TEA Project Bi-Weekly Report –March 2, 2022

Final Preparations for Epoch 9

Internal testing continues as we prepare to launch epoch 9 of TEA Project’s mining competition. At the end of this week we plan to allow a public testing phase to further help iron out any remaining bugs. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, we look forward to launching epoch 9 in early March.

Besides the behind-the-scenes code optimizations, users will notice some major differences in the new epoch.

1. COFFEE returns to the TEA ecosystem

We’ve previously introduced COFFEE as a stand-in for bridged USDT. The price of COFFEE in epoch 9 will be 1:1 with USDT.

• Users can exchange COFFEE for contest TEA.
• With contest TEA, users can exchange those for contest CML and contest TApp tokens. This is different from epoch 8 where contestants bought contest CML vouchers directly with their USDT.

At any point during the contest, contestants can exchange their testnet TEA back to COFFEE. We will manually exchange COFFEE to USDT for anyone wanting to exit the contest with their funds. This setup allows us to test the tokenomics in a setup similar to mainnet where users can freely bridge funds into and out of the TEA ecosystem.

2. The TEA Party TApp makes its re-entry

The TEA Party social networking TApp will come back online in epoch 9. Users will be able to post public messages using the TApp after transferring funds to their layer-2 TApp account. Some new features they’ll notice with the new TEA Party social networking TApp include:

• The ability to send private messages:

• Notifications. This is a paid feature if the sender wishes to notify the recipient that they have messages waiting for them in the TEA Party app:

Updated Tokenomics

This past week the team has had many discussions on how to simplify the tokenomics and make sure that we have mechanisms in place to support the price of our tokens. After many meetings the team has settled on an improved tokenomics model that makes the TEA the main token in our ecosystem. Based on our discussions which included outside feedback, we’ve made two major changes to our token model:

• TEA will be premined in the genesis block.
• There will be a hard cap on the total CML outstanding at any one time. In our new model, miners will burn / lock TEA to secure a CML that grants them mining rights.

The tokenomics change was spurred from our discussion with VCs during the latest funding round interviews. These funds have worked with a variety of projects and have a wealth of knowledge regarding structuring token incentives.

Speaking of which, our interviews with potential funding partners continue as we look for a partnership that can not only provide funding but also some expertise in biz dev. We feel these new tokenomics changes will make value accrual a more straightforward proposition and the project more investable by focusing on a traditional token launch.