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In an industry that's become synonymous with fast cash, patience can be a rare commodity.
That makes a little-discussed announcement last week by the Nebulas project, powered by the top 100 cryptocurrency NAS, all the more remarkable. The team behind the protocol, today valued at $64 million, will now voluntarily wait a decade before they can get their hands on the blockchains' tokens they'll earn for their labor â seven years longer than they had originally planned.
In December, the Beijing-based team raised $60 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) for a general purpose blockchain with additional features that they believe will accelerate development and market adoption. In the original token allocation, 20 percent of the initial supply (or 20 million NAS tokens) were set aside for the team and founders to be gradually released over a three-year period.
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But based on a blog post published last week, the timelines for the token release are being extended considerably.
For the developer team, the start date for the gradual distribution of tokens will be postponed for a year, and for the founders of the network, the token distribution doesn't start for a full decade.
Its a move that's already winning nods of approval from an industry seeking to develop best practices. Ryan Selkis, founder of the token data source Messari, said that he believes a multi-year vesting schedule should become a standard for new token companies.
"The best way to align founder incentives is with vesting schedules â could be time-based, many are starting to do this, or milestone-based," he wrote CoinDesk.
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The Nebulas team has also committed to publishing the smart contract address holding the NAS tokens and will contract with a third-party auditor to verify their finances.
"We are conscious that the construction and development of Nebulas still have a long way to go. We need to focus on Nebulas developing, including technology and ecosystem," Hitters Xu, a founder of Nebulas, told CoinDesk.
Echoing that, the project's marketing director, Becky Lu said, "We just want our team to focus on our technical vision."
She continued:
"It's not an easy decision for everyone because the blockchain industry is a very innovative industry and still has a lot of risk. I think that shows our determination."
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Part of the reason behind the move, founders say, is the strength of the project's core idea, the mission of creating a blockchain ranking system that helps users elevate the best dapps, or decentralized applications.