Foundation Now Holds 1% of the Total Peercoin Supply

Open letter from the Peercoin Project Leader and Foundation Board Member, Peerchemist, to the community, supporters, and sympathizers of the project.

You will often see me argue that Peercoin is the only true Proof-of-Stake chain because it allows everyone to be a "validator" or simply a "block producer". Everyone with a coin has a right to produce a new block. There is no gatekeeping. No gatekeeping is a recurring theme throughout the entire ethos of Peercoin. Another thing that makes Peercoin stand out in the deluge of generic proof-of-stake chains is that it has a continuous distribution of new coins. Peercoin is still being distributed, nearly ten years after its launch in the summer of 2012. Compare that to new PoS chains being launched today, which are distributed to insiders and VCs, while only a couple of % of the total supply is released to the market.

For those new to Peercoin, let me remind you that Peercoin is the most fairly launched blockchain in the world. The launch date (timestamp) was announced weeks before the chain started. Nobody had any advantage to get the coins, no Venture Capitalists, no founders, no team, no advisors.

In the summer of 2016, a while after Sunny King left the project, a dozen of us from the active community bonded to start the first "Peercoin Team". Efforts to bring Peercoin back on track culminated in 2018 with the establishment of the Peercoin Foundation. The Peercoin Foundation was established with the simple mission of promoting and supporting the continued education, development, and overall progression of the Peercoin project. We seek to empower current as well as the future Peercoin team members by providing the tools necessary to perpetuate Peercoin's long-standing reputation.

We established the Foundation using our own money, and initially funded it using our own coins. The amount of work we did in past years is exceptional given how limited our resources were. There was a period when the total value of the Foundation's assets was a mere $4,000.

Over the years, the foundation has provided the Peercoin project with a full infrastructure, from block explorer to mobile wallet, from payment services integration to new exchange listings, full documentation, a set of supporting libraries, YouTube videos, a blog... the list is far too long. The sheer fact that the first release of Peercoin after we "took over" was 0.6 and now we're preparing for 0.12 speaks volumes.

The mobile wallet, designed and implemented in-house, from scratch, and sponsored by the Foundation, is one of the finest in all of crypto, while our cryptocurrency library, coinslib, is the most feature-complete and the most mature one in the whole Dart/Flutter ecosystem. The mobile wallet has already been adopted in the wider crypto community, as two blockchain networks have already started using their forks in production. Multisig minting was done for the first time in history by the Foundation just recently. Wrapmeister, a tool to wrap peercoins into wPPC on foreign chains like Ethereum and Polygon was also sponsored by the Foundation.

We truly did set the Foundation on top of which the future of this project will be built upon, and we did all of this with unprecedented transparency. Is there another crypto organization whose financials are 100% transparent and open, at least one which does not practice insider trading?

Mind, most of us were volunteers until 2021! I was personally a volunteer until just 12 months ago when the Foundation finally acquired some serious funding. I volunteered for the project since 2016 and later for the Foundation since it was established. On more than a few occasions, I have personally covered expenses or salaries so the project can continue uninterrupted. I am telling you this so you understand the determination. We did this because it was hard, not because it was easy. Had we wanted to get rich quick off this crypto shit, we surely could have launched a generic ERC20 to line our pockets. This is clearly not about money.

We did what was right as Peercoin deserves to prosper. It is still the only coin done right. And Peercoin does prosper. Take a look around, observe the project and tell me that we did not fulfill our mission.

Now, four years after the Foundation was established, its finances are solid and sustainable. Of course, we are still talking about fractions of a percent of what other players in crypto handle, but that is fine. We did not have a premine to feed off of, Peercoin does not have a "dev tax", Peercoin does not have "grants", and nobody can print new coins at a whim. The first and the most important design choice of Peercoin was always to have sane economics. In Peercoin's ethos, sustainable and sane economics are even more important than the invention of Proof-Of-Stake itself. Peercoin must be a viable p2p financial asset.

This means that every single one of the 278866.37 coins the Foundation now owns has been purchased off the open market. Most of these coins were donated to the Foundation by sympathizers, supporters, and friends. However, recently the Foundation has started buying coins on its own in order to reach the 1% supply milestone.

With pride, I proclaim that the Foundation now has 1% of the total supply of coins. This is a big milestone for the Foundation, we have worked on achieving this for a good while. I believe it's important that an institution like the Foundation has a noticeable chunk of the supply, as it's one of the pillars the current project stands upon. The Foundation must have a stake!

I invite you to start more teams and more foundations that take care of Peercoin and continue building and improving. We did most of the heavy lifting and pain to get there. Now we need a boost in manpower and resources. I call for "whales" who have much, much more coins than the Foundation to stop sleeping on them and get busy. Build, and expand the network, provide and build new services, expand the userbase, increase the market cap, and increase the trade volume. Prosper.