The INK Foundation announced on June 17th that it will mint 1 billion INK tokens to provide financial support for the liquidity operated by users on the INK network. INK is an Ethereum Layer 2 network supported by Kraken.
The foundation has permanently set a supply cap and will announce the minting date and contract address after the audit is completed. The conclusion of the audit and the achievement of the predefined usage threshold also mean that the details of the airdrop qualification process will be clarified accordingly.
Furthermore, the announcement clearly states that INK holders will not participate in the governance process of the rollup itself. INK will not affect the technical parameters of the INK network, which is still under the Optimism superchain framework. On the contrary, the holder will dominate the incentives and resource allocation of the protocols deployed on this summary.
According to the statement on June 17th, the foundation will distribute INK through an airdrop associated with the liquidity protocol supported by Aave. A wholly-owned subsidiary will manage this airdrop and adopt an industry-standard anti-sybil attack inspection mechanism to curb mining activities. The platform based on Aave will offer lending and trading functions and serve as the first fundamental component in INK’s decentralized finance (DeFi) stack.
The foundation stated that minting INK is to advance the project to the next stage of development and coordinate the interests of users, developers, and all parties to the protocol around this token.
Kraken launched INK on October 24, 2024, describing it as a network based on Optimism that enables users to trade and borrow without intermediaries. Andrew Koller, the founder of INK, said that the team would “accelerate on-chain development through an interoperable Layer 2 network” and planned to open the developer testnet later that year and fully roll it out to retail and institutional users in the first quarter of 2025.
Five days later, Ryan Wyatt, the chief growth officer of Optimism, disclosed that the Optimism Foundation approved a grant of 25 million OP to Kraken to incorporate INK into the hyperchain ecosystem. Of this grant, 5 million OPs are used for the OP stack project, while the remaining 20 million are linked to transaction volume milestones, aiming to return the fees to the Optimism community. At that time, Wyatt said that the proposal was similar to the ones provided to other companies building on the OP stack.
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