Bancor’s $2.6 million Ethereum airdrop will land in December

The upgrade will encourage users to create their own micro-exchanges.

2 min read

Sep 25, 2019

Decentralized exchange protocol Bancor has revealed its upcoming airdrop, worth around $2.6 million, will happen in the two weeks following an upgrade to its network, which will happen sometime in December. It has also provided a few details regarding why it is happening and how it will work.

Bancor functions similarly to a decentralized exchange where users can buy and sell coins directly to one another—however the company plays a more active role in maintaining the network. But to ensure there’s enough liquidity on the exchange, Bancor uses a mechanism that creates pools of coins, called liquidity pools, that people can dig into. And it even has an innovative mechanism that stops them from drying up—you can read more about that here.

Later this year, the network will go through a change that affects how Bancor’s native token BNT will work. At the moment, 10% of every BNT token is backed by ether (ETH)—made inaccessible through the use of smart contracts. But instead of having all of this ether locked up and made unusable, Bancor wants its users to be able to use it instead.

So, Bancor is airdropping a token that represents—and is backed by—both this ether and BNT, split 50:50 down the middle. The new token will be called BNTETH.

The token will also have a function on the Bancor network. People will be able to use it to create liquidity pools—as we discussed earlier—in a way running their own micro-exchanges. The tokens will be distributed proportionally between those who hold the BNT token. Bancor hopes this will create 60,000 new liquidity providers on the Bancor network, helping to keep the network running and healthy.

The side benefit for users is that they receive a share of fees from trades of ether on Bancor. But it’ll only work if they can get their heads around the increasingly complex nature of the product.

“Mainstreaming first of its kind tech ain’t easy,” tweeted Nate Hindman, growth at Bancor. He’s not wrong.

Get crypto news straight to your inbox--

sign up for the Decrypt Daily below. (It’s free).

Get Email!

United States of Bitcoin? These States Are Considering BTC Reserves

Donald Trump and his political allies are plugging away at plans to stockpile Bitcoin at a national level in the U.S. Treasury. And now, with the asset’s price repeatedly soaring to new peaks since Election Day, some U.S. states are following suit. So far, three states are fielding proposals to establish strategic Bitcoin reserves, while digital asset advocates are calling for other local governments to do the same. Bitcoin Strategic Reserve Is Now on the Table—Here's How It Could Work Here'...

AI Won’t Tell You How to Build a Bomb—Unless You Say It’s a 'b0mB'

Remember when we thought AI security was all about sophisticated cyber-defenses and complex neural architectures? Well, Anthropic's latest research shows how today’s advanced AI hacking techniques can be executed by a child in kindergarten. Anthropic—which likes to rattle AI doorknobs to find vulnerabilities to later be able to counter them—found a hole it calls a “Best-of-N (BoN)” jailbreak. It works by creating variations of forbidden queries that technically mean the same thing, but are expre...

Elon Musk and Dogecoin: How the Billionaire Became the 'Dogefather'

As Dogecoin makes a comeback off the back of Bitcoin’s surge, some may be pondering: Where did the asset come from? What’s it for? And what’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk got to do with it? The original meme coin’s boom largely has the world’s richest man to thank. Musk’s obsession with shitposting helped boost the coin to a top 10 cryptocurrency. It’s been a wacky ride over the past few years, culminating in Musk's appointment to co-lead a government agency called D.O.G.E.—yes, really. But we'll explai...

News

Courses

Deep Dives

Coins

Videos