Introducing the $MASK Token

NOTE：$MASK is not launched yet and not traded anywhere.

Background

The initial growth of the Internet was fueled by the opportunity to explore and build a wild but virgin world, where people could freely converse with each other, speak their mind, and build whatever they had set their minds to. The Internet was once a free and decentralized world — everyone had the maximum freedom to innovate, create, and experiment. Everyone was equal. This pioneering and buccaneering culture gave rise to the advent of the Internet Age and the dominance of internet companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Twitter in the everyday life of people.

However, as the tech giants grow increasingly more powerful, they slowly eat away individual privacy and freedom through big data. They start to rank us by our online trials and seek to bring the structural inequality of the real world to the virtual world. Consequently, the Internet also becomes more centralized, to such an extent that anyone can be silenced on social networks because of his opinions, that apps can be refused entry to Apple App Store simply because their beliefs and opinions differ from those of the Silicon Valley mainstream. It seems that as the Internet grows, the once free and fiercely individualistic virtual land has been gobbled up by tech giants and replaced with centralized online surveillance states. This strikes at the core of democracy, as sovereignty is gradually siphoned from the individuals at the grassroot level to the top.

We at Mask Network believe in democracy. We know that democratic freedom is a luxury because it relies on its constituents’ consensus and upholding of its principles by limiting their own actions. The social inequality caused by the irresponsible stewardship of governments and the financial sector over the past decades, however, has made the prospect of democracy dimmer than ever. If there was one thing cryptocurrency achieved, it gave the possibility that we, the individuals, can retrieve the power that we have given to the state, the corporates, and the financial sector. We have an alternative, a choice. We can — and need to — choose smart to help democracy continue to thrive in the 21st century. After all, democracy will not be able to thrive without democratic individuals. Even though everything seems to suggest an autocratic shift, and the democratic world seems to deteriorate, the seemingly very desperateness and frustration of the current situation brings its own remedy.

Due to the encroachment of personal privacy and liberty online, Mastodon, the most popular decentralized social media, has been growing rapidly, and Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter has backed a decentralized social media standard, Bluesky, in order to decentralize Twitter down the line. Moreover, there has been increasing discussion of the ownership economy. All of these attempts seek to curl power of the internet giants and give power back to the individuals. We at Mask Network have been deeply involved in these projects, managing two of the main instances on Mastodon with an active user base of 300,000, while providing technical support to Mastodon. Along with blockchain, decentralized social media are the pillars of Web 3.0. However, they have not focused on economic incentive engineering and have barely leveraged the potential of the market for large scale innovation. Leveraging market design to foster broad scale innovation on web decentralization is what Mask Network will focus on.

Mask Network

Mask is the bridge, Mask is the foundation, Mask is the meme.

Instead of creating a new platform, Mask Network aims to bridge Web 2.0 (the current web) and so-called Web 3.0, to empower the general public to use the better web within the current mainstream platforms, without using any API or centralized server. Our core goal is to maximize the freedom of interpretation on social media networks.

In order to achieve this mission, we have to build a layer of censorship-resistant, private, user-friendly network on top of the social networks without relying on their API. Thanks to great progress in cryptography and other Web 3.0 technology, (including blockchain, decentralized storage, and peer to peer networks, etc), the majority of the infrastructure is complete. Thus it enables us to move onto the second stage, building a decentralized applet ecosystem on top that could serve billions.

Next is to make it both user friendly and developer friendly so that we can achieve a two-sided network effect. Developers build or introduce various apps to Mask, users enjoy a wide range of Dapps. More developers are attracted due to popular demand. More users are drawn over due to even better utility of the app ecosystem. The flywheel goes on so that billions of social media users are eventually drawn over to Web 3.0 via Mask Network.

Over the past year, we have already brought many meaningful functional applets onto Twitter so users can send encrypted messages, store files permanently, display NFTs, and send crypto payments; In the finance category, users check token information and prices on Twitter, directly trade crypto using fiat, as well as issuing and participating in public offerings, all using our very light Chrome extension without leaving Twitter.

In the future, we will continue to improve user experience and expand the applet offerings to meet user needs and welcome any developers to help with the course. Layer-2 solutions and smart wallet will be introduced. Fiat onramp experience will be further streamlined. Pay-to-unlock will unlock an immense market of digital goods (NFT) and subscriptions. This mechanism provides a solid foundation for free online commerce over Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

As the decentralized “masked” layer on top of social media, we envision Mask Network to be a new world where anyone can build their privacy-respecting, decentralized network infrastructures, establishing the foundation for meaningful decentralized application ecosystems. Who says the privacy-respecting banking system of the 21st century has to be in Switzerland (no longer is due to FATCA)? Who says Tor can’t be on social media? Anyone who believes in self sovereignty and right to privacy can build on Mask Network and have easy access to the billions of users on social media platforms.

While we believe in freedom, we know that there is a responsibility that comes with it. Our ultimate goal is to see the emergence of a vibrant community on Mask Network that is not only free but also respects the freedom of others and resolves conflicts within the community. To achieve this, Mask community has to establish a self-governing structure. This governing imperative combined with the market-based innovation imperative led us to the conclusion that we need to introduce our own token $MASK.

$MASK

$MASK is the native token of MaskDAO. The DAO is the owner of the Mask Ecosystem. $MASK holders are members of MaskDAO and possess ownership of the Mask Ecosystem through the DAO. As the native token, $MASK serves as incentives to facilitate governance. Each $MASK represents one vote. Overtime, Mask Network team and ecosystem members will develop more products and services that would accrue value to $MASK. Mask Network will continue to actively engage with top Web 3.0 and DeFi projects as we have done with MetaMask, Mirror, UniSwap, Uniswap, Transak, Coinmarketcap etc to expand use cases for $MASK.

- Governance — MaskDAO

Governance of the Mask Network Ecosystem is carried out by MaskDAO, consisting of $MASK token holders. It is the final decision maker on all matters related to $MASK and the parameters and usage of the fund in the Reserve. $MASK token holders vote by staking their token on proposal contracts during the voting period. A voting period typically lasts anywhere from 1 hour to 3 days. Only $MASK that has been locked in governance for the past seven days before a proposal voting session can be used to cast a vote during the voting period.

- $MASK Token Supply and Distribution

A total of 100,000,000 $MASK tokens is created at genesis. Below is the information of the previous rounds and the distribution of the token before the upcoming Initial Twitter Offering of $MASK.

- 3-Year Circulating Supply

Circulating supply is the outstanding balance of token that can be freely traded in the market at any point in time. The majority of $MASK supply is subject to long-term lockups. The initial circulating supply is made up of Public Sale of $MASK, the liquidity pool and airdrop. All supply created at genesis will be unlocked by month 36.

The chart below shows the gradual increase of the circulating supply as tokens unlock.

The table below shows the circulating supply for each year.

- Category Details

· Foundation Reserve

Foundation Reserve is governed by MaskDAO and is used for many things, including but not limited to providing community grants, developing developer community, building ecosystem, providing operations grants, creating partnerships and collaborations.

· Core Team

Mask Network is built by one of the most imaginative and strongest Web 3.0 team. Core team members have been in the growth of Mask Network and is important to its continued success. Every team member is subject to the same lock-up period of 36 months with a 6-month cliff.

· Prior Investors

Mask Network raised funds from investors over the years at 5 different price levels, whose details are showcased below.

· Airdrop

To thank those who have participated in our experiments and events, as well as those who have continuously supported the growth of DeFi and Web 3.0, we have decided to conduct airdrops not only to our community but also to the broader DeFi and Web 3.0 community. The airdropped tokens are not subjected to lock-up.

· Community Public Offering

To engage the broader community, we have allocated 7% of $MASK total supply in a two-stage public sale. The first stage will be fixed price token sales using ITO with an allocation of 3% of total supply. The second stage is an auction using Balancer liquidity bootstrap pool, with an allocation of 4% of total supply. The ITO stage could be considered as early bird special. The real market value of $MASK will be derived at the second stage. Tokens from public sales are not subjected to lock-up.

· Initial Liquidity Pool

Because our first trading pair is on Uniswap, we need to provide liquidity to the $MASK liquidity pools. The initial liquidity pool will be set up by Mask team.

We are going to publish another article in a few days to detail how the public launch and airdrop works.

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