The Future is Nai: Staking, Rev Share, and More

“Now I am become Nai. Sharer of Revenue. Creator of Worlds.”

Since our inception over a year ago, one question has loomed large:

“Wen rev share??”

We believe a well-executed revenue share is key to uniting the consumer AI and Web3 worlds; and so today, we’re beyond excited to announce our answer:

It’s here.

The Future is NAI

We’ve always sought to lead the way on building applications that live at the center of crypto and AI. In terms of product and delivery, imgnAI stands head and shoulders above the competition. Our generative AI platform has expanded from humble beginnings as one of the first Telegram-native AI applications, to housing a full product suite with Web and Discord apps — each serving tens of thousands of users monthly.

As our user base has grown, so too has our infrastructure. We’ve vastly improved our product stack; quadrupling base image resolutions, migrating to compute-hungry but quality-centric frameworks like SDXL, hand-tagging our own growing data sets to support creative freedom, and providing a range of social and creative tools to empower creators around the world. Soon, we’ll unleash our first character companion, “Naifu”, and deliver on our promise to go beyond image generation and make imgnAI a global hub for generative AI.

Our team has worked non-stop since launch to continually ship updates and stay competitive in a landscape marked by an unprecedented rate of change. We’ve seen countless projects with infinitely more resources be made obsolete overnight, swallowed up by a relentless wave of development; and still, we remain, with a thesis around creative freedom that’s stronger than ever.

This fact is highlighted by our fundraising efforts, which culminated in a $1.6M seed round with some of the most respected funds and angels in the space. This fundraise secured our runway and allowed us to transition from rented/contracted GPU hardware to a completely in-house infrastructure. Transitioning to in-house servers supports backend stability, drastically reduces our monthly hardware burn, and allows us to effectively scale compute as our user base grows. It also helps to improve the censorship-resistance of our models by further reducing our reliance on third-party providers.

We’ve delivered on product and secured the infrastructure to build long-term. However, as we transition to our mass market phase and prepare to aggressively pursue user and revenue growth, one key aspect is missing: a well-designed revenue share system for $IMGNAI holders.

That changes now.

In this article, we’ll outline our complete revenue share model and how it fits into our current and future product suite.

Get excited, genoratooors. It’s here :)

Real Yield

Real yield is at the core of our revenue share model, ensuring sustainable rewards for participating holders. Yield is derived from multiple aspects of the project, including on-chain volume and in-app payments. Yield is rewarded to users via a staking contract; allowing users to stake their $IMGNAI tokens and receive rewards in both $ETH and $IMGNAI. Staking will go live in April and be hosted on the imgnAI web app.

Real yield rewards will be emitted in $ETH. This allows stakers to receive yield directly without needing to swap $IMGNAI for $ETH.

Long-term stakers will receive $IMGNAI as an additional reward. This reward pool will initially be seeded by a percentage of supply held by the imgnAI treasury.

To counteract inflation, we’re implementing a deflationary burn mechanism on incentivized $IMGNAI subscription payments as well as a range of in-app transactions. In this way, the overall supply for $IMGNAI should trend down with increasing growth and adoption of the platform.

Subscription Revenue

With our Premium infrastructure live, we’re now ready to pursue aggressive user and revenue growth. This presents a significant opportunity to reward holders via a share of subscription revenue.

Moving forward, all income received from Premium subscription payments will be split 50/50; with 50% of all revenue being directed toward rewards for $IMGNAI stakers. In the case of fiat, stablecoins or other tokens being used for payment, revenue will be converted to $ETH and distributed to holders. In the case of $IMGNAI being used for payment, 50% of all received tokens will be burned.

This revenue share includes payments related to current and future imgnAI products, ensuring that stakers benefit from our continually expanding product suite.

On-Chain Volume

To-date, all on-chain swaps against our Uniswap V2 liquidity pool have been subject to a 3% tax. This tax is split between 1% auto-liquidity and 2% allocated to imgnAI operational costs.

Following our successful raise and transition to an in-house server architecture, we’re ready to begin the process of updating our tax structure. The first part of this update is redirecting the auto-liquidity tax to benefit stakers. $IMGNAI stakers will be entitled to 33% of all on-chain revenues. At 2023 levels (we’re currently out-performing these), this equates to hundreds of $ETH per year directed toward stakers.

The remaining 67% of on-chain revenue will continue to support our operational costs, most importantly scaling server architecture. This is critical to supporting a growing user base and increasing the quality of our products. As revenue grows, we’ll continue to evaluate our tax structure and make changes that best support the growth of imgnAI.

Layer 2 Expansion: NFTs and Microtransactions

The issue of Ethereum gas fees continues to be a source of conversation among our team and broader community. While mainnet was critical to supporting our launch in late 2022, the high cost of transactions has limited our ability to offer certain products and in-app transactions.

We can now confirm we’re speaking to a Layer 2 partner about taking imgnAI multi-chain. A portion of $IMGNAI tokens will be bridged to the L2, ensuring that liquidity is native to both chains. This L2 will be our primary chain for in-app transactions, including payments, tips, and of course: NFT minting!

Microtransactions like these will be paid in $imgnAI and subject to a small fee. All generated fees will be split 50/50, with 50% of $IMGNAI being burned.

We’ll discuss our L2 expansion in more detail as we get closer to the launch of our L2 liquidity pool.

$IMGNAI Reserve Supply

To kick-start our staking program, we’ll seed our staking pool with 1% of the total $IMGNAI supply. This supply will be transferred from the imgnAI treasury to the staking pool, to be distributed to long-term $IMGNAI stakers over time.

Catgirl-Powered NFT Yields

As part of our move toward a sustainable revenue share model, we’ll release a limited-run collection of 1,000 NFTs. You can probably guess the theme of this collection (hint: meow, UwU).

After the mint, 100% of proceeds will be placed directly into a yield farming position on bluechip pairs (wBTC/ETH, etc). These pairs will be harvested monthly, with all rewards converted to $ETH and split into a 80/10/10 share.

80% will be directed to $IMGNAI stakers as $ETH rewards. 10% will be directed to compounding the liquidity positions, ensuring a steady supply of farming revenue. The remaining 10% will be directed toward general operating costs.

Holders will be able to stake their NFT alongside $IMGNAI tokens, granting them a 20% boost on their overall staking rewards.

Staking Commitments

Our staking program is designed to best reward long-term holders. As such, staking pools will offer short, medium, and long-term staking durations. The bulk of rewards will be emitted to long-term stakers, with maximized returns allocated to those in long-term staking with $IMGNAI tokens and staking one of our aforementioned catgirl NFTs.

Staking will initially be launched on Ethereum mainnet, with an additional L2 pool currently being evaluated.

A New Era

Creative freedom is not given. It’s earned by the everyday efforts of teams and communities like imgnAI.

Launching our revenue share model is a pivotal step toward making imgnAI a platform built for, and by creators. By aligning revenue growth and holder incentives, our model ensures that our community is rewarded for supporting what we see as one of the most important movements of our generation.

Our Web2 peers have made it abundantly clear that creative freedom is not a priority. This is where imgnAI can have a profound impact on the future of generative AI. We have everything we need to deliver next-generation NSFW models, creatively free character companions, historically accurate output, and beyond — all with a best-in-class user experience. Now, with a revenue share system that incentivizes and aligns our supporters, it’s time to deliver.

Getting to this point was a monumental undertaking, not just by our team, but by our entire community of generators and key advisors. Building and scaling generative AI tools is an enormous task, and one that was only possible thanks to your incredible support. We’re forever grateful to our community, and extremely proud to have reached a point where we can build a platform that upholds the values of creative freedom, while rewarding our community.

This marks the beginning of a new era at imgnAI; one where we can build and grow faster than ever before, while sustainably rewarding our most loyal supporters. We can’t wait to show you more of what we’ve been building, and of course, introduce you to Naifu :)

Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far, and all those who will be joining us in the future. Welcome to the show, anon.

The future is Nai.