The Cardano community’s first DAO, ADAO, has sparked the creation of the blockchain’s first DAO toolkit, The Summon Platform, which was announced last week. Today, the time and place of The Summon Platform’s initial “Community Token Distribution” was clarified: August 15, 2022 at app.summonplatform.io.
$SUMMON tokens serve as a decentralized governance mechanism for the Summon Platform and provide several forms of utility. Holders of $SUMMON are considered part of the Summon Member Community and are eligible for representation at the Summon Association Assembly, according to its articles of association. The not-for-profit Summon Association is registered in Switzerland and, according to the project team, owns all intellectual property rights for The Summon Platform.
Utilizing the same tools that the platform offers to DAOs created using Summon, $SUMMON holders are given direct governance over specific features and parameters of The Summon Platform itself. “This will provide incentive for active interest and utilization of the SUMMON token by the user community” said Summon Association President, Adam Rusch, PhD. The association is the token issuing organization, said Rusch, and the project’s general counsel and co-founder Matthew Bowen underlined that $SUMMON and its Community Token Distribution is “fully compliant with Swiss law.”
Through the Summon dApp’s DAO governance interface, $SUMMON holders influence development priorities of the platform. The project’s development arm, Summon Labs, said in an infographic released today that the project team “believes in the decentralized power of DAOs” and the utility of $SUMMON seems to back the spirit of the claim up.
The utility token’s tokenomics lean into The Summon Platform’s focus on community, which is unsurprising for a DAO toolkit which has grown out of a large and active DAO itself. Promising 37% of $SUMMON to “community distribution”, and 35% to “partnerships, ecosystem and rewards”, the project team, their advisors and technology partners are set to retain only 28% of tokens as compensation. The Association said that “$SUMMON… are being generated by the Summon Association for the purpose of advancing the mission and purpose of the organization” and are key to “raise funds for building key infrastructure.”
ISPO announced
Summon also announced today that a Cardano ISPO (Initial Stake Pool Offer) is now open to give ADA holders a method of supporting the project. ISPOs, unique to the Cardano ecosystem, have become increasingly popular and low-risk havens for ADA during the recent crypto market downturn. As a delegated proof-of-stake blockchain, Cardano ISPOs serve the capitalization and funding needs of new on-chain projects while simultaneously acting as an investment in those projects, and incentivizing the project teams to fully develop and encourage the use of their dApps.
The Summon Project’s ISPO is leveraging ADAO’s existing ISPO, so ADA holders can stake now to the ADAO pool. ADA staked to the Summon ISPO always remains in the staker’s own wallet and the staker retains custody. The deal is that the Cardano rewards that staked ADA generally earn (around 4% to 5% APY) flows to the Summon project team as funding, and the staker earns rewards in the form of $SUMMON tokens. The method of calculating those rewards is based on the “Maladex Formula” which may be peak tokenomics – the formula “…is proven to be an equitable method for rewards,” said Rusch, “$SUMMON will be allocated every epoch according to the formula (which has a whale-balancing mechanism), a lottery, and other properties to ensure healthy token distribution to the community.” In total, the project has allocated 17% of $SUMMON supply to service ISPO rewards.
The Summon ISPO is open now.