❌"Ramen's Price Discovery Mode only favors whales 😡"
For those who are unfamiliar, Ramen's Price Discovery Mode is powered by
@axis_fi's Sealed Bid Auctions.
Essentially, token launches are ungated and uncapped, which means any participant can contribute any amount and submit a bid price they are willing to pay per token.
During a Price Discovery Sale, participants input their Bid Price, which represents the maximum price you're willing to pay for one token, which remains encrypted through the auction phase.
After the auction is concluded, the system decrypts all bids and sorts the bids based on bid price, from highest to lowest. The system then allocates tokens in that order, until all tokens are allocated.
The final bid to be filled establishes the settlement price.
All bids above the settlement price will be considered successful: you will pay the settlement price and get more tokens than you bidded for.
If your bid price is lower than the settlement price, you will get a refund instead.
Now, this is why I think Price Discovery Mode is fair and doesn't only favor whales.
1⃣ The mechanism sorts bids based on bid prices, not bid sizes.
This means that if a whale's bid is below the settlement price, they will not win allocation no matter their bid size.
2⃣ It is not in the whales' advantage to bid at an extremely high bid price just to win allocation.
In a mainnet environment, it is unlikely that a whale will bid a high bid price with an extremely huge size. In this scenario, the resultant settlement price will be closer to the whales' bid, which means that most participants will be excluded, and the whale now becomes exit liquidity as most successful bidders will almost certainly sell their tokens at the high FDV. The whale now becomes exit liquidity.
In most cases, persons with high capital backing would almost always get a better advantage by investing in private token rounds instead of the public sale.