Offshift & the Anti-Idea Execution Paradox

December 16, 2021

As long as I can remember, I’ve had sort of an obsession with the “real.” I can’t stand small talk. I have a very limited capacity for bullshit. I loathe spammers and scammers. I’ve always had a keen awareness of the brevity of a lifetime and it’s driven me to avoid giving time and energy to things that aren’t meaningful.

When I first came across Bitcoin, it was clear to me that it was meaningful, both from a design perspective and a philosophical one. Bitcoin provides perhaps the best chance the majority has ever had at wrangling power from the plundering, wealth-siphoning central banking cartel.

When Ethereum came along and its ecosystem began to flourish, it was clear to me that it, too, was something meaningful. In the same way Bitcoin provided a potential decentralized alternative to fiat currencies, Ethereum provides a decentralized alternative to traditional finance, a sector dominated by a powerful few, protected by a co-dependent regulatory scheme. Ethereum and decentralized finance provide the best chance the people have at reclaiming financial sovereignty from the predatory, self-serving banking incumbents.

But for every real, meaningful innovation like Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are dozens - maybe hundreds - of meaningless projects and tokens. The vast majority of crypto serves only as a vehicle for speculation. That’s not to say speculation is good or bad or right or wrong. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that speculation and the potential for financial gain is what brought you into crypto in the first place.

When we began the conceptual design for Offshift, it was extremely important to me that the protocol’s native asset, XFT, wasn’t one that derived its value purely from speculation. To me, Offshift wasn’t worth doing unless it was the genuine article. It had to be truly decentralized and censorship resistant, it had to offer true privacy, and its native token had to have real value and real utility.

In a space driven by speculation and financial gain though, I knew these were elements that couldn’t be ignored. The challenge, then, was to create something that was both a meaningful financial privacy tool but that also stood a chance at success and adoption in a space dominated by speculation. Bitcoin had all the elements - meaningful innovation and the speculative potential to attract and onboard users. Ethereum had all the elements as well. Unlike the vast majority of crypto projects, years after launch, Bitcoin and Ethereum both still have all the elements.

In 2018 Julian Hosp, then head of a (now-defunct) crypto debit card project, described something he called the “ Idea Execution Paradox .” In short, the Idea Execution Paradox describes the phenomenon whereby a project with an unreleased product has a much easier time generating interest, excitement, hype, and ultimately an increase in token price than a project that’s already launched its product or achieved its main objective.

Once the idea is executed upon, or the product or protocol is launched, much of the speculation that’s driven the appreciation in token price ceases to exist, and is replaced by the (often bleak) reality of what the product or protocol is. “It’s going to be the next ‘x’,” and “This will be bigger than ‘y’ “ are replaced with…what it is. Whether another pseudo-decentralized ghost chain, a useless application, or a token with no real utility, the asset often stagnates or sees diminished buy-side demand once the pre-launch hype is over.

Offshift and its native token, XFT, were designed to be the antithesis to the Idea Execution Paradox. Instead of an asset that becomes less relevant or loses value when the pre-launch hype is over, Offshift draws on some basic economic principles to produce a native asset that becomes more scarce the more the protocol is used for its intended purpose.

Offshift is built around a proprietary Burn-and-Mint Mechanism, where XFT is burned to create zkAssets and vice versa. As more value - and therefore, more of the XFT supply - is Shifted to the private side in the form of zkAssets, the tradable supply of XFT is reduced. As long as privacy remains in demand (and judging from today’s political climate it appears that it will only become more sought after), basic economics theory on price determination tells us what happens when supply is reduced and demand remains the same or increases.

Since we launched Offshift a little more than a year ago, we’ve stayed away from a lot of the pre-launch hype, opting to instead keep our heads down building and putting all the pieces into place for the successful launch of something that’s never been done before: confidential transactions on Ethereum Layer 1.

We’ve put a lot of time and effort into building our brand and gaining credibility. We’ve partnered with both the best marketing firm and the best blockchain engineering studio in the business. But as we approach the launch of our pilot and mainnet, we’re most eager to see Offshift’s sound tokenomics and scarcity model in action.

We’ve built something meaningful that we believe has all the elements required to achieve mass-market success. Ultimately, Offshift will serve individuals and organizations that value privacy and protect the capital they inject into the protocol. We’ve built a capital-efficient system, the success of which is directly correlated with the growth of its community, user base, and capital. We’re very proud of it and look forward to (not) seeing people use it.

— Johnny

About Offshift

Offshift is leading private decentralized finance (PriFi) with the world’s first Private Derivatives Platform. It leverages zero-knowledge (zk) proofs and sources reliable, real-time price feeds from Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network to enable users to mint zkAssets, an unprecedented line of fully private synthetics. Offshift’s mostly anonymous team has developed a trusted reputation for their thorough privacy research, development and execution.

To learn more and get involved, visit the links below: