Great news! The Kusama crowdloan season is resuming on Wednesday (September 1st) after Gavin’s return from holiday. Snek took no days off and is in the greatest shape ever. The 115k KSM we managed to put on board during the exciting race with Bifrost has been a great source of motivation.

Fren, it is time to announce Basilisk crowdloan #2. Prepare your KSM bags. Snek will start accepting your sacrifice again on Tuesday (August 31st) via https://loan.bsx.fi/.

Low Effort Memes: Happy degen after a successful Basilisk crowdloan.

The strategy for getting the snek a spot in the next round of parachains is the same as last time. We want to join asap, but not at any price. For the purpose of organic community growth, we have designed the Basilisk crowdloan with the main goal in mind to not overpay for the parachain slot. We believe that achieving a realistic initial valuation of BSX is the only fair way to treat our fellow tribemates and maximize the upside for early supporters.

To make sure that KSM contributions don’t spiral out of control, we have set the Basilisk crowdloan cap at 222,222 KSM. Furthermore, the rewards mechanism incentivizes KSM contributions when they matter the most - before the auction close period, or when Basilisk has not gained a 15% lead on the other competitors.

This post provides a detailed explanation of the mechanism behind the two types of rewards in the Basilisk crowdloan: BSX rewards and HDX bonus. At the very end of it, you will be rewarded for going through all this information with some cool info about the product.

Basilisk Crowdloan #2

• Visit: https://loan.bsx.fi/

• Start: 31 August 2021

• Parachain duration: 48 weeks

• Target parachain slot: #6 - #10

• Crowdloan cap: 222,222 KSM

• Total BSX rewards: 15,000,000,000 BSX (15% of total supply)

• HDX rewards: 56,873,469 HDX (max)

• Vesting period: BSX rewards and HDX bonuses are distributed linearly. The distribution will start once the Basilisk LBP event has been concluded (~2 weeks after the parachain slot is won) and will continue until 1 week before the parachain slot expires.

• Crowdloan campaign deadline: 09 October 2021

BSX Rewards

The amount of the BSX rewards depends on two factors. The first one is the share of the individual contribution in the total amount of contributed KSM. The second factor is the BSX rewards multiplier.

The rewards multiplier is at its highest value (1x) in the first 45h after an auction has started. This is the best period to bring your offerings for the snek. Once the ending period of the particular auction has started, the multiplier will drop linearly for the remaining 5 days of the auction until it has reached 0x in the last auction block.

The reason behind the declining BSX rewards multiplier has to do with the design of Kusama auctions. Parachain slots are allocated using the so-called candle auction mechanism. In candle auctions, the exact moment at which the auction closes and the winner is determined, is initially unknown.

Some centuries ago, pre-boomer ship tradesmen would light a candle every time they started an auction. Once the candlelight would go off, the winning bid of the auction would be determined. The purpose of candle auctions is to prevent sniping - entering the race with a huge bid at the last moment, which was a problem already back then.

An example:

Auction #6 starts on 01 September 2021 at 12.00 GMT.

Basilisk wins with a total contribution of 100k KSM.

Alice contributes with 1k KSM which represents 1% of the total contribution.

Alice would receive the maximum rewards of 150M BSX if she would bring her contribution before 03 September at 09.00 GMT.

If she did so on 05 september at 21.00 GMT, Alice would receive only 50% of the rewards (75M BSX).

The BSX rewards mechanism incentivizes early contributions and brings fairness to the game. The chance of Alice’s late contribution being counted to the bid of Basilisk is only 50%. This explains why she would receive only half of the rewards (if Bob had only told Alice about the snek on time..).

In the example above, Alice would still receive the full reward of 150M BSX for her “late” contribution if Basilisk did not win Auction #6 and continued the race for parachain slot #7. In this scenario, Alice’s contribution was still made on time - before the ending period of Auction #7 had started (and Bob is off the hook now).

HDX Bonus

The second element of the rewards mechanism is the HDX bonus which partially compensates for the opportunity costs of locking your KSM tokens instead of staking them against a ~14% APY. In other words, eligible contributions will receive part of the incurred opportunity costs in HDX tokens priced at $ 0.08059 (the closing LBP price).

The HDX bonus varies between 30% and 5% of the contribution’s opportunity costs. The bonus is at its highest (30%) while the snek is playing catching up with the frontrunners. As Basilisk becomes first and secures a comfortable lead of 15%, the HDX bonus will start dropping. Once the lead has reached 20%, the bonus will be at its lowest (5%).

The Value Proposition & Feature Updates

The core mission of Basilisk is to bring DeFi experimentation to Kusama and enable proper degening. As the summer is almost at its end we’d like to initiate the farming season (aka the harvest). We’re looking to attract projects to bootstrap liquidity through specifically designed pools (called LBP) and unlock DeFi experimentation on Kusama.

Basilisk’s playful nature is very compatible with Kusama’s ambition to move fast. The goal is to not merely copy mechanics and designs on other chains but make Basilisk a go-to-place to launch your liquidity. This, however, will require Kusama to have operational and interoperable DeFi with amazing UX and attractive rewards. We believe Basilisk will play a key role in that.

As NFT speculation eats crypto, Basilisk would not be complete without enabling one to ape into JPEGS. We have been working on this with our friends from KodaDot for a while now. The goal is to deliver NFT functionality by the end of September.

BSX Featureset (not in any particular order):

• Trade/swap tokens

• Launch a token pool

• Liquidity bootstrapping pools

• Mint NFTs

• Trade NFTs

• Bid on NFTs

• NFT royalties

Happy crowdloan!