XEN & the promise of free money
Welcome to the maddest project in blockchain today
Welcome to https://xen.network/.
Trust me when I say this is going to be a wild ride.
This is the general thesis behind this project.
https://wordpress-825823-2958393.cloudwaysapps.com/xen-vs-bitcoin-future-of-money/
ThinkLair did a wonderful job summing up the early days of the launch and the various shenanigans that went on.
How does this work in practice?
For all the complicated explanations Xen gives, in practice it couldn't be more simple.
Pick a chain (any chain!) and go to Mint. We'll use Polygon in this example.
https://xen.network/polygon/mint
Select the number of days you want to wait to collect your tokens and hit submit.
You'll get put in a queue and allocated tokens based on the time you choose to wait for them.
Here's my latest mint on Polygon.
You can claim early for less or wait it out for the full weight.
Once you have your tokens you can.... stake them for tokens!
Again we'll use Polygon as the example.
https://xen.network/polygon/stake
Staking looks identical to minting. Longer you stake, the more you get.
And that is it. You can mint on many different chains. At time of writing that was 12 chains including stuff like Ethereum PoW and Pulsechain (talk about weird meets crazy...).
It's all a bit mad as you'll see from the below. The core concept is quite simple but around that they've built this narrative of an entirely new ecosystem from essentially endless token minting contracts but, as you'll see, nothing has been built.
It's just token faucets all the way down.
https://www.xencrypto.io/
https://x.com/Xencryptoio
The founder is a wacky early Google employee who is trying to style themselves as the new Santoshi for this chain-but-not-a-chain. It's likely this is all self funded.
You'll see from their X account they're conspiracy theory leaning (maybe heavily...) so you're already starting from a not-so-strong place https://x.com/mrJackLevin
Predictably the token price hasn't maintained much momentum as the supply endless inflates.
Mining for dummies
XEN is a hodgepodge of stuff. reading through their blog it seems like they're releasing a new token or chain every few months. The seem to just follow whatever narrative is hot in crypto at the time.
https://www.xencrypto.io/category/blog/
The latest is a POW token, solXEN, on Solana
https://www.xencrypto.io/how-to-mine-solxen-on-solana/
https://docs.solxen.io/
If solXEN sounds familiar to you then you're thinking of ORE, which has been incredibly popular.
https://x.com/Lightspeedpodhq/status/1824507028158488667
https://x.com/OREsupply
https://ore.supply/
https://ore.supply/what-is-mining
Or you might be thinking of an even earlier proponent of using minimal resources to mint a token: Minima
https://www.minima.global/
https://www.minima.global/run-a-node
https://www.minima.global/learn#tokenomics
If this is all sounding incredibly similar to promises you've heard before from crypto; you're not wrong.
The basic premise of all of it is simple: Earn passive income while you sleep with minimal hardware requirements.
- ORE can run through the browser
- Minima can run on a phone
- XEN is just a mint and wait, no actual mining needed for most of it.
- solXEN can be mined with minimal overhead
And all this has trended to zero pretty much as none of has been able to link to any value as of yet. That's not crazy though as the effort here is low and product produced has no demand. Almost all of the output, like Bitcoin's POW mechanism, is immediately discarded after the token rewards are given.
In the case of Minima there is more value to validating transactions but the network has only a handful of apps on it, https://minidapps.minima.global/, even after all this time and they're mostly just for managing the validating process. It's not that surprising though, this is a network of very low powered devices so the scope of things that is able to enable is understandably limited.
An interesting distinction is that XEN and ORE are smart contracts on top of a blockchain (and in XEN's case that's several chains) and Minima is an actual blockchain. 
The lessons you can't learn from Bitcoin
Bitcoin is an outlier. No other POW chain fork of it or similar POW chain launched in the early days has been able to sustain much value. Even the most successful ones are down-only and have been for years.
All successful chains since Bitcoin have usage that drives fees which pays validators and they have fairly complex validator requirements (which then enables more interesting and complex apps to be built on top of them). They're also all POS; not POW.
Bitcoin's allure has always been it was so relatively easy to mine. Now that the hashing power required has made profitable solo miners (but not solo mining itself, which is still very accessible and is what keeps Bitcoin from being overly centralised) mostly a thing of the past people are looking for the next 'lotto ticket' just like Bitcoin.
But there will never be another Bitcoin in this regard. Running a validator on many POS chains is profitable but it requires capital investment and expertise to be profitable (just ask small Solana validators https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-small-solana-validators-struggle).
People long for the early days of Bitcoin when you could set up a miner to run and just watch it mint BTC for you without you needing to do anything.
You could become rich without any work (which is a tip off as to anything offering the same ROI being wholly unsustainable)!
You can see this premise running clearly through these projects. They are selling the Bitcoin dream held by so many still regardless of the fact that it is impossible to have a very low effort and non-valuable process create large amounts of tangible value.
At least TON tap-to-earn games are honest
At least the cookie clicker games on TON are open and honest about how worthless they are. They're not trying to sell some grand vision of a new financial system or similar.
As the surging massage gun sales showed (https://decrypt.co/239617/hamster-kombat-massage-guns-turbo-tap-to-earn-rewards) these are near the height of stupidity but people are still willing to put time and energy into it on the hopes they might make a few bucks. That's IF these games do launch tokens, and it's not clear many of them will, adding further to the lunacy of the time people are putting into these.
Which is sad in many ways because we've taken all that valuable time and attention and funnelled it towards a zero/negative value exercise.
Says a lot about the state of many of the economies where these games have been most popular...
The non-Doomer viewpoint
These are all very interesting fair token distribution mechanisms.
It's why I'm minting and staking XEN, even though it's quite clearly almost certainly pointless. It's really cheap to do and all it requires me to do is wait.
In a way it's tokenised my patience. The more patient I am prepared to be, the greater the reward (which is, just to be clear, almost worthless tokens).
And for that reason it intrigues me.
We've seen the limits of what existing token distribution designs can do. They've all been farmed to death and that farming has threatened the long term viability of many crypto projects.
Moving forward, if we want nice things, we're going to have to put in a bit more effort. Maybe a lot more.
I could see a world where someone takes a combination of these designs above and links it to a token distribution mechanism that rewards for specific actions or outcomes e.g., followers on social media platforms, revenue earned from a separate service process etc...
I look forward to someone building something on top of XEN or leveraging the XEN token holder base somehow.
XEN has filtered for a certain type of user it seems and has now provided a platform from which to engage them.
What that would look like is anyone's guess.
