The unclaimed tokens will be used to support and fund projects and initiatives that are important to the IOTA community ecosystem via future votes.
The unclaimed tokens will be removed from the IOTA ledger, and the total supply will be reduced by the number of tokens held in the unclaimed treasury pool.
Before the launch of the IOTA network in 2016 with its genesis transaction, the founders of IOTA collected funds in exchange for the option to receive IOTA tokens in an initial crowd sale.
The crowd sale participants had agreed to collect their purchased tokens in a timeframe of 90 days following the launch of the IOTA network. Otherwise, purchasers may permanently lose access to the crowd sale tokens.
The total supply of IOTA tokens was decided to be increased to todays amount of 2.779.530.283.277.761 IOTA tokens from initial 999.999.999.999.999 Tokens offered in the crowd sale. This meant that every IOTA holder was requested to claim 1 IOTA token from the old supply to 2,779 IOTA tokens of the new supply. Some holders have never completed this claiming proccess and what should happen to the tokens that have been leftover from this claim period is now also part of the Vote.
The Founders, with support of the later established IOTA Foundation, started to return the funds to the owners that completed the reclaim process. This practice was continued to keep the reclaim process for these funds open until 16 June 2021.
As the remaining unclaimed tokens for which no owner could be identified should no longer be under the control of any single entity, a decision about their future needed to happen. The tokens should either be under the control of the IOTA community, or they should be removed and vanished from the IOTA network.
The node operators took this first decision during the Chrysalis network upgrade in April 2021. IOTA Node operators had two options:
In the middle of May 2021, following a broad interest in the community, a governance channel was established in the IOTA Discord server where the IOTA community could discuss this topic at length. Since these early days, many members have been actively involved in developing a solution to give the whole IOTA community a voice and a vote on the destiny of these tokens possible.
In June 2021, a large group of community members started to meet bi-weekly and later weekly to define and develop the voting system needed to make this first decision possible.
Here we have arrived today. You are now empowered to take on this crucial decision. You are using a voting system developed by the community that makes it possible to decide what should happen to those unclaimed tokens collectively.
Once the development is finished and it is officially announced, every IOTA holder can upgrade the Firefly Wallet from the official website, which adds voting functionality to the Firefly wallet. Once you have updated Firefly, you can participate in the vote.
The number of your votes is directly related to the number of tokens you commit during the counting time frame of ten days.
Every 1000 IOTA tokens (0,01 Miota) used to vote will create 1 vote every 10 seconds. The sum of all those votes counted over ten days will be your total votes in this decision.
This website hosts an application that lets you preselect your opinion in this vote
(Build or Burn) and initiate the voting functionality in your Firefly wallet.
