ethereum:0xf19308f923582a6f7c465e5ce7a9dc1bec6665b1 taught me two things I now consider core to asset design, what I call the Virtual Lending Machine, and what Fair Launch may actually mean. But to explain why those matter, I have to walk through what broke first. TitanX has a lot going on within it, so there's a lot to write about and his will likely be a longer post, but worth the read. When I heard about TitanX, I was very skeptical, and if not for a good friend I would have completely ignored it. I'm very happy I didn't, but similar to HEX, I fell in love with the design and got lost in the sauce yet again (There's going to be a number of posts like this with many assets I've spoken of, so you might see a pattern of idealization begin to emerge). I got a lot wrong in interpreting how these systems would operate and perform in reality, however I did deeply understand the fundamentals and systems. The more time I spent with TitanX, the more I could see major issues in the design, yet chose to tell myself "It doesn't matter". Let's talk about what was broken from the beginning. First, the tRank Bonus. Bonuses in general are a dangerous game to play, because if you underestimate adoption and don't have safeguards in place (and even then there are limits to what can be controlled), your supply can explode beyond what the liquidity and system design can actually handle. This is exactly what happened to TitanX, which saw around $100m inflow within the first 90 days. TitanX is not alone here, as many tokens that came before suffered similar fate because of a bonus structure. Initially, the tRank bonus was giving nearly 100% bonus TitanX for around 60 day miners alone, and absurd amounts were earned by anyone who was in early and went max length of 270 days. This not only created a supply problem but a profitability problem for early participants and is largely responsible for why prices dropped so low. Luckily for TitanX, the bonuses and the entirety of supply mechanics reduce due to difficulty, reducing this problem massively over time, but its initial phase still caused major problems that will take years to resolve, if ever. Second, TitanX's Staking system was a unique twist that gave Stakers a portion of the ETH inflow from Mining. The problem with this Staking System is multi faceted. ETH rewards are dependent on Mining, Mining is dependent on price, and the main incentive to buy TitanX was to stake and earn ETH from the 5 different cycles of rewards. As profitability was over abundant from the tRank, prices plummeted, Mining stopped, and ETH stopped flowing in, putting those who had locked their TitanX for the Max length of 10 years in a precarious place if they missed the early rush, as ending a stake early could wipe out your entire position in penalties. To make matters worse for Stakers and the incentive to buy TitanX, and consequently the price, $DRAGONX was created, allowing users to mint DragonX 1:1 for TitanX. Trillions of tokens flowed in, and because DragonX's design was to Stake all of the TitanX it received from minting to earn the ETH, every existing staker was immediately diluted, massively, reducing their future payouts for the few that remained. Now to be clear, there is a very good argument for why DragonX was needed to retain the ETH within the ecosystem instead of seeing it be earned and taken elsewhere, but the repercussions were community division, anger, and a massive reduction in one of the only incentives that were designed into TitanX to help the price increase. Because of these two major structural flaws, you had an intended design and design consequences that were going in opposing directions. Briefly, Build on TitanX. BoT is no different than building any ecosystem on a blockchain in terms of basic flow and leverage on one tokens liquidity, like building on ETH. The problem was not BoT, and in my it was the rush of protocols that came flying in that were poorly designed systemically and destroyed many users holdings. Philosophically, this created another division and eventually led to certain founders leaving the community, bringing some users with them, though this was a smaller problem. To be honest, this whole BoT thing turned out to be a real mess, but I'll leave it there for now as I'm not looking to focus on non systemic points of TitanX, and BoT was a supplemental ecosystem add on. Now, the Buy & Burn. The TitanX Buy & Burn Still holds 4452.19 ETH in its reserves valued currently at $8.49 Million at the bottom of the market. Amazing right? Well, I can see two arguments here with the obvious being that it is an incredible setup for an ecosystem to have going into a future bull market. The second is that a discretionary change was made to withhold the value that users gave to the protocol with the expectation that the value deposited would be used to support the ecosystem and TitanX. This, to me, is another design flaw and over centralization. Yes, holding onto the funds may be optimal in the long run for growth and performance if the Founder ever comes back and utilizes the funds at key times, but at the expense of many holders who participated early and gave the contract those funds. It's complicated, there's no right answer here, and in concert with everything previous and what follows in the next paragraphs undermines the "Decentralized & Immutable" intent for TitanX upon launch. Finally for what I'll cover here, we need to talk about the Founder - Jake Sharpe aka @inkayknows. Now, after becoming a Founder myself, I do have some sense as to why he has handled himself the way that he has, and I can understand, if my sense is accurate, why he may have chosen the path he's taken given everything that has happened within the TitanX ecosystem. Whether I agree or not is an entirely different question. That being said, Jake Sharpe has been largely or completely MIA ever since late 2024. An entire ecosystem of users and builders who chose to give their energy, attention and money to his ecosystem are currently all left to their own devices wondering if the largest public figure at the head of the ecosystem will ever return. After all the problems TitanX has already had, this could turn out to be the nail in the coffin, though Jake could ultimately come back at any point and possibly even have something massive up his sleeve, just in time for the next bull market. The assumption there is that a return after everything the ecosystem has been through and the additional builds he released will be left where they lie and the ecosystem can be reinvigorated. We'll see, but I have no idea if a resurgence has ever been successful given a similar situation. So from the design of TitanX to the follow up builds to the behaviour and communication from Jake himself, TitanX is far from perfect and has structural issues both systemically and socially. Does this mean I don't think TitanX can perform any sort of gains in the next bull market? I think it can, but a lot needs to be changed and clarified. In my last post about $HEX, I explained how I see it as a utility token turned meme coin. For TitanX, I see it stuck in the middle of two worlds with a mess of an ecosystem built on it. In my opinion it will struggle to convert to a Meme coin and be successful based on Narrative alone, and something massive would have to change, without perfect certainty, for the DeFi Utility aspect to really shine again. Even the design of two of Jakes secondary builds, primarily Hyper, will act as strong headwinds for price performance beyond a certain point. In spite of that, I want to highlight what TitanX did that really introduced some unique and thoughtful designs to Crypto and asset design, as I think it really did contribute a lot and credit needs to be given. Two of the most unique features, and what sold me on TitanX, was primarily the combination Mining and Staking the same token together, follwed by the massive Buy & Burn, and the utilization of Fair Launch Crypto. Let's start with the Mining and Staking combo. This is extremely interesting design within the more speculative design of assets, and creates a bi-directional incentive gradient in theory. When the market is overheated relative to the cost to mine in ETH, Mining begins to take off and ETH begins flowing into the system. When profitability occurs and users sell down the price below the threshold for mining, Buying and staking keeps the price high and is designed to reignite Mining again, as Stakers earn a portion of the ETH from the staking pool. So TitanX really was the first Alt coin I had ever seen that used two mechanics that were previously used in "either or" fashion, together, to create an incentive gradient designed to keep the price around a floor that increased over time due to difficulty. Obviously the structural issues didn't allow the theory to pan out in the way it seems to have been intended, but this was a massive breakthrough in my opinion in asset design direction and was a massive inspiration for $TORUS and $UNITY, so massive kudos to @inkayknows needs to be given here. Second, is the Buy & Burn. 69% of all ETH that ever entered the system through Mining was placed into a Buy & Burn Contract to specifically Buy and Burn TitanX tokens off the market from its main Liquidity Pool. Initially, I loved it because of the massive support this meant for the price, but I later learned to love it in a way that I wasn't expecting. Through studying this Buy & Burn, I now view deposit based Buy & Burn contracts as Virtual Lending Machines. Think of it like this - for any token to have value that can be realized in USD terms, it must have a market with a token which already has a market in USD. When a Buy & Burn receives tokens from users depositing funds into a contract, the implications of the B&B are that those funds are going to be used to increase the price with every purchase, increasing realizable value for all holders due to increased price and tokens within the liquidity pool for users to sell into. This may be at complete central discretion, fixed time release, or some blend, but the value held in those contracts is expected to make it back to the holders in controlled fashion. This is how we get to the name Virtual Lending Machine, as users are lending their value to the contract with the expectation that the value they put in will be used to their benefit across time to support their value they accrue from the tokens underlying mechanics. This changes everything about how I look at Buy & Burn contracts now, and how I view how TitanX's own Buy & Burn was handled. I could write an entire article on this alone, however I'll save most of that talk for a future video. So thanks to TitanX's implementation of a Buy & Burn contract, I think this was a genuine leap forward in the development and understanding of how these contracts can serve a system and community of an asset. Finally, let's talk about "Fair Launch". TitanX was not the first to do Fair Launch, however it was the first to implement it with all of the mechanics it introduced like we've spoken of. Unfortunately, the Fair Launch ethos was undermined by its own design in terms of Bonuses, Mining lengths, as well as even the staking pool to some degree. Designing TitanX with the intent to create a system that does not reward based on size but rewards based on timing and time committed within the system was very important, and allowed the little guy to win at the same rate as the big guy when they played the same game. Fair Launch in the way TitanX did it was extremely inspiring, and though it was far from perfect, it made me see what was possible if we trimmed the fat and really asked what "Fair Launch" actually means. To me now, Fair Launch is symmetrical across time and holders. A Fair Launch System in my mind prevents early adopters from owning the system forever and gives opportunity to new users entering the system. It penalizes extractive or even malicious behaviour and incentivizes behaviours that are simultaneously beneficial to the user taking the action, the system, and other users. In other words, when an opportunity arises, that opportunity is not at the expense of others or the systems operations - Opportunity leads to stability, not instability. This is one of those subjects that I actually do need to make a video or article on to properly break down what I'm saying, so for now let's leave it there. All in all, this is not a hit piece on TitanX, as I truly do think this is one of the coolest experiments in asset design I've ever seen and much of what I wrote about here as lessons and insights were absolutely key in the development of my first two protocols as a founder, as well as what I have been creating as a hypothesized Asset for a Global Community - AEON. TitanX continues to teach me, as do Hex and all of the previous assets I've studied as well as even my own, which are far from perfect. If you want to see how I've applied what I've learned for TitanX and other assets I've deeply studied, go check out the links in my bio for the Live protocols and go to my proposed Whitepaper for my Hypothesized Global build for AEON: torus-win.gitbook.io/aeon Thanks for reading.