THORSTARTER 101: What is Thorstarter?
Thorstarter is a Venture DAO and IDO launchpad built in the THORChain ecosystem. The mission of Thorstarter is to fund and launch the best up-and-coming THORfi and DeFi projects through liquidity grants and access to their customisable, multi-chain IDO launchpad.
Let’s breakdown what this means, starting off with IDOs.
Thorstarter as an IDO platform:
A key use-case of Thorstarter is to act as an IDO platform for new projects. IDO stands for Initial Decentralised Exchange (DEX) Offering. If you are familiar with IPOs from traditional finance, or ICOs in crypto, then an IDO is similar to these. It is the initial offering of a token to retail investors, in the same way that an IPO is the initial offering of shares of a company to the public.
Within crypto, you have ICOs and IDOs. ICO stands for initial coin offering, and is when a token first lists on a Centralised Exchange such as Coinbase, Binance or FTX. An IDO is a new innovation on this, where a token first goes public in the Defi ecosystem on a Decentralised Exchange. Examples of Decentralised Exchanges include THORChain, Sushi Swap and Uniswap.
When a project IDOs with Thorstarter, an initial pool of liquidity is seeded with XRune and the new token, and 50% of this is provided as a grant to IDO participants. The details of how this process works will be explained in my guides on XRune and vXRune. Thorstarter offers a variety of different launch models to best suit each project, including vesting schedules, minimum purchase and varied pricing models.
Above all, what makes Thorstarter stand out compared to other launchpads is that is offers access to THORChain’s deep multi-chain liquidity. This offers a significant competitive advantage to new projects. This uses a liquidity relay, which allows projects paired with XRune to access THORChain liquidity, without needing to meet the high liquidity requirements to list on THORChain.
Valhalla Venture DAO:
Thorstarter’s second key role is as a Venture DAO. This functions like a decentralised VC firm, funding the best up-and-coming THORfi and DeFi projects.
DAO stands for Decentralised Autonomous Organisation. This is an entity with no central leadership, but instead is governed by its community. In practice, this works through Thorstarter’s vXRune governance token, which allows community members to vote on decisions for the organisation. If you want to know how to get your hands on some vXRune and put it to use, then I have a guide coming on this too!
A common problem with DAOs is lack of community participation. Thorstarter tackles this by building in economic incentives to the vXRune token. vXRune token holders direct capital through voting, and receive a share of the profits of successful ventures too! Voting and directing capital in a traditional VC firm is normally limited to a small number of partners, but with Thorstarter’s Venture DAO model, all vXRune holders can get involved.
