We’re in month 9 of the 12-month airdrop… 1B XTM was allocated to the community.
Given the price since launch, a significant portion went unclaimed… people who never set up a wallet, lost interest, or forgot. Those tokens are sitting idle, and nobody has formally addressed what happens to them.
Three months left. Let’s decide now and act precisely, rather than let the window close and treat it as an afterthought.
First, the Council should publish the unclaimed figure and confirm where the tokens sit. We can’t decide well without the number.
Then we choose. Two options:
Option 1: Burn them.
Permanently removed from supply. Deflationary, benefits every holder proportionally, needs no management, and nobody can ever misuse them. Clean.
Option 2: Deploy them.
Use the unclaimed allocation as a community war chest for outsized impact… collateral toward a top-tier listing (revive Kraken), or accelerating integrations like Cake. These tokens were meant to grow the community. Use them to do exactly that.
I back the burn. Most transparent, no intermediary, every holder wins.
I’m putting this to a community vote on my X accoun Okan Saglam (@Okz6161) / X — to gauge where the community stands. Come weigh in, and let’s bring a clear signal back here for the Council to act on.
Before deciding whether to burn or deploy the unclaimed tokens, the Council should publish exactly how many tokens remain unclaimed and where they’re currently held. The community can’t make an informed decision without that information.
Personally, I lean toward burning them, but I’d also support deploying them if it’s for something that creates clear, measurable value for the ecosystem. The important part is that whatever happens with these tokens is done transparently and publicly—not behind closed doors. These were community-allocated tokens, so the community should be able to see and understand how they’re ultimately used.
My personal preference will always be to get a good exchange listing as I feel like we really need to extend Tari out as far as we can but i’m not confident just tokens alone will achieve that?
Otherwise I’d also be keen to see some more experimental campaigns eg, bounties for agentic commerce enabling templates (I feel like if we could get 1-2 really high quality templates, that are valuable to agent builders and anyone could replicate - this would be a super positive outcome for Tari. In a way this is also marketing as it highlights capability and is something we can share permanently on the website.
Dont burn them, this misses an opportunity to use them as intended for the community. Deploy them elsewhere. anything to help actually create something and make the community or network grow.
Possibly keep them to subsidise human tapplets in l2 if that ever eventuates. Some l2 kind of airdrop where its not made up on the run - and also not for bots or just people in alpha club.
Also - how does the throttle respond to burns on the l1? Would it effect the amount of fees burned on the l2?
I would like to see unclaimed airdrop going back to community. There are few things we could use that for, obviously it has to be well planned through.
IE:
Initial staking reward bonus IF you lock your tokens for a period of time.
dont give it to the community, i think that would create an unnatural economic situation if we were to use it for validator incentives on Ootle. Just burn it on Ootle after its launched on a transparent transaction.
I am with you on this: 5% rewards, but to receive your reward, you must interact with your wallet and send at least 1 transaction per month. If you do not have a transaction to make, you can send it to your own wallet. As a bonus, it will help consolidate the UTXOs in your wallet.
I wanted to let you all know a few things. The first is that the question of ‘how to use the unclaimed airdrop tokens’ is one that came up before, and is actually the genesis of the bounty program. The council has been working with the assumption that these will be used for projects.
We hear you all, though, and one of the tasks of this inaugural council is setting up a budget. Part of that process is going to be what to do with these tokens. However we’ll need a bit more time, as we’re still hashing out other community items, and one or two team members who are critical to assembling the information the council needs to build this budget are traveling.
Once we’ve got a budget together, and get a full accounting of the tokens as they stand, we’ll be able to make more concrete decisions here. Thanks for your patience, and feel free to keep making suggestions about how you’d like to see the tokens used/handled! We’ll definitely be factoring them in as we construct the budget.
I’ll leave the poll open for a week and collate all feedback, here and elsewhere.
Big thanks to @Fox and the Tari Council for surfacing the numbers on the unclaimed tokens. That’s exactly the transparency we needed to make an informed decision.
Once the data and feedback are in, I’ll take the lead on drafting a concrete proposal for us to refine together and send to the Council for ratification.
In the meantime, keep the discussion going and keep pulling in Tari stakeholders. This is a decision the community makes together, and I intend to see it through
Burn. It demonstrates dedication and seriousness, boosts people who claimed. Integrations like Cake will come in time, esp. if their team is interested… and decisions like this shouldn’t be shaped by what are essentially BD deals. XTM needs to be important enough for people to want XTM in their wallet apps, to be incentivized to build on the L2 etc.
Managing bug bounty programs is traditionally difficult… in my time at Yat / Tari one of my tasks became managing bug bounty payouts, reducing cruft claims and the total cost of the program as well as increasing the efficiency of the payouts (number of useful disclosures went up, average payout amount went down). These days, it’s a complete nightmare with LLMs and not something for the faint-at-heart or even unpaid volunteers to tackle. IMO, it’s not wise to devote a significant amount of XTM to bounties (and, at current valuation compared to USD, you would have to). True high-severity issues will come to light via dedicated audits by the team, and are much less likely to be disclosed via bounty programs in the current automated slop PR landscape.
Don’t burn it; use it instead. The 5% rewards look like the best solution so far. It could be added to the code, so no one has to interact with it.
Komodo used to have a 5% reward until December 2024, when they voted to remove it; the price went from $0.50 to $0.01 in a year, a drop of 50X. I think if you add the reward, it will have a huge impact on an uptrend price.
I don’t have a strong preference yet between burning the tokens or putting them to productive use, but there is one thing I haven’t seen mentioned that I think we need to consider.
As I understand the tokenomics, the long term Throttle mechanism was designed around maintaining a target supply, currently 21 billion XTM + XTR.
So if we burn a significant amount of these unclaimed tokens but leave that target unchanged, aren’t we potentially undermining part of the point of the burn? Over the long term, the system would still be trying to move toward the original supply target, potentially through lower future burn rates.
To me, if we decide these tokens should be permanently removed from supply, that decision should probably also include lowering the target supply accordingly.
Otherwise I would rather see the tokens used productively by the community for things like development, integrations, bug bounties and other ecosystem incentives.
What I don’t think makes much sense is burning them today while leaving the long term tokenomics targeting the same total supply.
