Today we can announce that we have decided to postpone the SQT Public Sale to a later date and that we will be conducting a private sale which will be open to key participants in our community. In addition, we will be proceeding with the SubQuery Kepler Network, an incentivised "canary network" on Karura to build the foundations for the future SubQuery Network.
Why are we postponing the Public Sale?
While the decision to postpone is not an easy one, we feel ultimately it is the right choice for several reasons. Although the market conditions have been trending down for some time, we decided several weeks ago to proceed regardless due to two factors, the first being our commitment to our community about launching since March and secondly, the fact that we needed SQT to be circulating and distributed to kickstart the SubQuery Network.
Despite significant interest we received during our "Expression of Interest" process in May, with tens of thousands of signups in a matter of days, the overall market conditions have become increasingly bearish in the interim. It became clear that launching our token into such an environment would create unnecessary pressure on SQT, and our valuable community for the foreseeable future.
To be clear, we are not cancelling the Public Sale.
Regardless, SubQuery is in an incredibly advantageous position today. We have a live product that is relied on by hundreds of partners across three Layer 1 ecosystems (Polkadot, Avalanche, and Cosmos). Our current SubQuery Frontier testnet is halfway through its third and final season with over 1,000 indexers indexing projects from three different chains in one decentralised data service.
We are committed to move to a decentralised future, and as we have proven our Frontier Testnet through three successful seasons already, we are ready to begin our Network for real world customers. For this reason we are proceeding with the launch of our Kepler Network to enable network adoption to grow with the demand from our users.
What is the Kepler Network?
The Kepler network is the "canary network" of SubQuery that will be deployed on Karura, the DeFi hub of Kusama (and sister network to Acala) within Polkadot. The Kepler Network will enable thousands of users of the testnet, to progressively test the decentralised features of the network, and begin testing with incentives in a sandbox environment.
When we survey the web3 ecosystem today, we see that many other projects that provide decentralised services have made poor progress migrating customers from their centralised services to their decentralised alternative. Kepler, named after the famed astronomer, is designed to migrate real projects from our managed service to the decentralised SubQuery Kepler Network while providing incentives to all.
These incentives will be via the token of Kepler (kSQT) which will be issued with a very limited supply. We will reward key participants of this network such as Indexers, Ambassadors and Spartans with an airdrop of kSQT to help launch the network. kSQT details will be published over the coming weeks.
The SubQuery Kepler Network will operate in a similar way for indexers and delegators as defined in the SubQuery Network Whitepaper. However, as a canary network, we'll be fine tuning network variables to maximise utility, performance, and efficiency of the network. The main difference is that there will only be a single Consumer in the Kepler Network, SubQuery's Managed Service will proxy real customer requests to indexers around the world and reward indexers appropriately with kSQT.
While we need to work through various elements, a major benefit of launching Kepler is that we can leverage XCM. XCM is a foundational new technology within Polkadot that allows parachains (custom, project-specific blockchains within Polkadot) to interoperate and seamlessly transfer value. During the Frontier testnet we have only tested non-cross-chain features, and now we can test and integrate other parachains by taking the same approach as parachains, which is by launching a canary network on Kusama first.
The Kepler network will be retired when the mainnet is launched and participants will be able to burn kSQT in exchange for SQT via a predetermined mechanism.
Upcoming Private Sale
The private sale round is a unique opportunity for our Indexers, Ambassadors and Spartans to co-invest alongside professional investors to reward them for their ongoing support of the project prior to the launch of the SQT token.
The private sale will be at a considerable discount to the previously announced public sale terms and further details will be communicated to the aforementioned groups via email in the coming weeks. This will include the sale terms and structure, KYC/AML requirements, and other materials that will help to make an informed decision and understand the risks involved in participating in a private round.
The private sale will have restrictions in terms of prohibited jurisdictions, which include: USA, China, New Zealand, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Philippines. However, residents or citizens of the USA and New Zealand will be able to participate as long as they qualify as an accredited investor in their respective jurisdictions.
When will the Public Sale take place?
The SQT Public Sale will take place when we have confidence in market conditions and have fine-tuned and migrated a significant number of real world projects across to our decentralised Kepler Network.
At the time of the SQT Public Sale, the previously published sale structure and terms will be revised and adjusted to reflect both the community feedback as well as the network requirements at the time of the sale. All currently whitelisted participants will be able to claim a whitelisting spot under a new structure and preserve guaranteed allocation, though the discounts, lockups and purchase limits will differ. We will work to differentiate more the whitelisted users from both Discord roles and outside participants to reflect their commensurate contributions to the development of SubQuery.
Expression of Interest winners will retain their guaranteed spots in the SQT Public Sale.
What about Airdrops?
We will conduct a retrospective reward distribution sometime closer to the actual minting of the SQT tokens. This will take place *after *the public sale, around the launch of the SubQuery mainnet.
The airdrop will be tailored to Discord community roles and the level of input and participation from each of the roles. The airdrop will also cover the Frontier Testnet participants from seasons 1-3, respective to their performance.
The airdrops previously awarded to Gleam prize winners, SubQuery Grants recipients, hackathon winners, and participants of other community competitions will take place simultaneously with the above.
SUMMARY
- The SQT Public Sale has been postponed until the market recovers;
- SubQuery will be conducting a private sale which will be open to Indexers, Ambassadors, and Spartans to co-invest alongside professional investors;
- SubQuery will launch an incentivised testnet on Karura called Kepler ;
- The Kepler testnet will issue a kSQT token which will be burned in exchange for SQT once the mainnet is launched; and
- kSQT will be airdropped to Indexers, Ambassadors, and Spartans and those who participated in our Frontier testnet seasons (1-3).
We will share more precise details about the Private Sale, Kepler Network and SQT Public Sale in the coming weeks and months. Despite the bear market, we have never been more confident about the trajectory and opportunities awaiting SubQuery as we keep our focus on building fundamental infrastructure for Web3.
Once again, we would like to thank our early supporters for your ongoing support of SubQuery and can't wait for this next step in our project and to finally reward those who have backed us since our inception.
If you have any further questions, please contact the team in our Discord channel.
About SubQuery
SubQuery is the universal data indexing toolkit facilitating the construction of Web3 applications of the future. A SubQuery project is a complete API to organise and query data from Layer-1 chains. Currently servicing Polkadot, Substrate, Avalanche, Terra, and Cosmos (starting with Juno) projects, this data-as-a-service allows developers to focus on their core use case and front-end without wasting time building a custom backend for data processing activities. In the future, the SubQuery Network intends to replicate this scalable and reliable solution in a completely decentralised manner.
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