As difficult to believe as it may seem, the month of January has already reached its end, and with it Ghost Trader’s migration to the Ethereum Network. It seems like only yesterday that the team found ourselves simultaneously neck deep in the festivities of the holiday season, and planning the rollout for the then not-yet-unveiled migration. Since then, the last few weeks have flown by, now little more than a blur in the rear-view mirror. For the benefit of keeping our community informed of our progress, please consider this an overview of some of the more important points of interest for the year thus far.
Smooth Sailing
In case you have not heard, the migration went off without a hitch, with only a few final loose ends yet to which to attend. At the time of this writing, the development team remains hard at work to re-release our DApp. In fact, by the time you end up reading this, the DApp may already be back up and working as intended.
Our migration event illustrated — yet again — how GTR operates differently, and for the benefit of its community of contributors. In fact, to the knowledge of the team, such an approach has never been attempted elsewhere. The entire decision to structure the migration relaunch the way we did relied heavily on the team’s dedication to the principle of respecting and elevating the interests of contributors. Read within the context of that framework, the following will make a bit more sense.
The Rundown
For all intents and purposes, GTR still operates pretty much the same way it did prior to the move to Ethereum. Just like with our initial launch back at the end of 2021, the team handled the migration and re-launch internally instead of relying on a third-party launch platform. By handling this process ourselves, the team saved the project from having to outlay a significant amount of money for something we managed to do ourselves.
Doing it ourselves also protected our contributors from the possibility of any potential major sell-off by people with no connection to the project who have no interest in the long-term success or failure of our community. In addition to charging a pretty hefty fee for the service, most launchpad services often require a token allotment as a condition of their service. These launchpads often unload those tokens on an unsuspecting community who end up providing exit liquidity for people who are little more than “hired guns.”
Aside from some new, additional functionality that provides more flexibility and utility for our holders, the NFT-side of the project remains largely unchanged. The token functions practically identically. The only real major difference lies in which layer-1 chain people need to employ to participate in the project.
Tokenomic Implications
If you managed to participate in the re-launch festivities, you may have some questions as to what happened and why we chose to do what we did. In order to understand fully the plan and its implementation, a short primer on the project’s tokenomics will prove helpful and instructable.
You will recall that the GTR token represents ownership of a small sliver of the ongoing passive income stream generated by the trading team as they trade the liquidity held in the token trading pool. To incentivize long-holding behavior and to reward those who exercised faith and trust in the project, Ghost Trader revamped the project’s tokenomics back in April of 2022.
In brief, GTR operates as a deflationary digital asset. Essentially that means that over time, the team locks away tokens mechanically, removing them permanently from circulation. Deflation means that a given holder’s position as a percentage of the underlying fundamental value proposition increases over time. The logic works like this. Contributors accumulate their tokens. Over time, assuming they remain patient and steadfast with their position, the real percentage of their position vis-a-vis the total gets larger.
Ideally, the team locks up 2M tokens per month. In practice, the total fluctuates depending on overall trading volume. The token launched with a total supply of 100M, but now the current circulating supply stands somewhere in the neighborhood of 76M and shrinking.
The token’s deflationary mechanism function operates as the foundational component of the tokenomics of the ecosystem. The transaction fees associated with buys and sells generate the flow of tokens that get locked away into the utility wallet, found here. The higher the trading volume, the more tokens get locked away. The more tokens that get locked away, the fewer tokens remain available and tradable as part of the circulating supply. The mechanism removes the tokens intended for locking as a matter of course.
As an aside, with the move to Ethereum we have decided to manage our own locked wallet as yet another opportunity to reduce operational costs for the project. Ultimately, lower costs translate into a more efficient, more profitable project.
Prior to the migration, GTR had just short of 11M tokens available in token liquidity on Pancakeswap (PCS). That number has shrunk dramatically with the migration, with only 5.6M tokens left unspoken for. This requires a bit of clarification.
As part of the relaunch, the team decided to withdraw half of the liquidity from the token liquidity pool originally held on PCS, as well as sell off a significant portion of the remaining token liquidity at a fixed price. The team then pulled 4 million tokens from the decentralized trading pool and made them available to the community, providing them an opportunity to participate in what amounted to an OTC token purchase.
Brass Tacks
The proceeds of the token sale amounted to almost $76K in new liquidity. Along with the liquidity withdrawn from the exchange liquidity pool, the total reached somewhere in the neighborhood of $180K. The team then combined these funds and added them to the token trading pool, effectively increasing the trading liquidity of that pool by approximately 32%. In other words, all things being equal, monthly token rewards should increase significantly moving forward because the team will have more money with which to trade.
All in all, the team could not be prouder of the work we all put into the entire migration process. The community responded with characteristic enthusiasm, and we promptly hit our 4M relaunch hard cap in approximately 60 hours’ time. Between the tremendous efforts of the team and the incredible support of our resolute community, we feel that the migration surpassed all expectations of success. We believe this success will feed future progress, accelerating the development of the project and further reinforcing Ghost Trader as the leading project in its class.
Join Us
Please be sure to stay tuned to our social media outlets moving forward for updates and news of the Ghost Trader project. We invite you to check out our official Ghost Trader website, join us either on Telegram or Discord, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, and be sure to check out the podcast found here.
