Pastel Network is pleased to announce our listing on Bitcoin.com, currently scheduled for March 5, 2021 at 10:00 AM (UTC)! The PSL token will be used by artists, collectors and node operators who wish to support the Pastel Network.
Tokenomics
Token symbol: PSL
Max Supply: 21,000,000,000
Totally Supply: 10,500,000,000
Initial Circulation: 1,925,000,000
Algorithm: EquiHash (POW)
Token emissions: 12,500 PSL per block
Block time: 2.5 minutes
Listing price: $0.0025/PSL
Private allocation: 150,000,000 PSL (For details, please contact us on Telegram)
Public sale allocation: 88,888,888 PSL (10% discount to the listing price)
Hard cap: 25,000,000 USDT
Note: Pre-Listing Allocations are not available to citizens of the United States, China, or Japan.
What is Pastel Network?
Pastel is a decentralized cryptocurrency project for the creation, validation, and trading of provably rare digital artworks. By digital artworks, we mean a kind of cryptographically secured, digital collectible that is created in a similar way to how a traditional artist might create a set of 10 limited-edition physical prints. This same basic idea is also commonly referred to as NFT (which stands for non-fungible token), although most existing implementations as of 2021 are built as particular kinds of smart-contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.
We think the idea of rare digital artwork is going to change the world and revolutionize how art is created and consumed, allowing artists and collectors to connect directly without paying huge fees to gate-keeping intermediaries such as auction houses like Sotheby’s and famous art dealers. The thing is, we believe that Ethereum is fundamentally the wrong technology to build on, and that there is a much better way based on Bitcoin.
Why Make a Native Blockchain Project for Rare Art?
We believe that rare digital art is important enough of an application to merit its own, purpose-built crypto system that is highly optimized for the specific requirements of visual artwork. Not only will this allow the system to work far more efficiently and with greater security guarantees — because the heavy computations can be done in native machine code instead of an abstract and super-inefficient Ethereum virtual machine — but it also makes the system much simpler and easier to reason about. The history of Ethereum is littered with people who shot themselves in the foot because it is so easy to make mistakes in the Ethereum smart-contract programming language, usually a result of the extreme flexibility and abstraction of Ethereum. Why introduce open-ended complexity for a rare digital art project when you only really need a few common workflows, such as:
- Users establishing an identity on the network
- Registering new artworks
- Purchasing an artwork from another user
- Retrieving the art images files from the network for artworks the user has purchased
Instead, we decided to build on the best possible foundation, which has the longest proven track record of security, reliability, and decentralization: Bitcoin. The design of Pastel is heavily based on the Bitcoin codebase, and the project has a similar orientation towards mining-based proof-of-work and maximum decentralization. The most basic part of Pastel is its native currency, called PSL.
In addition to being based on the Bitcoin code, PSL is similar to Bitcoin in other ways: instead of 21 million maximum Bitcoins, Pastel has 21 billion maximum PSL (we increased the number because we wanted artworks to sell for, say, 5,000 PSL instead of 0.000023 PSL). Bitcoin also targets a new block to be mined every 10 minutes, whereas Pastel has opted for a 2.5 minutes block time. And instead of using the SHA-256 mining algorithm, Pastel uses the well-tested Equihash algorithm that is used by Zcash and which has cheaply available ASIC mining hardware.
The coin-creation (emission) schedule for PSL is also similar to BTC, except we are starting out with around half of the coins already created. This is because Pastel is a fork of the Animecoin (ANI) cryptocurrency that was announced in 2018. Animecoin was a fairly-mined and widely distributed Bitcoin clone project, originally intended to serve the anime fan community, and was introduced way back in 2014, making it older than nearly all crypto projects today. It was mostly installed by gamers and anime fans who were also into Bitcoin, and had many hundreds if not thousands of users at one point. As shown in the bitcointalk.org link, ANI is based on Bitcoin with a different hash algorithm and faster block time, and most importantly, had zero pre-mine and was widely distributed in a totally decentralized way.
Various owners of ANI coins came together in 2018 to add art functionality to this coin, but we ultimately realized that restricting the project to the anime community was too limiting. As a result, we restyled the project as a more general rare art project under the Pastel name, and later conducted the fork transaction. In the fork, existing ANI balances were transformed into corresponding PSL balances. The forked PSL coins then inherit the intrinsic fairness in the distribution of PSL.
In addition to forking the ANI coins, we also forked the codebase. The software infrastructure of the existing Animecoin network was based on a very outdated version of Bitcoin from 2014, so we decided to start from scratch, building on top of the Zcash codebase (which is itself built on the Bitcoin codebase). The existing ~11 billion PSL coins today correspond to the ANI coins that participated in the fork. Importantly, the majority of these existing PSL are locked up by long-term contractual agreements and are not available for sale. They are owned by long-term oriented private individuals who believe in the vision of the project. The fork mechanism is a long-recognized tradition at this point in the cryptocurrency world, and a convincing argument can be made that it preserves the essential fairness and decentralized nature of an ideal cryptocurrency and is fundamentally different than a “pre-mine” where there is an unfair distribution of coins from inception.
Owners of ANI coins have collectively invested hundreds of BTC into the project in the form of acquiring the original ANI coins. Furthermore, various ANI owners have contributed to the development efforts and costs more than 50 BTC over the last 3.5 years, including the commissioning of nearly $100,000 worth of digital artwork for the project (for examples, see here and all the various other costs that go along with releasing a complex project like Pastel.
Why Pastel is Better than Competing Blockchain Art Projects
Having a native currency token (PSL) makes the Pastel Network’s fees for registering, storing, and trading rare artwork very low, which makes it affordable to artists and collectors all over the world. Furthermore, the system includes a native mechanism based on changes in the mining difficulty of Pastel’s proof-of-work algorithm for maintaining these fees at affordable levels long into the future — even if PSL appreciates significantly in value. This is in stark contrast to Ethereum-based art projects, where the cost to create new artworks is currently hundreds of dollars, creating unnecessary financial risks for artists and making these other platforms out of reach for all but the wealthiest artists and the most expensive digital artworks. Even if an artist can afford to pay these egregious fees, the cost of simply transferring the artworks to users is prohibitively high. Pastel offers digital artists a secure and robust environment for registering their rare digital artworks with very low transactional costs, making digital art accessible to artists from anywhere in the world, and allowing a different business model for artists where they can sell larger numbers of their limited edition digital art “prints” a price point of under $5, while still making a healthy profit margin.
At the same time, Pastel allows art collectors and fans to purchase rare digital artworks directly from their favorite artists — with most of the value going to the artist instead of being wasted on unproductive network fees and overhead. This allows fans to participate in the long-term success of their favorite artists, creating a reciprocal relationship that transforms an artist’s fans into partners that have a financial stake in promoting the artist’s work. Furthermore, buyers of rare artworks on Pastel are able to trade their owned artworks with other Pastel users in a decentralized exchange that is native to the platform, all while paying modest trading commissions and transaction fees that are closer to the ~2% charged by payment processors such as Paypal and Stripe than the 15% or more charged by art dealers and auction houses, and other NFT platforms. Pastel Network’s low trading fees will lead to a much more dynamic and liquid marketplace for rare digital artwork that has the potential to radically transform the way art is created and collected. Best of all, the trading fees are sent by buyers and sellers to an unspendable PSL address, thus “burning” them and removing them permanently from circulation. Over time, this natural deflation will offset the new PSL created through the mining process, making PSL scarcer and more valuable.
With over two years of continuous, public development (which is fully documented on Pastel’s public Github code repository), Pastel has built a secure system that solves the major problems of existing blockchain art projects: high fees, poor scalability, no internal native network file storage, and no means of preventing near-duplicate images from being registered on the network, which introduces a new standard of digital scarcity for NFTs.
Pastel is coming!
To keep the community informed, we will be posting additional information and updates as the March 5th listing date approaches. The best way to stay up to date is to follow our Twitter account or join our Telegram room for the most current feed! We look forward to delivering a world class experience for artists and collectors alike after our token sale concludes and our platform is live for all. Will you join us?
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