The Futereum Foundation, a Panama-based organization established to use Ethereum smart contracts for the role of creating non-securitised derivative utility tokens announced earlier this month the launch of its first product – FUTR.

FUTR is a derivative utility token that uses a Fibonacci algorithm written into the source code of the token’s smart contract to simulate returns similar to those enabled in futures and forward-swaps contracts trading of Ether (ETH).

The product was developed by the team in part as a response to securitized futures contracts for Bitcoin which were introduced in December 2017 by CME and CBOE. While the tokens are not futures contracts and have no qualities associated with securities, the algorithm used in the Futereum FUTR smart contract enables early-stage and high-frequency miners of the tokens to take advantage of fluctuations in the Ethereum price in a similar way.

To mine FUTR, a crypto trader goes to the Futereum Foundation website and copies the smart contract address. The trader then sends Ether to the address and the smart contract automatically issues the trader a FUTR. The Ether that is used to mine the FUTR is then held in the smart contract securely until all 10 difficulty levels of the mining algorithm have been completed. If all 10 levels are complete before the end of 12 months then at the end of the 13th month all outstanding FUTR are exchangeable with all the ETH in the smart contract on a percentage – for-percentage held basis. The period is extended until 37 months if the levels are not all fully-mined within 12 months from contract deployment.

What gives the FUTR a unique payment utility is that as the levels of the smart contract advance, less FUTR per ETH mined are distributed to the miners. This pushes up the cost of mining FUTR and compounds the effect of any price rises in Ethereum. As if to highlight this, when the developers wrote the White Paper, FUTR mining costs were $6.58 per FUTR whereas at the point of the product launch they had already risen to nearly $12 in value.

The launch of FUTR by the Futereum Foundation coincided with the Ethereum price going over $1000 this month. In addition to functioning like futures contracts for Ethereum, FUTR is primarily designed to whitelist miners in future Futereum product releases and to be used as alternate payment utilities whereby “merchants can charge progressively less for their product(s)/service(s) while earning progressively more for those products at the same time,” according to the foundation’s White Paper.