A Case for Safemoon Protocol
by Gideon Six
If you haven’t heard of Safemoon, you are one of the few. If you have heard of it, but don’t understand it, then you are one of the many. This article will provide you the information necessary for you to determine if Safemoon (SFM) is a good investment for you. Safemoon is roughly 6 months old, publishing its contract on March 3, 2020 (Github). The contract itself declares that no rug pull is possible with this token and establishes trust by auto-locking liquidity for 4 years. The white-paper gives a brief introduction to the principles of Static Rewards and LP Acquisition. Safemoon is currently listed on the following Exchanges/Dapps: BitMart , WhiteBit, Gate.IO, Burency, ZBG, HotBit, MXC, BitBns, PancakeSwap (V2), BNB, LBank, Kickex, Decoin, Hoo, Bittrue, BitForex, BitTurk, behex, Jubi, and Biki.
Welcome to Safemoon
The welcome text on the official site Safemoon.net states “The SafeMoon Protocol is a community driven, fair launched DeFi Token. Three simple functions occur during each trade: Reflection, LP Acquisition, and Burn.” The project is led by CEO John Karony(CPT Hodl). John appears to have been an analyst with the U.S. Department of Defense for 6 years prior to starting Safemoon. He has a healthy following on Social Media and communicates regularly on several platforms. Currently the Roadmap is being revised though the team is constantly giving updates. There is a brief team introduction near the end of this article.
Community Driven
This describes the social media engagement of the holders of the token. The current count of this writing is 2,528,814- meaning that is the number of wallets that currently have SFM tokens. To be fair, the way this protocol works, once you buy in, you never really leave (more on that later). The site moonwhales.ca/holder contains a data set that allows one to break this number down for a more accurate representation. A chart provided in subreddit r/Safemoon sourced from miketheshadow’s API dated 24 Jul 21 shows the following:
If we consider an active holder having a wallet containing 10M or more tokens, then there are 1,261,607 holders (one person could have more than 1 wallet). This is still a significant amount of holders for a 6 month old token.
Social Media Followers are perhaps the most important part of this project. Instead of Safemoon as a company spending a fortune on marketing and Salespeople (they do have a small marketing department), there exists a rather large “Safemoon Army '' This Army comprises a large array of active followers on various Social Media Platforms.
Twitter (@Safemoon) boasts 999.1k Followers
Instagram (@safemoonhq) 224k Followers
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/safemoon/
7,519 Followers, 34 Employees
Discord 101,918 Followers
Reddit (r/Safemoon) 263k Astronauts
Telegram (https://t.me/safemoonv2) 155,826 Followers
For comparison, Ethereum has been around since 2014 and has the following social media following:
Twitter @ethereum 1.5m followers
Instagram ethereum_official 32.3k Followers
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethereum/ 161, 471 Followers, 467 Employees
Discord 22,088 Followers
Reddit r/ethereum 1.1M Builders
Telegram https://telegram.me/ether 5116 Members
These followers provide much needed information on how to buy the token (more on that later), clarifies information gleaned from AMAs by the developers, provides a buffer from FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), marketing, etc. The community itself takes on the role as Spokesperson for the company. Although not unique in Crypto markets, it is effective. In SFMs case it is powerful. The critics will point to a lack of transparency from the developers and a cult-like zeal by the holders of SFM. It is worth noting however that the Safemoon developers doxxed themselves and the cult-insult is an overused term that can be applied to just about anything outside of the mainstream.
Fair launch DeFi Token
A fair launch describes an effort made by the developers to ensure that the general public had an equal chance to purchase Safemoon on its launch date. This is opposed to traditional launches where friends and family members get their wallets first, much the same as a traditional company issuing private stock before an IPO. Unfortunately, there is no real way of verifying this. The transparency shown by the developers (self-doxxed) is encouraging however. There are not many tokens that do this.
DeFi (Decentralized Finance) relates to the way Safemoon Protocol works. According to Coinbase, DeFi is an umbrella term for financial services on a public blockchain, such as Ethereum. The main driving force behind the adoption of DeFI is to free people from the heavy regulatory and fee based dynamics of traditional banks and banking products. DeFi is a peer-to-peer service encompassing lending, staking, trading, saving, buying, and much more world-wide at speeds and prices banks cannot compete with. DeFi also offers some anonymity for those who wish to have more privacy and security with their financial transactions. SFM intends to build on the existing system and make improvements that will separate itself from other Crypto.
Reflection, LP Acquisition, and Burn (Tokenomics)
SFM wishes to establish itself as the premier token to utilize Tokenomics which can be loosely defined as auto-staking with the benefit of a constant decrease in supply over time to help drive value. Every transaction creates 3 simultaneous actions through a 10% Fee. 5% of the fee is “Reflected” to all other holders. The amount each holder gets is based on their total bag size. The remaining 5% is split in half- one half being sold by contract into BNB, and the other half is paired with said BNB then added as a Liquidity pair on Pancake Swap. The major Holder is the Burn Wallet. No one has access to this wallet. The wallet was initially funded with a manual burn however that is no longer the case. The developers have stated that they will not do any more manual burns.
This a great value for investors. As long as you hold, you will gain more value by doing absolutely nothing. It does discourage day trading due to the 10% for each transaction. You will pay 10% buying and selling. The great news is that the burn will stop at a certain point yet to be determined. At that point, whatever was going to the burn wallet, will also be redistributed among all holders.
Near-Term Projects
Wallet
The release of the SFM Wallet is expected to be Aug 28th, 2021. SFM released the Android Beta on August 7th, 2021 and the IOS Beta on August 11th, 2021. The reactions to the wallet have been strong both in compliment. The updates are coming quickly and the buzz leading up to the release has increased considerably over the past few days. The main issue surrounding the wallet has been about the lack of a direct “Buy” button. At the moment there does not seem to be a safe way to get around regulatory requirements for this. A key thing to remember is that each local/state/federal government worldwide has different rules regarding these types of transactions and SFM has been careful not to upset the applecart so far. There does seem to be a swap function that is just as good though. We will not know for sure until the actual release date. They are currently using Trust Wallet encryption to test but have plans to release the wallet with SFMs own powerful encryption.
Blockchain/ Exchange
At the moment SFM operates in BSC. To my knowledge Pancake Swap is the only exchange to have fully implemented Tokenomics. The fix to this of course is for Safemoon to have its own Exchange and Blockchain. This will not only allow full implementation of Tokenomics, but allow SFM to list other tokes/coins with similar ambitions negating the need to negotiate with the current large exchanges. The Volume generated by this has the potential to outperform every other exchange (crypto) currently in the market. The rumor mills indicate the Exchange will come in September with the Blockchain to follow by December. It is difficult to say for certain due to the Roadmap being taken down for revision. There will be an AMA coming up on August 22nd, 2021 that should shed more light on this.
Mooncraft
Mooncraft is a product that uses the Minecraft platform to integrate gaming with the SFM Protocol. This will open opportunities for players to earn and trade SFM tokens (maybe coins), NFTs, and other services. There is scant information to be found as far as where they are in the developmental stage, though the developers have just recently updated their official website to provide a link to the new website for Mooncraft.
The Team (Self-Doxxed)
Thomas Smith -CBO- 2021 Binance Influencer of the Year - Blockchain Consulting Background
Hank Wyatt- CTO- Software Engineering Background
Jack Haines- COO- Operations Management and Crypto Trading Background
Jacob Smith- Web Dev- Web Developer Background
Charles Karony- Executive Assistant- BYU Grad
Ryan Arriaga- Global Head of Products, Safemoon Hound, U.S. Marine Veteran, formerly known as The FUD Hound
Summary
A major concern for most coins/tokens is whale dominance. In this respect, SFM has had major selloffs by whales that has kept the price suppressed for an extended amount of time and generated criticism. This will soon no longer be the case. Recently u/joejoevargas posted an updated outlook on whale dominance in r/Safemoon using data from BSC scan.
Currently there are 24 wallets (Not including Exchanges) holding close to 70 Trillion SFM. That may seem like too much, though it is only roughly 15% of the total circulating supply meaning that their influence over price has waned substantially over the past few months. When the token was ATH, whale dominance (Top25) was closer to 23%. Compared to Bitcoin (Whales own 40%), SFM is in a historic position to be a completely community-owned token.
The lack of whale dominance will allow the buying pressure to overcome the sell walls and raise the price back above ATH. The sustained price increase will depend on the success of the Wallet, Blockchain and Exchange. Long term the prospects get even better. There are published efforts for Safemoon to work with African countries such as The Gambia as well as Project Phoenix. These projects are shrouded in NDAs so information about them is limited but they do exist.
FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) will drive prices up and down over the next few months. The battle cry for the SFM Army has always been HODL (Hold on for dear life). That is great if you do not want to cash out in the meanwhile and buy back in (it helps the burn). Keep in mind that even though this has been an extended dip. The current price is still up several thousands of percent from its initial price.
The Safemoon team is still expanding with the most recent hire of Ryan Arriaga. It is difficult to build a great team and every once in a while someone will have to go (SafemoonMark) due to circumstances that are not the best. This is a stumbling block for any organization. The CEO handled the situation as he does many others in a clear, concise, professional way. This is a team and a project focused on achieving greatness. There is little reason to doubt they will get there and make thousands of people rich, while helping developing economies around the globe.
References
https://github.com/safemoonprotocol/Safemoon.sol
https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-whales-the-key-facts-figures-you-need-to-know-2021-1
