web you should be familiar with the Open Collective and the utility OPEN provides. If not, you can read more about it here

In short, Open Collective is the default collective of the Strata Protocol. And OPEN is the token for this collective. Any token made on Strata that isnt directly bonded to SOL, USDC, or any other cryptocurrency will be automatically bonded to OPEN by default.

The bonding curve for OPEN will become unfrozen at 9:00AM UTC Today. It is setup in a way to provide a fair launch to all who participate in the early moments of its price discovery. If you would like be one of those participates, please ensure you have a Solana wallet and have funded it with SOL. After that, all you need to do is wait for the curve to become unfrozen and utilize the UI below.

The OPEN token will launch on a bonding curve with the formula $P = c * S^k$

The parameters for the OPEN fair launch are as follows.

• First 6 hours of launch the curve price remains fixed $P = 0.005$
• 6 hours after launch there will be a 9.09091% bump $P \approx c * S^{(1/10)}$
• 12 hours after launch there will be a 7.57576% bump $P \approx c * S^{(1/5)}$
• 24 hours after launch there will be a 8.33333% bump $P \approx c * S^{(1/3)}$
• 36 hours after launch there will be a 8.33333% bump $P \approx c * S^{(1/2)}$
• Beyond 42 hours the curve will have reached its final slope

Whenever the bonding curve steepens resulting in an increase in price, there is a temporary tax imposed on selling. This removes incentive for bots to pump & dump the launch

If you participated in the beta of Wum.bo, you should have been airdropped netbWUM. A token which represented your overall total earnings from the beta. If you ended up holding it and not swapping for SOL in the first round of the beta distribution then congrats!

The time has come for you to be able to swap the netbWUM to OPEN, the first collective launching on Strata and the default collective for any unbonded social token. You can read more about the Open Collecive here.

At the time of this post, and the decommisioning of the netbWUM to SOL exchange, there was 388.57 SOL left unclaimed in the beta rewards pool. We have gone ahead and added an additional 10% (38.857)SOL to the pool as a thanks for sticking with us and converted it all to OPEN.

Exchange​

Chrome Webstore​

You can now download the latest version of Wum.bo on the Chrome Webstore