On March 02, 2022, we announced that we would be introducing a 3% trading fee on all swaps on our pair on PancakeSwap. In this article, we go through why we made that decision, where the 3% goes and how this benefits the long-term health of the $HOL token.

🚨 Please make sure you adjust the slippage on PancakeSwap: 3.5% is sufficient.

A little bit of context…

While this decision may seem like it came unexpectedly, Hololoot has always maintained transaction fees as a core part of our revenue and token redistribution models. This is also not the first time we’ve had a fee like this.

When our token launched in December 2021, a 2% fee was placed on all transactions. The revenue from this fee was allocated to liquidity.

This fee was removed at the end of January as one of the conditions for our listing on MEXC.

When the token launched, we also almost immediately opened staking pools for both single-asset and LP token stakers. These pools offered attractive APRs, for a long time in triple-digit percentages. As of writing today, single-asset $HOL staking earns around 69% APR, while LP staking is more than 225%.

💰According to our tokenomics, the staking pools target an APR of at least 10%. We’re proud that we’ve been able to reward early backers by exceeding this target by such a large margin.

These high APRs encouraged holders to lock up their tokens rather than sell them during the market downturn. We believe this has been successful in reducing sell pressure as we wait for our first product to launch — a product that will start increasing the $HOL token’s utility.

So far, 1.2 million $HOL tokens have been assigned to staking rewards pools. As per our tokenomics, these tokens have come from the same initial token allocation as our liquidity.

Why a fee now?

The high staking APR has a catch — we need tokens to keep it going! In our whitepaper, we stated that staking rewards would initially be covered by tokens released at the TGE, but that they would ultimately be provided for by transaction fees.

When the marketplace is released, we plan to take these fees from commissions we earn on sales. This includes tokens from buybacks funded by marketplace revenue.

We believe this will make our token even stronger as our ecosystem will redistribute and partially burn tokens that are already in circulation. This means that we need to release fewer tokens from project allocations to cover these, reducing inflation and, eventually, making the token deflationary.

We are in the process of updating and redesigning our whitepaper and a new document, reflecting the long-term product vision of Hololoot, will be available very soon. One thing that won’t change in this new document is the tokenomics — you can check out our Lightpaper for the time being.

After consulting with our advisors, we decided to bring this plan forward by reinstating the fee mechanism on swaps until the marketplace is live.

Again, the transaction fee is not new — we’re just reimplementing it at a slightly higher rate, which is still well below the proposed marketplace transaction fee.

While our daily transactions are low for now, with a product release at the end of March and with a massive marketing push to coincide with this release, we expect transaction volume to pick up.

With the tokens already in the staking rewards pool plus what we expect to generate from fees, our projections indicate that the staking program can continue providing high-APR rewards to holders. We also have tokens in reserve for rewards, however we want to avoid allocating them if possible to help reduce inflation.

Again, when the marketplace is live, these transaction fees will be disabled, with this revenue instead funded by marketplace transaction fees.

Will the fee changes impact the MEXC listing?

In short — no. The fees won’t apply to transactions on our MEXC pair, however daily volume on the exchange is negligible.

In hindsight, we would have much rather delayed listing with a CEX until the project had more traction. Because of the conditions MEXC placed on the token, we were forced to remove the fee we had on transactions since the TGE, which has now resulted in some confusion as we seek to bring it back.

We encourage you all to check out the MEXC HOL/USDT pair yourselves and draw your own conclusions about what happened there.

What do I need to do now?

If you’re planning to swap on the $HOL pair, make sure you adjust your slippage. Because the pair has a good amount of liquidity, 3.5% is more than enough.

Remember, these fees are being redistributed to our stakers. If you aren’t already, consider staking your $HOL — you can begin earning high-APR rewards as soon as you lock your tokens in 🚀

If you’d like to see where the fees come from and where they’re going, you can track everything by checking out the fee address on BSCScan.

📚0xBe6127C707348907028D680A407B7659A3F727AA

Finally, keep an eye on our announcements. There’s a lot planned for March, culminating in the marketplace launch at the end of the month.

Thank you all for ongoing support as we build the future of AR and NFTs together 💖