The popularity of NFTs continued to rise in 2021, with OpenSea being one of the earliest NFT trading markets, monopolizing over 90% of the trading share. Undeniably, OpenSea has provided significant assistance in building the entire NFT ecosystem, but it has various issues, such as:

• Frequent system downtimes affecting the entire industry
• Centralized management model that arbitrarily withholds user assets
• Standing alongside investors from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, sharing the enormous trading fees contributed by the community

Unlike Web2, the underlying business logic of the Web3 economy is "value returned to the end creators," meaning that every user's high-value behavior on-chain should receive value feedback from the project parties. Thus, OpenDAO and LooksRare emerged as challengers at the end of 2021, interpreting this Web3 spirit through "airdropping to OpenSea users" and demonstrating to all of us that OpenSea is not unparalleled.

Did LooksRare Break the "80/20 Rule"?

Taking the more popular LooksRare as an example, it attempts to shake OpenSea's monopoly through some innovative mechanisms, which is a perfect start. However, aside from the product details of LooksRare, we believe it also has some serious issues at its core:

• Focus on whales. LooksRare targets airdrops at users who have traded over 3 ETH on OpenSea, who only account for 20% of the 900,000 users on OpenSea. Undoubtedly, these top users are crucial. However, currently, the global NFT user base is still less than 0.02% of the total population, and we need to reward all of them to "achieve every NFT enthusiast."
• Lack of transparency. Before the launch of LooksRare, 3.3% of LOOKS tokens were allocated to so-called strategic investors at undisclosed prices. Essentially, this is no different from the behind-the-scenes deals OpenSea has with investors from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
• Wash trading. This is the most serious of the three issues. A large amount of wash trading dilutes the rewards for normal users, striking and punishing honest users. A few whales with financial and technical advantages intercept most of the LOOKS rewards issued daily.

LooksRare brands itself as "by NFT people, for NFT people," but in essence, it is a market "by RICH people, for RICH people."

Disruptor X2Y2

The name X2Y2 comes from the formula of a perfect circle x² + y² = r², and our journey to find the formula to establish a perfect decentralized NFT market is unfolding.

X2Y2 aims to solve all three issues of LooksRare through the following token economics:

1. Inclusive Airdrop

We will take a snapshot at Ethereum block height #13916166 (the first block of OpenSea in 2022). The 861,417 OpenSea users who traded before this will be eligible for the X2Y2 airdrop, with no claim expiration date. They will collectively receive 12% of the total token issuance as airdrop tokens.

We thank the top 1% of whales, who contributed 44.96% of the trading volume on OpenSea. At the same time, we are more loyal to X2Y2's vision: to create a truly decentralized, community-owned NFT market. Based on the above considerations, the airdrop dual-layer distribution plan is as follows:

This distribution rule allows 95.17% of retail investors on OpenSea to receive 65.34% of the X2Y2 token allocation. Additionally, to ensure the airdrop reaches the true potential users of X2Y2, the prerequisite for claiming the airdrop is that users must list all NFTs listed on OpenSea at a lower or the same price on X2Y2.

2. No Private Placement, No Institutions

We will not conduct any private fundraising and will only conduct a public market presale ILO (Initial Liquidity Offering) based on a whitelist system. We will place the ETH obtained from sales and 1% of the total X2Y2 tokens into Uniswap to provide initial liquidity, and all LP tokens will be permanently destroyed. The whitelist rules and X2Y2 sales plan are as follows:

• Among the Discord community members and users trading on the X2Y2 test platform, 1,000 addresses will be whitelisted, and the results will be announced on Discord.
• Whitelisted users can claim the X2Y2 Genesis NFT, and holders will have priority access to advanced features in subsequent iterations of the project.
• 15,000,000 X2Y2 tokens (1.5% of the total) will be available for public sale at 1 X2Y2 = 0.0001 ETH.
• All unsold X2Y2 tokens will be directly destroyed after the ILO ends.
• After completing the ILO, 10,000,000 X2Y2 tokens (1% of the total) + 1,500 ETH will be put into Uniswap to create initial liquidity.
• All LP tokens will be destroyed, permanently locking that portion of liquidity.
• Tokens obtained from participating in the ILO will be unlocked linearly over 360 days.

The total supply of X2Y2 tokens is 1,000,000,000, and the overall token distribution plan is as follows:

3. No Trading Mining

We do not conduct trading mining and only provide staking rewards. Therefore, there will be no wash trading issues, providing ordinary users with a fair opportunity to obtain long-term higher returns. X2Y2 stakers will share 5,000,000 X2Y2 staking rewards daily (0.5% of the total) and all fee income from the previous day (with a fee rate of 2%). Among them, 5% of the staking rewards and 1% of the initial LP liquidity together constitute the 1.5% liquidity management portion.

We have designed the entire token economics for the community, with a particular focus on limiting whale users. Because we deeply understand that the token economics of NFT people is key to building a better OpenSea. At this stage, we need help from the NFT community, not investors. Our doors will always be open to community users who can truly provide assistance.

Most general NFT markets share most features, and we are no exception. On February 4, 2022, X2Y2 officially launched its market beta, which is a fully functional NFT market. The smart contracts, frontend, and backend are all 100% independently developed. In addition to the most basic NFT trading market functions, it also has the following special features:

• Instant push notifications for buying and selling
• Comprehensive rarity ranking and analysis
• Batch sending and listing
• Bidding on collections or traits

The market beta is just the first step for X2Y2. In 2022, you can also expect the following features:

• Availability notifications filtered by traits
• Directly purchasing multiple items from listings
• Multi-exchange aggregation
• 3D/VR immersive NFT market UI/UX for display, social, and trading

The ultimate form we envision for X2Y2 is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), where members of the DAO will decide the direction of the project. We believe that what drives the progress of the DAO is not the token price, but the consensus of participants on the project's vision, and we will build that consensus! After completing the first phase of market construction, we will begin to explore and gradually transfer leadership and financial control from the team to the DAO.

Born for inclusivity, every NFT enthusiast is our reliable support, and we will give back the best project resources to community users.

Website: x2y2.io

Discord: discord.gg/x2y2

Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_x2y2