Initial DESO Distribution

The DESO supply was initially ~10.8M (prior to any staking rewards being paid out). This DESO was initially distributed by three mechanisms (initially described in detail in this extremely old document, noting that DESO was initially called CLOUT). Notably, no DESO was ever locked, and there is nobody waiting for liquidity so they can dump their coins.

We describe the initial distribution of DESO below in simple terms:

• Bonding Curve Allocation (~77%). In ~2021, approximately 77% of the initial DESO was sold through an innovative bonding curve mechanism that was fully open to the public. This mechanism was relatively simple: The price started at $0.50 per DESO (priced in Bitcoin), and doubled for every million DESO sold. The price ultimately reached approximately $180, raising ~5k BTC before the bonding curve was disabled by a hard-fork (shortly before DESO's first CEX listing).

  • Every purchase made against the bonding curve has been aggregated and listed in this sheet, with full pricing information for full transparency.

  • Notably, major well-known investors participated in this Bonding Curve period and continue to support the blockchain today, including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Distributed Global, Hack VC, TQ Ventures, North Island Ventures, Blockchange, and many others.

• Team Allocation (~20%). ~20% of the initial supply was allocated to the team that developed the DeSo Blockchain. This is listed in the sheet along with the bonding curve purchases.

• Proof of Work Mining (~3%). The DeSo Blockchain was initially secured by Proof of Work mining for maximum decentralization. Once the distribution of tokens evolved to be sufficiently-decentralized, the network transitioned over to Revolution Proof of Stake in 2024, which no longer distributes tokens to Proof of Work miners.

The above is an exhaustive list of how the initial ~10.8M DESO were allocated.

Later on, in 2024, in order to promote the adoption of staking to secure the network with the launch of Revolution Proof of Stake, a ~20% APY was offered for staking one's DESO to a validator. At the time of this writing, the APY is still 20%, but please check the block explorer validator page for the most up-to-date value. Although high, the staking APY does not result in the dilution of one's DESO holdings, so long as one stakes their DESO (and indeed one's ownership percentage actually increases when they stake because not all DESO is staked and earning rewards).

The above list is exhaustive: There are no DESO sources other than what is listed above, and DESO would be fixed-supply if not for staking APY.

Over time, as transaction volume increases on the network, and as the APY decreases as more validators emerge, we should expect DESO to become deflationary, and possibly hyper-deflationary.