In January 2018, we released our token distribution plans for our project. Let’s briefly recap what they were.

Total Supply: 1 Billion tokens

30% (300M) sold to the public through a private and public sale

(300M) sold to the public through a private and public sale 30% (300M) incentivize partnerships and ecosystem growth

(300M) incentivize partnerships and ecosystem growth 20% (200M) team members, which will be subject to 2 year vesting for long-term growth

(200M) team members, which will be subject to 2 year vesting for long-term growth 10% (100M) retained for future use and locked for 2 years to ensure we manage the project efficiently

(100M) retained for future use and locked for 2 years to ensure we manage the project efficiently 6% (60M) for equity investors in the project

(60M) for equity investors in the project 4% (40M) our incredibly helpful advisors, who also vest with team members over 2 years to show long-term commitment to the project

If you notice, 300 million tokens were reserved to incentivize partnerships and ecosystem growth. That is a significant portion of the total supply of DOCK tokens to be issued. You’ll also notice that this figure matches the total sale of tokens done privately and publicly. In other words, the people that will benefit the most from dock.io’s token distribution model are not private investors, not the token sale participants, not even equity investors. The people who will benefit the most will be those whose incentives are aligned with the dock.io project.

This is very important to us. Instead of raising $40 million in token sales, we recognized that properly facilitating the growth of the dock.io platform is just as important as raising the necessary funds to develop our project. In order for dock.io to succeed, it needs a healthy and robust network behind it. This is the primary reason we’ve relied on secondary distribution mechanisms for the organic growth of our project.

Secondary Distribution Mechanisms

Primary distribution mechanisms are something we’re all familiar with. These methods mostly revolve around crowdfunding where people pay for tokens.

Although token sales offer many advantages, it has a couple drawbacks. They’re often limited only to those who have the finances to participate in either the private or public sale. They are also primarily geared towards people who want to financially support the project.

Secondary distribution mechanisms are an alternative to token sales that attracts people who fall more in line with our overall vision for the project:

It focuses on rewarding people whose interests are aligned with dock.io’s goals. Instead of paying for tokens, many dock owners will have earned them.

It provides a more equitable means of distribution that emphasizes tokens as an economy.

It identifies and fosters a community whose interests are aligned with our goals. These users will more likely continue to participate and organically contribute to the growth of our ecosystem

This was ultimately the heart behind our Earn Program:

Through secondary distribution mechanisms, we hoped to incentivize the organic growth of our platform. We achieved this in a couple of ways:

Users were first rewarded for successfully inviting their contacts to join the dock.io app. This created a network of data for dock.io to access on top of our partners such as Remote.com and FundRequest. Users were also rewarded through the Bounty program to share our project. Rather than spending that money on advertising companies, we wanted to leverage and reward the dock.io community. Quite frankly, we were blown away with the results. We had over 3k new users per day in the dock.io app. We were also the fastest growing Telegram groups by February 1, 2018.

We were very excited by these results because it provided a more equitable means of token distribution to the community. It also signals a large number of users who will continue to use and engage in our protocol. In light of this, we are currently working on new secondary distribution mechanisms that may serve to:

Contribute value and growth to the network

Incentivize partner adoption

Support a developer community around the project

Conclusion

Our approach to growing our network was atypical from that of traditional start-ups or even other ERC20 tokens. We took a risk by allocating such a large percent of our tokens for secondary distribution mechanisms. By doing this, we tied the success of our project to our community. We trusted them to take the initiative and ownership of the project to organically grow the network. And we could not be prouder or more thrilled by their response. Hopefully, the success of this program can serve as a model for future projects to more equitably distribute tokens while simultaneously growing a user base that is aligned with their values.