On October 25, Jack Levin, the founder of the Fair Crypto Foundation and the creator of the XEN Crypto protocol, announced on Twitter Spaces the launch of the XEN batch minter and XEN NFTs, a parallel peer-to-peer XEN token minting system of contracts called Virtual Minting Units (VMUs). XENFT uses an NFT as a key to a collection of underlying contracts that can be traded on marketplaces like OpenSea or any other user interface, and a certificate that you will receive the future yield for XEN tokens minted from your batches. With this tool, Jack Levin could create a market for more investment capital and future profits from mining operations.
Read: How to mint a XENFT
About XEN
XEN Crypto launched on Ethereum on October 8th. It’s a token that can be minted for free, and the only thing needed is an Ethereum-compatible wallet and some ETH to pay for the network fee. If XEN is minted on another chain than Ethereum, then it needs that chain’s native coin. By providing the lowest barrier to entry to crypto, XEN is aiming at global adoption. The ethos behind XEN is to bring back the first principles of crypto, like individual sovereignty through self-custody of economic power, decentralization, and trustless consensus.
XEN instantly became the biggest gas guzzler, making Ethereum deflationary since Merge. To this day, 5951 ETH was burned in fees of the total net worth of $8,408,903.85. It is now one of the most widely used smart contracts, not only on Ethereum but also on the other six blockchains where it has been deployed. Some of these networks have seen a historical number of new accounts created and user activity never seen before.
Some news outlets accused XEN users of being mostly bots spamming the networks or that XEN suffered an exploit and a Sybil attack. We denied any exploit accusations and explained why XEN is a protocol that has no fear of bots. The XEN Crypto tokenomics is based on a logarithmic function that encapsulates the solution to all of the above issues. Studying the mechanics between different function parameters is key to understanding the lightpaper and the game theory.
It’s been noticed that, together with the XEN Crypto smart contract, the Cointool dapp also contributed greatly to the burning of the Ethereum gas fees. When XEN launched, the dapp developers created the XEN batch minter, which is very popular now. It allows users to mint XEN with ease by creating multiple accounts and claiming XEN rank in one batch transaction. The overhead on the gas fees is very high, and the contract hasn’t been audited. However, this doesn’t stop the users from minting XEN successfully with a short-term mint period. This is merely an indication of the hunger people have to use these kinds of tools to engage with the XEN smart contract.
XENFT batch minter changes the game
XENFT is a game changer not only for XEN adoption but for entire networks because it transforms their security assumptions and economic models. XENFT is an in-house built open source tool with no admin keys, which means that it’s immutable and is also going to be audited. It allows users to connect their wallet to the xen.network dapp and mint XEN in bulk with up to 128 VMUs rather than with 1 account at a time. It saves hours of time that would have been required to create and claim rank manually with the same number of accounts, and it makes the whole process more secure because it abstracts the wallet and relies on one private key rather than a hundred. From now on, it becomes trivial to use a hardware wallet, whereas before it was cumbersome. People are able to select a certain number of virtual minters and choose a mint term period that is equal to the whole batch. On Ethereum, it’s possible to mint with up to 128 VMUs.
The gas fee for minting one claim transaction on Polygon is 180,000, while the full batch of VMUs costs around 18,000,000 units of gas, which is close to the block limit. It’s possible to reuse VMUs and mint two or more batches with the same VMUs, which means that the gas is saved. Claiming XEN is cheaper and can be done with 200 VMUs in a single transaction.
Minting in bulk levels the playing field between bots and average users. Users could always create multiple accounts to mint the tokens, but only the most savvy and resourceful could extract the most in the shortest amount of time. Everyone is at the same level now and only the economic availability and the willingness to spend ETH for the gas fees is the limit. It is expected that with the ease of use introduced by this new tool, network activity and gas fees will rise even further. Since XEN Crypto’s launch, the minimum gas fee has never returned to pre-XEN levels, and it’s higher even when the network’s activity is at its lowest. These fee levels aren’t always welcomed by average users, but the validators and Ethereum investors welcome them because the validators can earn more rewards and ETH gains in value by becoming more scarce.
XENFT = XEN + NFT
XENFT claims cRanks for the whole batch and compounds them into one ERC-721 NFT containing metadata like count of VMUs employed, cRank range, AMP, EAA, limited, and redeemed. They are created on-chain as SVGs. VMUs are nothing else than proxy smart contracts used to mint and claim XEN. The NFT can be traded on OpenSea or any other marketplace or OTC. It becomes the access key to the whole batch. NFTs are innovative because they make claims portable what means that the user is not obliged to hold on to his claim for the whole mint term but can sell it anytime. The NFT background has a visual clue to how much value the NFT holds and how long the term is. The two dimensions of the clue are reflected in the colour gradient. The smallest number of VMUs with the shortest mint term is red, while the largest number with the longest mint term is blue. It’s going to be trivial to recognize the value of the NFT from a single look at the NFT image.
XENFT could potentially lead to more interesting use cases like burns, futures trading, loans, and games. One thing is almost certain, and that is that the ease of use of bulk VMUs is going to create a higher demand for the gas fees and more deflationary pressure on Ethereum. This in turn should raise the floor for XENFTs and XEN as a whole.
