FAQ's
FAQ's from our Community.
What is Polygen?
Polygen is the Community’s Launchpad, the first truly decentralized launchpad where projects are free to innovate, experiment and launch their project with no gatekeepers, no whitelist and no whales. Gatekeepers restrict innovation and are contrary to everything crypto is about – being decentralized and permissionless. There has been almost no innovation in launchpads during the years, so projects need to compromise a lot to be able to feature on those centeralized/traditional launchpads, yet all other sectors of the crypto space have evolved so mcuh and are able to offer much more to their users; Essentialy, what Uniswap did for tokens, we are doing for launchpads.
As a project, why use the Polygen launchpad?
No Gatekeeping and permissionless approach
On Polygen, any project can raise without barriers to entry such as minimum purchase amount and project size- which other launchpads impose, this lets projects freely experiment and innovate.
Complete Flexibility
Projects have complete freedom to decide how much they want to raise, what auction mechanism they want to use, how they do their tiering, and they can operate any project round (seed, private, public), or connect rounds. Projects are able to raise more funds than they have originally planned as there is no upper limit.
Launch token pools on the Polygon (Matic) chain
By operating on the Polygon (Matic) chain, the most significant benefit is that IDOs will enjoy cost effective, low fees and improved scalability compared to larger gas fees and network congestion that’s currently present on the Ethereum Mainnet. Through this, projects will essentially spend less on token distribution and gas fees and IDO participants will in turn also spend less on redeeming their earnings.
Polygon also aims at facilitating the infinite growth of the Ethereum blockchain without any form of scalability issues while also acting as a bridge between various chains for ease of access by users.
Long-term community
We aim to be “The Community’s launchpad”. Most launchpad communities exist solely to “pump and dump” projects. They are not loyal to the project and move on after the project’s IDO. Polygen allows the community to participate from day one in a project they like. The community can provide seed liquidity and invest by funding as soon as they have passed KYC. The Project builds a community that is interested in the long term success of the project and loyal.
We have a strong social presence (we have Medium, Telegram and Twitter) and will do our best to promote projects in an organic fashion to help them reach their target audience.
As an investor, why use the Polygen launchpad?
Access to many projects
As we have no gatekeeping process and barriers to entry for projects, the Polygen community will have access to far more raises than other launchpads. This gives our Community a wide variety of projects to invest in.
Early access to projects
Through our launchpad, anybody can invest in a project at an early stage (where previously only angel and venture capitalists got the opportunity to). This has indeed created a fair and level playing field for a person to partake in pre-sales and support a project from an early stage.
Is Polygen native to only Polygon?
For the moment, yes, but we aim to become a multi-chain platform providing access to other platforms for projects to launch.
What partnerships have Polygen formed?
We are proud to state that as of 2 November 2021, we have closed our investment round and have raised $2.3 Million. Our lead investor is SL2 Capital, followed by 18 Ventures, Twin Apex Capital, AU21, Polygon Syndicate, ZBS Capital and Pluto Digital. Our other investors are Iconomy, Insignius Capital, NetZero Capital, Maven Capital, Woodstock, Sky Man Ventures, Lumos Labs, Moonboots Capital, Girnas Capital, Extra Watts, LD Ventures, LucidBlue Ventures, Aniket Jindal, Anderson Tan, GSR and Amplio Capital. You can read the full press release here.
What is the PGEN token utility?
$PGEN is Polygen’s native utility token which essentially unlocks a membership tier to various project raises, seed pools, DAO voting power & more. If a user has larger PGEN holdings, they get access to project liquidity pool seeding, further, holding PGEN allows users to access rewards across the entire ecosystem.
The goal of introducing $PGEN is to provide a convenient and secure mode of payment and settlement between participants who interact within the ecosystem on the Polygen platform, and it is not, and not intended to be, a medium of exchange accepted by the public (or a section of the public) as payment for goods or services or for the discharge of a debt; nor is it designed or intended to be used by any person as payment for any goods or services whatsoever that are not exclusively provided by the issuer.
How does the work on Polygen?
We use a Fair Launch Offering (FLO) process to encourage a transparent fundraising process with a fair distribution of tokens. To do this Polygen has integrated Balancer.
NEW: We also just added a new Fixed Raise option.
This unique approach is very different from the traditional launchpad whitelist/lottery with guaranteed allocation. The Project will determine how long the fundraise will take place (this may be 48 or 72 hours for example) The price of the token starts high and drops based on a pre-configured price decay curve that will react to buying pressure from the auction participants.
During this period, anyone can buy into or sell out of the fundraise auction freely at any time, so price truly regulates itself. Please note, there is no minimum or maximum allocation. Polygon community participants choose how much they want to buy or sell. Another reason Polygen uses this fundraise approach is that whales do not unduly affect the price of a token in a raise.
Why does Polygen have Raise Tokens (rTKN)?
For one simple reason — with raise tokens (rTKN), Polygen can offer much more to the Community!
For example, projects can offer more than one token to be claimed or they can offer different types of assets (e.g. NFTs). No other launchpad offers this! It is Polygen’s permissionless flexibility that makes us the future of launchpads.
The Raise Token creates an opportunity between the raise and the distribution of project tokens. This motivates us to keep creating new flexible tools to utilize in that time period.
Raise Token is an essential part of the community seeding process.
How does the raise token enable seeding, why not just sell the token?
Polygen allows anyone to post a raise with USDC as the collateral. (or whatever the collateral token is, which can be any ERC-20 token like USDT, ETH, Matic and even PGEN which can add another layer of utility to PGEN token!)
The raise token protects Polygen users.
If we enabled “Bring Your Own” (BYO) raise tokens then the seeders could be rugged ( scammed ) by the raise.
For example, the raise creator could put 1% of their BYO token into the raise, ask for $1MM seed, then sell the remaining 99% of the token into the raise after it starts, draining most of the USDC seed in the process.
The raise would ultimately fail and auto-trigger our refund function. However in this case, there would be little to no USDC left in the pool so the refund would fail — The creator of BYO token would have effectively stolen funds from the seeders.
Even if the raise fails to hit the target there will always be enough USDC in the pool to cover the seed costs. Seed funds are a critical part of Polygen FLO’s — and because the seeder doesn’t benefit from the raise in any way (other than the optional seed fee paid for a successful raise) we need to keep them safe.
What is my raise token rTKN worth?
Your raise token is worth its claim power (the % share you hold of all rTKN) on all future rewards the project behind the raise is offering. The raise token is NOT worth the value of the money raised. The raise token is frozen, cannot be transferred or traded, so it cannot have a price. The money raised is now owned by the project, who must now do something with it to provide you with future value., be that a token, NFT or the next big thing!
Projects must be very clear about what future value they aim to provide.
Just like traditional platforms such as KickStarter, GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, etc. the raise should be for something specific.
You GIVE money to the project and they CREATE something you want in the future. If you want to look at it objectively: The value of the raise token is not about what you put in, but the value you expect to get out of it.
NB: Also just like other platforms, the project may be wildly successful beyond your expectations or completely fail or even be a scam. In a decentralized context where anyone can post a raise, you must be extra vigilant and do your own research before you put money into anything.
For example, the PGEN token is associated with the platform itself (if you own rPGEN you experienced our work yourself, so you know the project is real) and could feed into potential future governance (e.g. a DAO that can vote and help promote specific raises), as well as share in future revenue (such as “tips” from users buying into raises). These are currently ideas that we hope to realize in the future.
Your claim power is calculated only from the raise tokens that were actually sold in the raise. All unsold raise tokens are burned when the raise completes, regardless of whether it was a success or fail.
Technical notes: For projects that use the escrow contracts to distribute rewards:
Total tokens in escrow / total raise tokens sold = 1 raise token’s claim power.
Projects are not limited to using the escrow contracts. For example it would be relatively easy for a project to offer exclusive NFT mints to raise token holders that regular token holders are not eligible for. Holding the raise token is a hybrid between a claim on future rewards and a POAP style proof of participation in the raise event that can be referenced forever.
How much did I pay per project token during a FLO?
Calculation 1 — What is the value of 1 rTKN:
Amount of TKN in the pool / rTKN sold
Example below as per the PGEN sale on Polygen:
4,000,000 (TKN in the pool)/568,990 (rTKN sold) = 7.03 PGEN
1 rPGEN = 7.03 PGEN
Calculation 2 — How many TKNs will I receive?
Example below as per the PGEN sale on Polygen:
Example 1:
If Thao paid 500 USDC at a spot price of $2, that would give her 250 rPGEN
We multiply Thao’s 250 rPGEN by 7.03
= 1757.5 which is the total number of Thao’s PGEN
Example 2
If Kareem paid $500 at a spot price of $0.40, that would give him 1250 rPGEN
We multiply Kareem’s 1250 rPGEN by 7.03
= 8787.5 which is the total number of Kareem’s PGEN
Calculation 3 — How much did I pay per TKN
Example below as per the PGEN sale on Polygen:
So the price of each PGEN for Thao: 500 USDC/1757.5 = $0.284/PGEN
So the price of each PGEN for Kareem: 500 USDC/8787.5 = $0.056/PGEN
Kareem actually came out with a better price than Thao!
How does the raise pricing work?
Warning this is highly technical! But we think you need to know it — we are working on an easy-to-understand version.
The main thing we’re trying to achieve is a high gini-coefficient.
The more widely and evenly distributed a token is for any crypto project, the better. More people with real skin in the game means stronger markets and community.
More decentralization means a more resourceful and resilient platform.
More real stakeholders make governance attacks harder Less inequality at launch is just fairer, and launch is both the most difficult and important (or only) time to get token distribution widely spread.
Heavily centralized token launches tend to only increase quality over time. Polygen currently uses Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools (LBP) under the hood.
In the future, we will be offering more raise types, but this is a relatively battle-tested mechanism in the industry to achieve wide distributions.
The LBP is like a dutch auction in that the raised tokens are for sale, start at a high price and decrease their price over time, but is NOT exactly a dutch auction. Balancer, is foremost a trading platform where price goes up when a token is purchased and drops when it is sold. It makes sense that their LBP is also based on active trading.
They have a neat reweighting algorithm that allows prices of two tokens to change without any trades happening, this is what powers the LBP.
Internally we refer to the Balancer style raise as “flappy raise”… the price drops until somebody buys and pushes the price up… then it starts to drop again. If somebody sells it drops even faster. The “flappy-ness” is configured by the raise creator, they set how steeply the price drops and how quickly each buy pushes it back up again. The “start high” strategy stops bots from scooping up all the cheap tokens in the first 5 seconds. It only takes one or two whale bots to completely destroy a token distribution.
The constant downward pressure on the token price stops the price from getting “stuck” due to many people buying and pushing the price too high. If this didn’t exist then the only way the price could come down to let in new participants after a spike would be if existing buyers sold the token. Why would anybody sell a token they just bought mid-raise? (other than to speculate by trying to take advantage).
However, this is NOT exactly a dutch auction. In a “real” dutch auction, everyone gets the same price, which is not how Balancer works. Whatever price you buy at, that’s the price you get. The best strategy is to be patient for a good entry point and buy the dips. We hope this makes sense, and we will be providing more and more learning resources for our users.
But at the end of the day, this is a new, exciting product that you can learn to use in the best way that fits you.
Do you have an ambassador program? Where and how can I join?
We currently don’t have an ambassador program, but it’s something we would like to create based on community feedback in the not so far future. Our first implementation of this will be through the BETA test program that we commenced in October and we will continue to expand this in due course of time.
How is the raise time calculated?
We calculate raise time in blocks, for example, if the raise is predicted to last 48 hours, each block time would be 2.3 seconds. However, the end time is an approximation, the blocks may fill quicker, thus speeding up the raise period.
What happens to rTKN at the end of a sale?
When the raise completes the first thing that happens is all raise tokens (rTKN) unsold are burned. This could vary from 1% to 99% of the raise tokens. The raise tokens remaining are recalibrated so that the holders of rtkn get a proportional share of the rewards from the raise.
What is Balancer's Liquidity Bootstrapping pool?
The main use case for Balancer’s Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools is to give Projects the ability to launch a token with low capital investment. This is achieved by setting up a two-token pool comprised of a collateral token and the project’s native token. What we appreciate about Balancer’s LBP system is that you can actually control the weight of each asset in the pool as well as the transaction fee which is charged by the pool. More info here
How to participate in a Polygen IDO?
To participate in an IDO please follow the steps below: Go to www.polygen.io and click on “Launch App”. Connect your wallet (Metamask) and select the Polygon (Matic) Network. If you don’t have Polygon ( Matic) Network already, follow these instructions:
Navigate to Settings->Network.
Click “ Add network”
Key in the relevant details:
Matic Mainnet Network Name: Matic Mainnet
New RPC URL: https://rpc-mainnet.maticvigil.com/
ChainID: 137
Symbol: MATIC
Block Explorer URL: https://explorer.matic.network/
4. Once you’re on Polygon (Matic) Network complete the KYC process (Please see this guide for the KYC process).
5. Once your KYC is approved, you can take part in IDOs listed on Polygen.
Select an IDO of your choice (please do your due diligence about a project before investing using the metadata provided) and take part in liquidity pool seeding and raises to earn rewards. More info here.
Why do I need to complete KYC?
“KYC on a decentralised platform? What?!” We get it, but this is a necessary step that helps us to i) be compliant and ii) gives anyone (apart from restricted countries; USA and China) access to Polygen. No Whitelist, No Lotteries. This means there is no need for participants in IDO’s to be allocated to whitelist, everyone with a little bit of MATIC for gas fees, can join in.
How do I complete KYC?
Please note that you will only have to complete KYC once on our platform if it is a requrement of the project and the KYC process has two components — ID upload and ‘liveness’ which is processed by Synaps. By completing KYC, you’ll automatically be verified to take part in future IDO’s. Below, you will find the steps to complete KYC on our site. At the moment it is desktop only.
By doing KYC, you automatically get access to all of our projects.
Below are the brief steps to do your KYC. For a comprehensive guide, please refer to this document.
Step 1: Go to our website and look for the “Launch App” button or simply go to app.polygen.io
Step 2: Connect your MetaMask Wallet
Step 3: Start KYC verification
Step 4: Complete Liveness and upload ID document (Passport, National ID, Drivers license, Residence permit)
Step 5: Click on Submit session
Step 6: You will have to pay the gas fees and click on confirm when prompted.
Step 7: KYC Submitted!
Step 8: KYC Approved!
Note: Residents of the United States of America and China will not be able to complete their KYC on our platform or take part in IDOs.
What if a raise fails, do I get a refund?
If a project fails, then you will be able to claim back your seed and raise token for more or less tokens than swapped originally. This is because you are redeeming for the average swap value, not the value you originally swapped at. For example you bought 1000 rtkn at $0.05 ($50) but the average rtkn was $0.04 ($40), you will be refunded the average amount with a potential loss of $10. Alternatively you would make a profit of $5 if 1000 rtkn was bought at 0.035 and average token price was 0.04. This is because trading is open during the raise and participants can take profits from the trading opportunities that occure during the raise, and that actually shows the importance of having a good buying strategy during raises.
This protects everyone in the case that the raised amount is too low for the project owner to execute their roadmap and on the other hand incentivises token purchases when the price is lower than average, if a raise is close to failing, thus making it more likely to succeed.
Where can I buy PGEN and what is its contract address?
$PGEN is available on both Polygon Network and ETH Mainnet, and you can purchase them QuickSwap & UniSwap
MATIC contract address: 0x01d35cbC2070a3B76693Ce2b6364Eae24eb88591 MATIC Dextools: https://www.dextools.io/app/polygon/pair-explorer/0xb6fbb59945c7dd8a1282c47a60fba77081c8cc2c
ERC-20 contract address: 0xf6719e1a8fcbb1b9c290019e37e004966a8916c9 ERC-20 Dextools: https://www.dextools.io/app/ether/pair-explorer/0x93c6572a49a0bdab6469aeb8c33671746b2b5f7d
PGEN token distributions 1. Sale tokens: 42:33% 2. Treasury: 23.67% 3. Team: 10% 4. Ecosystem: 9.5% 5. Marketing: 9.5% 6. Advisors: 5% For more details please visit our Whitepaper.
Is there a mobile app for Polygen?
At the moment, Polygen dapp is only available on desktop browsers, and only desktop users are able to participate in raises, as Polygen dapp is still in Beta phase. However in near future it will be available for mobile users as well.
How does Superstaking work?
PGEN Super staking pool is a staking pool 2.0 provided by Dafi Protocol since our partnership (you can read the full article here), where PGEN holders can stake their tokens and get rewards based on growth of token's demand and Polygen's ecosystem. Super staking comprises multiple staking pools. These pools are built using ‘demand pegged algorithms’ which means rather than locking in your tokens for JUST a time period i.e 60 days, you stake over time until a goal is reached i.e the price of a project token is $1. After initial lock up, you can claim rewards and un-stake at any time.
Our favorite feature of PGEN super staking is that long-term HODLers earn exit fees from other users, and their rewards multiply as the price of PGEN rises, but there are so much more.
A 30 day initial lock-up period for staking PGEN on Polygon via Super Staking
PGEN rewards can self-multiply as the network demand and market value fluctuates, which is represented as “potential” rewards
When a user exits the Super Staking pool, 10% of his/her rewards are distributed among those users who remain staking in it. PGEN hodlers are better incentivized for the time they stay committed to supporting PGEN.
Every 24 hours the $PGEN Super Staking platform displays the top five users that have staked the largest amount of $PGEN
An all-in-one tab within the platform to check $PGEN price, supply metrics, and social media updates will be live soon.
Pool details:
Staked Token: PGEN
Initial lock up: 30 days ( post lock up you can un-stake and claim rewards at any time)
Pool open: 12 months
Starting APY: Up to 500%
Start date: Saturday 18 Dec
Start Time: 2pm UTC
Is the price of project's tokens higher in Polygen than other launchpads?
That is simply not the case, the final price of a token is different for each participant and depends on their rTKN price and how much of the total rTKNs are sold during the raise. The fact is participants also have the chance to get a lower price than other launchpads if they have a good buying strategy of course. That's why strategies people use in traditional launchpads doesn’t work in polygen, being early and FOMO buying doesn't alwyas have the best outcome!
How does DAO and voting work?
Polygen's uses Snapshot as the platform for its DAO and votings. Polygen is a decentralized platform so users can put any suggestion up for vote and the community will make the decision about it.
Voting power will be based on PGEN (any of the PGEN and PGEN LP tokens on both Polygon Network and ETH Mainnet), however, depending on the type of the proposal (Community-backed projects proposals, Development proposals and ...) the strategy will vary, some proposals need to be based on the amount of PGEN as the determining factor of voting power and some need to be based on 1 Person (wallet) = 1 Vote as the voting strategy!
You should notice that only the PGEN and/or LP tokens that you have in your wallet before the proposal goes live will get you voting power. Meaning if you buy or transfer any amount of PGEN or PGEN LP tokens to your wallet after the proposal goes live, you would get no voting power for those tokens. This will ensure that we won’t have multi-voting, meaning people vote with one wallet and then transfer those tokens to another wallet address and vote again. You can find the link to our DAO here.
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