Latest News: Public sale is currently live at Camelot Launchpad. Sale ends 24-Feb-2023 1800 UTC. Update – this has ended now, although Camelot continues to have other sales on their launchpad.
What is Factor DAO?
Factor DAO is a core piece of the DeFi puzzle that has been gaining momentum on Arbitrum, an L2 built on Ethereum that is emerging as a core hub of decentralized finance (DeFi) in crypto. In a nutshell, Factor is an on-chain asset management platform. The way it is built and the features it supports are much more advanced that previous versions of ‘on-chain asset management’ (think projects like Melon during the 2017 ICO boom with the same goal). I’d classify Factor and some other DeFi projects in this category in the “DeFi 2023” category (DeFi 2.0 was such a marketing gimmick).
Arbitrum DeFi
Before jumping into the token, a quick description of DeFi on Arbitrum. During the 2022 bear market when several blue-chip tokens crashed over 90-95% and majors were down 80+% from all-time high (ATH), one sub-culture of builders kept building in DeFi. That was all on Arbitrum. This group gave us gems like GMX, a protocol doing one of the highest fees in the entire crypto ecosystem currently.
Factor DAO Protocol
Factor DAO provides tools for any asset manager, trader, and other protocols to build on top of it in a seamless manner. The core of the protocol is “Tokenized Baskets” but yield pools play a big supporting role and finally the derivatives market that can interact with them is potentially huge. All these play into each other.
The core of the protocol is “Tokenized Baskets”. These are defined in ERC-4626. It presents a standard for yield-bearing vaults that make it interoperable across the entire DeFi stack. It is a powerful standardization in the DeFi system, similar to what ERC-20 did for fungible tokens. An asset manager can define their own fees and multiple strategies from active to passive. These can then easily be integrated into the rest of the DeFi ecosystem including automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap.
Yield pools help create lending pools on the blockchain, compatible with existing yield-bearing assets (think a-tokens from AAVE). Then there is a whole suite of derivatives built on top of these tokens and vaults – fully customizable options and futures contracts, perpetual futures, etc. There is something there for asset managers, traders, and degens alike.
There are a lot more nuances to the Factor protocol. You can dive deeper in the Factor Docs.
What is FCTR Token?
The FCTR token is the native protocol token of Factor DAO. It has similar tokenomics as Curve, i.e. the “ve” flywheel. For those unfamiliar, you lock up your FCTR tokens to get veFCTR tokens. These are not tradable. However, these give you a % of the protocol revenue and is used to make protocol governance decisions. The longer your lock-up period, the more ve tokens you get.
The maximum supply is 100MM FCTR tokens, with the team allocation of 15%. The public sale will have 10% of the tokens sold to the general public via Camelot DEX. There is a 50% treasury reserve, with the rest essentially for ecosystem incentives. Team vests their token linearly over 3.5 years.
At launch, 12.5% or 12.5MM FCTR tokens will be out in the wild.
How to Buy FCTR Token?
The best way to buy FCTR token currently is via Camelot DEX’s Launchpad. This is the public sale round for 10% of the tokens. The price will start at 0.1 USDC i.e. a $1MM minimum raise. However, we don’t expect this price to last during the sale event and the final price will likely be much higher. Make sure to do your due diligence on the token, protocol, and sale mechanics before you put any money in the primary public sale.
If you do decide to go down this route, follow these steps:
Step-1: Go to Camelot Launchpad for Factor.
Step-2: Connect your MetaMask to Arbitrum. If you don’t have Arbitrum network on your MetaMask, add it from Chainlist.
Step-3: Transfer ETH or USDC to Arbitrum. You can use the official Arbitrum bridge or multichain protocols like Hop or Multichain.
Step-4: On the day of the sale, make sure you have USDC on Arbitrum in your wallet. Use Kyber as an aggregator for best pricing or go directly to Uniswap (usually the best price, but there are a lot of other DEXes on Arbitrum that might be cheaper).
Step-5: Make sure you get your strategy of when to enter the sale figured out. Sale runs from 20 February 2023 at 18:00 UTC to 24 February 2023 at 18:00 UTC. Everyone will pay the same price at the end. The starting price of 0.1 USDC might not hold (unlikely in our opinion).
After the primary public sale ends, FCTR will trade on the secondary markets. We will update the post with those markets.
Here are the socials of Factor DAO if you want to stay in the loop on updates: Twitter, Telegram, Discord
Update-1: With 2 days remaining, the price of FCTR token has risen to over $0.5 per token, or a fully-diluted valuation of $52MM. However, the circulating marketcap would be around $17MM. There are still 2+ days left.
