One thing I’d like to highlight this week is a recent announcement from Worbli that they would be ending their “sharedrop” early, effective immediately. This comes a little over a week after their last sharedrop update, which said that the event would continue through June 2019.

I don’t mean to single out Worbli here, as there may be some legitimate reasons for their actions. But it gets to some interesting points around token distributions for new EOSIO chains.

Worbli is an EOSIO-based permissioned, KYC’d blockchain that is attempting to be the “financial district for EOS,” using its regulation-friendly status to act as a bridge between various EOSIO chains and the legacy financial system. It’s an interesting value proposition. But Worbli is not, and was never intended to be, a public blockchain. It’s more like a business with a distributed set of servers and a publicly viewable and audit-able database. So we shouldn’t be surprised at unilateral, top-down decisions like this one.

What should surprise us, however, is the way this decision was enacted and announced. The update went out the same day that the sharedrop was ended, giving users no time to react. Users who are still in the KYC process have been given until Thursday to claim their accounts, but several who we’ve spoken with have indicated that they won’t be able to finish the process by then.

There are several reasons why Worbli may have wanted to end their distribution early. As they mention in their blog post, the EOSIO token model, which allocates network resources on a pro-rata basis, leaves token holders uncertain of their allocation if future distribution isn’t known. If Worbli was looking to onboard partners, this could have been a hang-up. But to end the sharedrop immediately is just bad PR. To give users even a couple weeks of warning time would have been far better received.

The goal of airdropping tokens to the EOS mainnet is twofold: to earn the support and goodwill of the community and to benefit from the already existing and widespread token distribution of the mainnet. Ending the sharedrop so abruptly seems to go against both of these goals, especially since the undistributed tokens will now be burned and WBI token ownership will be more concentrated.

We wish Worbli the best, and hope that this decision was made in order to allow the company to move forward with new and exciting partnerships. But we highly encourage any projects looking to build independent EOSIO chains to consider this example when designing their distribution model. For proof-of-stake blockchains, token distribution can be the difference between a secure public chain and one that is effectively controlled by a cabal of insiders.

The EOS mainnet distribution is the result of a year-long, public token distribution and a number of market cycles that have occurred since launch. Its distribution may not be perfect, but it’s the best we’ve currently got. New projects should strongly consider the benefits of supporting this community and the negative consequences of significantly altering their distributions.

Myles Snider, CEO