First, if you wish to verify any of the following token economics, you can look at the Openfund sidebar for Focus, which displays all supply statistics, or you can do your own analysis by checking explorer.deso.com or syncing your own DeSo node.
$FOCUS is a fixed-supply token, with the following token allocations for each category (as shown in the image above and explained in this section):
$FOCUS tokens were initially distributed through the reserve mechanism described here. Users can reserve tokens using any currency (BTC, ETH, SOL, DESO, USDC) and receive a combination of liquid tokens and locked tokens. These are listed as "Reserved Tokens" in the chart, which are unlocked, as well as "Reserved Reward Tokens", which are locked for 2 years from the app launch and then linearly unlocked over 1 year. Note that the app launch is considered to be January 30, 2025, so the first unlock will begin on January 30, 2027. The token supply is constructed such that the sum of these two parts accounts for 40% of the total supply.
In addition to the reserved tokens, 20% of the tokens are allocated to incentive measures (for supporting social airdrops) and a combination of AMM tokens, which provide liquidity for the DeSo DEX on Openfund, where $FOCUS is primarily traded. For the incentive tokens, all tokens distributed for promotional purposes have a 10% unlocked and 90% locked component. This means that when incentive tokens are distributed, no more than 10% of the tokens can be immediately traded. For the remaining 90%, they are locked for 1 year upon receipt and then linearly vested over 4 years. Importantly, the 10% unlocked portion used to fund the incentive tokens is currently being purchased by the Focus core team on the open market at a 1:1 ratio. This means that the incentive tokens will not create sell pressure, although this may change in the future.
Finally, the Focus Core Team receives the remaining 40% of the token supply, with a lock-up period exceeding any of the reserve holders. The team's tokens are unlocked over 3 years after the app launch, and then linearly unlocked over 1 year.
100% of Fees Used to Buy and Burn $FOCUS
As mentioned, 100% of the fees generated by the Focus platform are used to buy and burn $FOCUS tokens. The sources of fees are listed in this section, but may change in the future. Currently, all non-token mechanisms charge a fixed 10% fee, including subscriptions, unlockable content, tips, and paid messages.
Token Trading. On Focus, token creators can set any transaction fee they want, including choosing a 0% transaction fee. When they do this, half of the fee goes to the creator, a quarter to the referrer, and the final quarter as revenue for the Focus platform. Additionally, the Openfund DEX allocates a fixed 10 basis points where users can "advanced trade" Focus tokens. 100% of the fee revenue is used to buy and burn $FOCUS tokens, regardless of whether the user is executing the trade on Focus, Openfund, or elsewhere (thanks to the global fee mechanism of the DeSo blockchain).
Paid Forwarding (aka Decentralized Advertising). Focus uses a new mechanism we've introduced called "Paid Forwarding" to transition advertising from a centralized model to a peer-to-peer model. Through Focus, any user can directly submit offers to creators to forward content, and creators can choose to accept the offer, immediately earning a payout and forwarding the requested content (with a "Sponsored" label so people know it's an ad), or reject the offer if they feel the content is not relevant enough to their audience. This new model allows creators to directly monetize their influence with just a few clicks in their inbox each day. During the onboarding period, all users will set a "minimum offer threshold", which for large influencers could be as high as thousands of dollars, to prevent spam offers from cluttering their inbox. Offers below this threshold will still be visible to creators, but only in a separate tab, essentially a spam folder. Creators can also set a separate "minimum tip" which must be included unconditionally for an offer to appear in their inbox (similar to a paid message fee). Remarkably, all offers are sent and managed on-chain using DeSo's on-chain messaging infrastructure, meaning more sophisticated third-party apps can be built to help creators manage their personal media empires. The Focus platform takes a simple 10% fee from each accepted offer to buy and burn $FOCUS.
Paid Messages
On traditional social media platforms, important figures are constantly bombarded with spam, to the point where hardly any important figures truly have open DMs. Focus completely eliminates this spam problem by having each user set a "minimum message price" during onboarding, requiring any non-follower to pay a certain amount to have their message delivered to the creator's inbox. Unpaid messages will still be visible to the creator, but will only appear in a separate tab, essentially a spam folder. While the message price for regular users might be very low, e.g. $0.01 for a regular user, for important users it could be thousands of dollars or more. Imagine how much people would be willing to pay to 100% ensure a top venture capitalist sees their company's pitch, or a key strategic partner sees theirs first. To our knowledge, this paid messaging system has never been tightly integrated with a broadcast social network like Twitter, and we believe it can greatly improve the quality of connections users are able to build. Remarkably, since it's on DeSo, all messages are stored and delivered entirely on-chain, again enabling third-party apps to build "power user" tools to help very important people manage their incoming message flow, paid or not. The Focus platform takes a simple 10% fee from each message, used to buy and burn $FOCUS.
Uncensored Generative AI. Generative AI has advanced to the point where, with just a few creator portrait samples, it can generate entirely new content. However, this capability has not yet made it into mainstream platforms - until now. Focus will empower creators to fully leverage the power of generative AI, allowing users to generate new content using the images the creators have previously uploaded. Users simply need to select their favorite creator's images from their history and provide a prompt, and new images will be generated. Creators will be able to set a fee for each query run by users, and automatically earn royalties from any revenue generated by the content (e.g. if the post is tipped). Focus will take a simple 10% cut from this revenue to buy and burn $FOCUS.
Unlockable content and subscriptions. Platforms like Patreon and OnlyFans have pioneered subscriptions and unlockable content, processing billions of dollars in revenue each year. But payments on these platforms are not anonymous, the platforms have strict moderation policies, and the legal payment processing fees are extremely high. More importantly, cashing out from any platform requires creators to go through a very tedious KYC and approval process, which violates the privacy of creators and rejects many creators, and most users frankly don't have the patience. Focus essentially solves all these problems, allowing creators to earn money through instant, permissionless, anonymous, low-cost crypto payments using their DeSo wallets. While this may seem slightly better than existing platforms, it's worth noting that no platform currently allows users to anonymously pay content fees to creators, and we believe the market for this service could be quite large. More importantly, DeSo's extremely low fees are crucial to enabling these new use cases. Surprisingly, all unlockable and subscription content is stored on-chain in an end-to-end encrypted manner, meaning only the creator and their subscribers can see the content. No one else, not even the Focus developers, can see it! The Focus platform will charge a simple 10% fee on this functionality, completely undercutting the fees of existing platforms (which are around 15-30%), and 100% of the fee revenue will be used to buy and burn $FOCUS.
Register for DeSo, Focus (social airdrop): https://focus.xyz/?password=9MFMZLKF
Community Twitter: https://x.com/focusdeso
