The Data Ownership Protocol (DOP) community was recently asked to vote on one of the most significant tokenomics overhauls in recent memory. And, the community didn’t just show up but delivered an overwhelming mandate, with 732.7 million votes being in favor of the motion (with a mere 23.3 million opposing it), securing an approval rate of 96%.
From the outside looking in, this wasn’t just another governance vote that crypto Twitter witnessed for the nth time; it was more of a tearing up of the old playbook, as most Web3 teams today seem to be busy finding creative ways to unlock more tokens, not fewer.
DOP’s team, however, took a polar opposite approach and permanently burned 30% of their own allocation.
Moreover, they revealed that newly hard-forked DOP-v2’s framework included an “adaptive, price-linked vesting” module which, instead of following rigid unlock schedules (that have historically been dumped on retail investors at the worst possible moments) pays attention to real time market conditions.
Additionally, on a technical note, every 30 days, smart contracts calculate the average price and determine the unlock rate for the next cycle. If $DOP-v2 maintains a 30-day average of $0.18, about 2% of the eligible tokens unlock. Conversely, a drop below $0.04 means that the schedule freezes completely until conditions improve.
Important Migration-Related Considerations
An important aspect of this entire development is the designated migration time window — which is designated to start in July and last for two months — during which $DOP holders need to burn their old tokens (following which they can receive DOP-v2 on a 1:1 basis).
Whether they choose to do it on day one or wait until the last minute, every investor starts the new vesting regime simultaneously on August 15th, creating a singular starting point, preventing early adopters from getting unfair advantages or late migrators from feeling penalized.
Lastly, it bears mentioning that a dynamic inflation system has been introduced that adapts in real-time based on market cap — i.e. when DOP-v2’s fully-diluted market cap sits below $50 million, inflation runs at 5% monthly to fund development. Above $500 million, it drops to just 1% monthly.
Paving the Way for a Better Web3 Ecosystem?
As part of the vote, 546 unique wallets (representing roughly 10% of the circulating supply) turned out, with 96% of them voting the same way. One Twitter user compared the results to a “North Korea style vote,” which prompted the DOP team to acknowledge that while the overwhelming support did look so at first glance, it wasn’t, highlighting its open ledger and zero coercion strategy as counter arguments for the same.
That said, DOP’s successful fork approval stands to set a new standard for how crypto projects can think about their tokenomics, as in the past, there have been countless platforms that have launched token models that have imploded within just months of them going live.
In this context, the 18-cycle checkpoint guardrail built into $DOP-v2’s design ensures sustained success such that if the token maintains a healthy average price above $0.12 during the 18th cycle (roughly 18 months post-migration), with all remaining locked tokens being released linearly over just six additional cycles.
Thus, looking toward September, when the unified vesting clock starts and even the new Uniswap pool goes live, it will be interesting to see how DOP’s bold upgrade pays off.
