$ANS Airdrop: a Token to Govern a Universe of Name Services

Today ANS (Arweave Name Service), a decent.land protocol, launched its token, an action that represents a foundation for ANS DAO. I will only bother you a little with the "technical" part, you can read their full announcement here.

Oversimplifying, ANS is for Arweave what ENS is for Ethereum. The beta version was launched in March 2022, and the public version in February 2023. 

The tokenomics are as follows:

And the snapshot caught 296 eligible addresses that will receive 21.8% of the total supply, which, as opposed to all the current trends it's only 100.000, so yeah, nobody will own billions of $ANS; it will come as scarce as it can get. 

Also, regarding the above graph, I'm genuinely curious how the community will behave with the airdropped tokens; not necessarily in terms of "how many will hold them vs. how many will dump them", but in terms of how many will contribute to the liquidity pool. That's the metric I think it's most relevant when it comes to tokens with a big chunk of supply allocated via an airdrop. Simply holding is relatively easy, given the fact that it's rather a passive approach. Locking some extra funds in a liquidity pool by creating a pair is an active endeavour that requires quite some effort and creed on the part of the community member.

I will stop here with the details you may already find in the original announcement because I want to use this opportunity to launch a different discussion: In the past months, even if it's not probably intentional, one may observe that there are three main philosophical currents under which, more or less, any Arweave related project can be classified, if not by its current implementation, than by its aspirational goals: the "purists", the "cross-chainers" and the "Web2-experience seekers". Now, of course, in reality, it is hard to find perfect embodiments of these "ideal-types", the vast majority of the projects being some sort of mongrels between these three types. Nonetheless, I believe that each project leans harder towards one of them.

Arguably, all three approaches have as one of their defining goals the growth of Arweave, even if the means and probably the targeted audiences differ.

Also, all three could work simultaneously in a synergic manner: the cross-chainers should bring Web3 from other ecosystems to Arweave's doorstep, the Web2-experience seekers should do the same for Web2 users (a mighty task, I could say), and meanwhile, the "purists" would have prepared all the infrastructure and products that otherwise you'll find in other places, for the newly brought users to try and hopefully adopt them.

Relatively recent Az, our colleague, opened a discussion about the necessity of further promotion of the ecosystem, and I saw that a healthy bunch of the answers stated that Arweave needs more marketing. They could be right; however, I believe that when this "trinity" starts working in the described way, the organic reach that will bring will be way more anything that can be brought through various marketing tactics. 

Indeed, it's harder, it will take a longer time (but hey, if Arweave can't handle long time frames, I don't know who can), but after each project delivers its own product and fulfils its little part in Arweave's construct, a tidal wave will be felt.

In the case of Decent Land I believe that it is safe to say that they are mostly in the "cross-chainers" category: they've integrated cross-chain logins powered by EverVision, and their products like Ark Protocol are directly aimed at cross-chain interactions. 

Why did I lead you on with this digression? Because $ANS is an ERC20 token. Yeah, it will be traded on Permaswap in an AR/ANS pair, but it will also be available on Uniswap, and I know that some of you will immediately ask, how can a token that has Arweave in its name not be a PST (a native Arweave token)? Besides some technical reasons, I'd theorize the answer has to do with Decent Land's broader view: make Arweave visible to as many other ecosystems as possible by using a "lingua franca" that is understood by most of the Web3 space. In this case, the "lingua franca" is Ethereum's ERC20.

Also, there is another catch (and I believe this is on alpha territory already): As you may know, Decent Land released the "Open Name Service Framework" (ONSF), a framework that lets any community/chain create its own name service out of the box. It was refined on the basis of the stack used for creating ANS, basically being powered by EXM and everPay, two Arweave L2s. $ANS will be the governing token not only for the initial Arweave Name Service, but for all any other Name Service resulting from ONSF. 

So yeah, even being an ERC20 token, I'd say that $ANS is, at its core, one of the first Arweave-related tokens launched in quite a while. Hopefully, we'll see more and more tokens, PSTs or other types launched by the projects from the ecosystem because, even if we may not care as much about the tokens as other communities, tokens are still embedded in the blockchain/crypto mindset for better or for worse.