What is the Young Token (YNG), and how does it work?

The economic identity of Young Platform’s ecosystem is rooted in the Young token (YNG), which binds all of the company’s products and brings the community together. The Young token is the key to a set of products that was created to make it easier for novices and experts alike to approach the blockchain industry in an informed and therefore secure way. 

Let’s therefore delve into what the Young token (YNG) is, how it works, what will determine its price, and how its tokenomics are composed.

How Young Platform was born – a ‘simple’ idea

Young Platform, first and foremost, is an idea. In 2017, six students from the University of Turin shared a passion for cryptocurrencies that they started to buy, but wished the process were simpler. Motivated to create an easy and secure way to buy BTC and other cryptocurrencies, they raised more than €1 million in 2018 in the first seed round of their project, Young Platform. However, even before launching a platform that could host exchanges, ‘crypto literacy‘ would play a key role in bringing this new form of economy together.

Thus, this ambition was taken up by the Innovative Companies Incubator of the Politecnico di Torino (I3P), a place that facilitates the birth of start-ups.

The journey of the Young token began, here with the “first steps” of Young Platform Step, an airdrop app that has been rewarding users in their daily commute since January 2019. Simply by walking, many obtained their first token: YNG, which soon also became a reward for education. In fact, Young Platform Step features Academy and Blog, portals enriched over the years with updates and simple explanations for navigating the crypto world. The information learned through these channels is the subject of Quizzes. However in the app, it is also possible to simulate market forecasts in the ‘Up&Down’ section, and both features are rewarded if correct. In 2019, the first million YNG was distributed through these mediums.

A user with a certain level of awareness will not only know the real value of cryptocurrencies inherent in blockchain technology, but will also be able to be more judicious in his or her purchases: doing research is the first level of security in the crypto world, which is why Young Platform takes on the task of providing information confirmed by authoritative but above all impartial sources in an accessible manner.

In June 2019, thanks to crowdfunding on the UK platform Seedrs, the target of raising €500,000 was beaten. This facilitated the launch of a second product: the community’s commitment and interest was rewarded by the launch of Young Platform’s exchange base, which allowed people to transfer their YNGs to sell or store them pending the official launch.

Let’s take a leap forward in time and project development: it is 2021 and Young Platform benefited from a EUR 3.5 million investment round (class A), led by United Ventures, a venture capital firm that supports companies and start-ups engaged in technological innovation. Ithaca Investments also participates in their products. The capital increase pavef the way for the optimisation of offerings and services in preparation for European expansion.

The background of the Young (YNG) token’s story ends here, and the next step of its journey really begins with the market launch or ‘listing‘. The project’s token has, over time, been enhanced by multiple use cases, and by June 2022 it is, therefore, ready to be subject to the market’s judgement: its starting price of €0.24 begins to face the constant valuations of buyers and sellers. However, before looking at YNG’s market, we must dwell on its tokenomics: the technical-economic background that helps us understand how each token is issued. 

Young (YNG): Young Platform’s utility token

Young (YNG) is a utility token based on the Ethereum ERC-20 standard. This means that it has specific use cases and it is developed on an existing blockchain.

The Young token (YNG) is in fact born on Ethereum, and it allows access to every service and product provided by Young Platform. This is why it can also be qualified as a Community Token and Exchange Token: users affirm their identity as participants in the ecosystem and obtain benefits through the token and Clubs.

The utility of the token is certainly an important indicator to contextualise its price or market, but this must also be compared with the other aspects of tokenomics of the project. The economic model of the token, in fact, includes its use cases, but also its economic policy. This concerns information such as the maximum supply of the token and the mechanisms governing its issuance. Let us therefore discover Young’s tokenomics (YNG).

YNG’s ‘total supply’ amounts to 100 million tokens, distributed as follows: 63.6 per cent are rewards for the ecosystem, 17.6 per cent are tokens reserved for sale, 10 per cent go to the development team, 5 per cent to advisors, and the remaining 3.8 per cent represents the bonus distributed among the participants in the 2019 crowdfunding campaign. We explain these percentages one by one:

We already explained the current rewards for the ecosystem: they are the Step and Staking incentives for Club members, but the future will hold other forms of incentives. Prior to the listing on 1 June 2022, approximately 3.5M YNG tokens had already been distributed through Young Platform Step and 4M directly from the exchange; this means that the ecosystem will have approximately another 56 million YNG tokens to spread along its path. 

Of the 17.6% reserved for sale, however, nearly 7M YNG was sold or given in cashback during the pre-listing Community Sale. The Treasury, however, still retains 10.75M YNG, which will be used for market making – literally creating a market for the token on the exchange – or for venture capital funds. In particular, YNG 4M has already been reserved for the ‘liquidity pool‘, mentioned below.

Equally important are the segments given to the Team (10M YNG), Advisors (5M YNG) and stake-holders (3.8M): those who helped Young Platform come into being and who work on its growth every day will also be rewarded with the Young token (YNG).

In order not to create excessive fluctuations due to token inflows, these YNGs will be subject to “vesting“, i.e. they will be frozen for a certain period and released with fixed maturities. Everyone will receive their first YNGs by the beginning of 2023 and these will be subject to “freezing” on an annual basis for the Team, and on a quarterly for the Advisors (¼ of the total for each period), while Seedrs investors will receive 765,000 tokens per listing and the remainder quarterly, again at 25% of the total for each release.

Finally, prior to listing, 16.73M Young tokens were already in circulation: the ‘circulating supply‘ counted 7.1% in the Step Wallet, that is, YNG not yet transferred to the respective Young Platform exchange accounts. 63.2% were tokens already redeemed or purchased prior to the community sale. 23.9% was allocated to create the first liquidity pool to support the YNG-EUR pair; the remainder were tokens already distributed among stake-holders and advisors.

A special chapter of tokenomics is devoted to the functioning of YNG’s market on its exchange, which is based first and foremost on the YNG-EUR pair. The task of every exchange is to provide liquidity for its pairs, and this is what Young Platform must do with its token, whose market it first hosts. For this purpose, the Liquidity Management System was implemented in the YNG-EUR liquidity pool, a software that ensures adequate liquidity for the pair. The system is based on a fundamental equation:

K = x * y

This formula is the same as that governing the liquidity pools of Uniswap‘s DEX and, in our case, establishes a constant proportion (the K factor) between x, the number of YNGs in the pool, and y, the number of Euros in the pool. In this way, the product between the number of YNGs and the number of Euros in the pool will remain constant over time. In short, it will always be possible to obtain the price of a YNG through the formula:

Price of 1 YNG = EUR in the pool / YNG in the pool

In this regard, the liquidity pool on Young Platform’s exchange (shared between Basic and Pro) will contain EUR 1,000,000 and 4,166,666 YNG tokens initially, to reflect the price of EUR 0.24 per YNG, which is expected for the token launch. However, for the total liquidity, contained in the liquidity pool, no substantial changes are expected in the short term: the Liquidity Management System will only serve the management of the funds already in place, but how? 

This software will automatically set sufficient limit orders to provide liquidity to trades to match future buy and sell requests from traders. By operating at limits and not at the market, the Liquidity Management System will not affect the price of the YNG token in an unpredictable manner.

Young Platform will also apply another mechanism to support YNG’s price trend, called ‘Buyback‘.

Buyback, as the name implies, is the re-purchase of YNG tokens by the company itself, so as to reduce its circulating supply and increase its capitalisation. These transactions will be announced with sufficient notice, the community will be kept informed of any buybacks and their modalities, and will be reported on all Young Platform communication channels. These tokens will not be put back into the market until at least 2023, given the initial purpose of stimulating their scarcity, so that the possibility of burning them and thus eliminating them from YNG’s total supply is not ruled out.

YNG: Crypto Made Easy

YNG is a token that is different from the others we have learned about in the Academy. We did not examine an innovative technology or a new scalable consensus mechanism, but rather explained transparently how it works. This is because the purpose of YNG and Young Platform is as simple as it is practical: to make cryptocurrencies accessible in a world that is still getting to know them.

Through this mantra, Young Platform and its utility token use cases will always follow new technologies in the blockchain sphere, bringing them ever closer to the community.