Nsure Network TGE | Balancer LBP User Guide

8 min readOct 26, 2020

After having announced our successful close over our Seed- & Private funding rounds on September 30th and many of our early community members requesting to release details about our TGE, it’s time to gear up for our upcoming token launch.

Time: UTC 11:00am Oct 28th (exact block-height: commencing from block 11,144,773 and concluding at block 11,157,773)

Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP)

Balancer’s LBP solution is what we perceived as the best approach for our initial distribution of NSURE Tokens to early community members out of all the alternatives we considered due to several factors:

IDO (Initial DEX Offering)
Aligned with our overall project thesis, we found a Decentralised Exchange Offering to be the best match for initially distributing NSURE Tokens to any interested participants. No lotteries, no whitelists or other tradeoffs from alternative funding models.
Fair Distribution
Looking to offer a fair model for our TGE, Balancer LBP’s allow for typical issues among other AMMs such as front-running bots to be avoided through periodical updates in the weight distribution of the pool. Instead of needing to rush to acquire tokens, users can wait for a price at which they are comfortable with to buy.
Price Discovery
Inspired in basic principles of dutch auction models, having a decreasing token price throughout the time period of the LBP, users are not forced to buy at any specific price, but rather decide for themselves at which valuation it would become attractive. From a collective perspective, this allows for fair price discovery to take place, having a realistic representation of what the community judges to be a fair valuation.
Other Features like Impermanent Loss Mitigated Pool and customisation abilities, while preserving permissionless nature and scalability, to cater best towards our needs influenced our decision towards choosing Balancer LBP over other solutions.

If you’d like to read about Balancer LBP’s basics & structure:
https://medium.com/balancer-protocol/building-liquidity-into-token-distribution-a49d4286e0d4
https://docs.balancer.finance/guides/liquidity-bootstrapping-faq

LBP Structure

This Balancer LBP is intended to act as TGE for interested users and will be closed once the targeted block height (approx. 2 days) is reached. The Dynamics of this LBP are designed to enable users to purchase NSURE while allowing for fair price discovery to happen,.

Its structure is partially based on principles of Dutch Auctions, and price will decay over time as the LBP passes, however one of the main distinctions is that each individual has the choice to wait and decide at which price he/she is comfortable with acquiring tokens.

Because of the dynamic weight change provided by the Balancer LBP, the weight between the two pools (NSURE:USDC) will change from 97.5:2.5 to 45:55. Every time the weight changes, the price will be less than the previous price. It creates a downward pressure for the price during the Balancer LBP period. In contrast, demand for Nsure tokens resulting in purchases during the LBP will impact price appreciation of the token, and price may increase if demand out-weights the downward pressure from the weight updates.

Here you can see the estimated price development during the LBP if no buy orders are added (hour 1 to 48):

A starting price of approx 5 USDC (price ceiling) followed by a steep initial decline, starting to stabilise progressively after the 6th hour of the LBP being live.

As for the estimated Market Cap, we decided to also give transparency on this metric to interested users, starting at a 44.8m USDC circulating, and 920k USDC at the price floor set at 0.1USDC/NSURE.

For better reading, you can find it displayed on a logarithmic chart here:

For further details on our published simulation data for the LBP you can look at the NSURE LBP Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JxvcP13QmR_cCgmWciPvKYQEWGwb17Or9koMoiOloOs/edit?usp=sharing

The trading experience is just like the usual Balancer Pool. If there are more people buying NSURE, the price goes up. Otherwise, the price goes down. The only difference is the Balancer LBP makes it harder for the price to go up.

We will deploy NSURE tokens on Balancer in two phases:

Phase 1:
We will create a NSURE/USDC Balancer LBP with 4,000,000 NSURE tokens and 500,000 USDC.
The Balancer LBP starts around 11:00am UTC, October 28th and will last for approximately 2 days, commencing from block 11,144,773 and concluding at block 11,157,773.
The weights will change gradually from the start (NSURE:USDC = 97.5:2.5) to the end (NSURE:USDC = 45:55) during that period.
At the end of the Balancer LBP, the Balancer LBP will cease and Phase 2 will begin.

Phase 2:
Using the last price and part of the proceeds from LBP, a new NSURE pool will be seeded.

Guide to buy Nsure during the LBP:

In order to swap NSURE token on Balancer LBP, users will have to go through three steps:

Install and set up MetaMask
Navigate to Balancer LBP via lbp.nsure.network
Swap $NSURE

We detail these steps below:

1. Install and Setup MetaMask

We recommend using MetaMask, which is a Web3 enabled cryptocurrency wallet, to swap tokens on Balancer LBP. You can download the MetaMask extension directly in browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox. In addition to Metamask, Balancer also supports WalletConnect, Coinbase, Portis, etc. This guide will focus on the use of Metamask, which is similar to other wallets.

After preparing Metamask, you need to prepare two cryptocurrencies 1) ETH to pay transaction fees on Ethereum and 2) USDC to exchange for NSURE tokens.

While other tokens can also be used, we recommend preparing USDC. Balancer’s multi-pool routing means other tokens besides USDC can be used, but may result in a higher price as extra hops will be required.

2. Navigate to Balancer LBP via lbp.nsure.network

2.1 Go to http://lbp.nsure.network/

Once live, there is a live price chart developed by Nsure Network to help you to know the current price trend immediately.

In order to see the live price feed you will have to connect your Metamask to http://lbp.nsure.network/

Once connected, you should be able to see the live price feed of the ongoing LBP:

2.3 Go directly to the Balancer LBP page through the button “Access LBP on Balancer”.

Balancer is an n-dimensional automated market-maker built on Ethereum. Once you arrive at Balancer, you should see a page similar to the one below.

Here is the contract address of NSURE token for your reference

The NSURE token contract address :
0x20945cA1df56D237fD40036d47E866C7DcCD2114
Balancer LBP NSURE/USDC pool contract address: https://balancer.exchange/#/swap/ether/0x20945ca1df56d237fd40036d47e866c7dccd2114

⚠️Please check for the right token contract address. We will not compensate you for the loss if you swap for the wrong NSURE token.

2.4 Unlock your wallet

Next, you need to allow Balancer to spend your USDC first so that you can interact with Balancer smart contracts continually. Submit the transaction and wait for it to confirm.

3. Swap NSURE

🚨 IMPORTANT — DO NOT SWAP NSURE TOKENS TOO EARLY 🚨

That’s it! Once you have submitted your bids, all you have to do is wait until MetaMask updates the transaction status from “PENDING” to “SUCCESS” in a few minutes.

Please remember to prepare a small amount of ETH as the gas fee(transaction fee) to Swap your USDC for NSURE token.

If you can’t see NSURE token in your wallet, copy and paste the token contract below to “add NSURE token” to MetaMask manually.

Token Contract Address : 0x20945cA1df56D237fD40036d47E866C7DcCD2114
Token Symbol: NSURE
Decimals of Precision: 18

LBP Simulation

We’ve also crafted a Spreadsheet where you can see the expected weights and price development of the LBP in regards to time, excluding any buy-orders.
It can be used as reference to build up your own strategy for buying in:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JxvcP13QmR_cCgmWciPvKYQEWGwb17Or9koMoiOloOs/edit#gid=2010372975

Alternatives we considered?

Mesa
Mesa is a batch auction platform run by DxDAO on the Gnoss Protocol. Traders on the platform can place their bids on-chain before the auction starts, and at the commerce of the auction, buy orders are matched with sell orders under the condition that traders’ combined welfare is maximized.

Mesa has many benefits for token distribution and has been used for projects such as mStable and DMM. However, due to our desire to minimize bots outcompeting humans during the distribution, as well as due to community feedback, we decided to go with Balancer instead.

Bounce Finance
Bounce Finance is a new token swap platform. With it, any person can create a pool that allows other people to 1) use ETH in exchange for the offered token by a predetermined price, or 2) place a sealed bid with ETH for the offered token, and when the pool’s running time is up, Bounce Finance’s smart contract will open the sealed bids and fill up the orders from highest bid to the lower ones until all of the token allocations are filled.

We really like what Bounce Finance is doing, but we decided to go with Balancer because it allows NSURE to be purchased with USDC and other tokens, not just ETH.

IEO
The initial exchange offering, or IEO, is a token distribution approach where a centralised exchange distributes a crypto project’s tokens to its users either by a first come first served basis or a lottery system. In return, a crypto project typically offers a part of their tokens to the centralised exchange as the service fee or the listing fee.

Balancer’s permissionless design and open-access distribution are more in line with our values and our goals for NSURE distribution.

Conclusion

As a publicly audited, open-sourced project, Balancer’s reliability, and code is transparent. It allows a variety of tokens to be swapped for NSURE, and it helps us minimise the chance of bots outcompeting humans. As a DeFi project itself, Balancer also fulfils our goals of providing an open-access distribution for NSURE.

If you want to try out an LBP, there is great news for you:

The LBP for NSURE, the native token for Nsure Network, will go live at 11:00am (UTC) on October 28th, so you can try it out yourself.