Introducing a new JAM Token?

[Max]

At yesterday’s OpenDev Fellowship call, @alice_und_bob directed a question at @gavofyork , about whether there would be a new JAM token.

OpenDev Core Polkadot Call - May 2025

In his response, Gav seemed to not rule out the possibility, acknowledging the potential positive benefits for branding, but ending his response with “I don’t know”. That is a sensible stance, as ultimately the DAO has to make this decision.

However, I do think that we need more clarity on this, because UNCERTAINTY about whether or not there will be a new JAM token, can be detrimental in itself. Who would lock their DOT in governance or staking if they fear there will be a new JAM token soon and they could not get unlocked fast enough. ETF launches can be complicated if the issuer does not know how a such a new token would impact their product. And rumours of a disproportional “airdrop” could create massive sell pressure as people worry their DOT may become worthless.

Here are a few options of what I think could happen, and I am listing them in order of preference.

1. Token Rebranding: Ticker symbol on exchanges and CMC changes from DOT to JAM. Nothing else changes, but the advantage is that if executed well, this could capture a lot of mindshare, move the narrative away from parachains and get people to realise that JAM is in fact a major technical upgrade worth paying attention to. We may need to hire a new external marketing agency to execute the rebranding.

2. Linear Airdrop: 1 DOT =10 JAM (or some other arbitrary number), and people get this amount of JAM tokens, regardless of whether their DOT is liquid, staked, locked in conviction voting, locked in some other way, or held on a CEX. No additional JAM tokens are minted. Utility shifts completely to the new JAM token, DOT becomes worthless and is delisted from exchanges.

3. Conditional Airdrop: This in my opinion is a BAD idea. For example, locking your DOT to receive a JAM airdrop. Or even rewarding past “good behaviour” (staking, holding for a long time, active governance engagement or other metrics) to receive a higher airdrop. This would be highly controversial and would make many people confused and frustrated.

4. Parallel circulation: This is by far the worst outcome. For example, if a new JAM token is introduced without rewarding existing DOT holders. Or a small airdrop to token holders with the rest controlled by some new “JAM Foundation”. Subsequent parallel circulation of DOT and JAM and split utility would be highly detrimental for the ecosystem.

Now, of course the ultimate option is to not do anything, keep DOT, and not introduce any JAM token. This may in fact still be my preferred outcome. But a positive marketing and mindshare effect of a new token is not to be underestimated, and could be exactly what our ecosystem needs to recapture the narrative. And also, now that the cat is out of the bag, the discussion around a new JAM token is not gonna disappear anytime soon. Best to steer it actively than let speculation run wild.

I think a next good step would be for someone (@alice_und_bob , I’m looking at you ) to put a non-binding WFC Ref on chain, to see which of these options token holders prefer.

[Zezmo]

Check the Polkadot Wiki: FAQ for Polkadot's JAM Chain - Polkadot Wiki

It states “DOT will continue to be JAM’s native token. No other native token will be issued.”

[alice_und_bob]

There is no economic reasoning for a new token, so any speculation here is purely based on psychological arguments. I’m very much against this.

Polkadot is an ecosystem that has always made sound decisions when it comes to its fundamental direction. Issuing a token just because it is opportune would go completely against that.

The only thing I can get behind is a renaming/rebranding of the eco and token. But a new token would create incredible uncertainty, drama, and loss of credibility as I see it today.

[Redfield]

Guys, no economic reason? Seriously? Look at the chart. There are tons of economic reasons for rebranding and for not minting any new coin. We don’t want inflation like in Turkey, the German Reich or fucking Zimbabwe!

[olanod]

I think a new token is generally a bad idea and since JAM wants to absorb Polkadot’s validators and user base it depends completely on DOT holders making the decision, and I assume DOT holders like DOT so they will say no to a new token.

Option 1 sounds interesting as a pure marketing strategy to use the rebranding as a way to signal the world that a big thing happened in the Polkadot ecosystem that deserves to be called differently, the Polkadot brand is not doing so well so this move could be advantageous.

I see option 2, a 1.2 hybrid or some other variation as a possibility for a different reason, what if JAM absorbs more than one economy? say KSM’s? As a Kusama builder who pushes for the bird’s independence and wants to see it fly high on its own, I still wonder about what JAM means for the bird, I haven’t seen this topic discussed enough and I think people assume there will simply be another JAM chain, but does the world need 2 JAM chains? the world barely has use cases for Polkadot and JAM comes with more power than the two networks combined. Kusama’s main benefit as a canary will quickly fade as JAM is designed as a “minimal” protocol that wont need constant upgrades, all the innovation and experimentation will be at the service level, so you can serve both the “boring” stable products(e.g. parachain services) and the experimental ones that use services with experimental new protocols.
Kusama could be super beneficial in JAM’s rollout, the network could first absorb the canary and launch earlier in “beta mode”, once everything is solid it proceeds to absorb Polkadot.

I might be an independentist in Kusama but I rather be a pragmatic so I’ll say it first, we don’t need 2 JAM chains, I want Kusama and Polkadot to join and accumulate into a single machine, a JAM token can enable that.

[pierreaubert]

We (Parity) talked with Gav last week and he explained some of his reasoning to us. I do not want to speak for Gav but speculating on what’s he has in mind is not very helpful. Why not wait a few months for the idea to mature and see concretely what is on the table?

Pierre

[alice_und_bob]

I think the time to have this discussion behind closed doors was one year ago.

DOT holders are co-financing the development of JAM. There has to be certainty about this topic as soon as possible.

[pierreaubert]

Hey Tommy,

I fully agree. My point is that speculating is not useful. The topic is important and should get more than a comment in a video. I am not the one proposing a new token so I will stop here and wait to see a proposal.

Pierre

[Redfield]

Good idea, how about proposing it to KSM holders in a WFC proposal?

By the way, what happended to the proposal to reduce KSMs inflation rate you promised the space a month or two ago?

[SFX-1]

After being in crypto for longer than Polkadot exists, I still cannot get used to the name “Polkadot”. It just sounds so weird, non-technical, non-financial. It sounds to me like some kind of old-fashioned Polish festival traveling folks-dancegroup. Really how did someone choose this weird name for an International, global financial/hightech product. If we would do anything, then only options 1 & 2 are acceptable. But getting rid of the name: Polkadot, this would finally be really really nice.

[PolkadotFollower]

Closed door conversations need to stop. Those making these decisions have lead us to the current price situation which will ward off potential users and undermine the legitimacy of Polkadot.

[PolkadotFollower]

Awful idea and quite disrespectful to long term DOT holders and stakers to even contemplate. Which might I add are funding all of the developments.

Community and price need to be the paramount priority or DOT is just EOS 2.0.

[luzanikita]

In the longer perspective, JAM will scale to multiple machines to form the cloud. I doubt that each machine will have a separate token on their system chain/service. It’s more about the physical layer and how to distinguish JAMs. For end users, it should look like a unified system. But the Kusama independence seems like an interesting topic.

[mister_cole]

One reason is that Polkadot Treasury is currently being asked to fund JAM-specific projects (JAM tours, etc.).

[Barakion]

Hey All,

On the fence on the rebranding. I think most people when they hear rebrand they think desperation by default. Also, alot of money has already been spent on the Polkadot branding via various sport partnerships. Changing now is problematic. With all of that said, I am not sure Polkadot is the best name to attract normal folks (if that is the goal at all).

In terms of a JAM token, I think there can be an argument for one, which I will inherently reverse a long position of mine. Both ideologically and philosophically I have been against the main chain competing with what was built on top of it (or beside it). It is now very apparent that whether folks like it or not that is the direction the entire industry will go. These new Bitcoin stock companies will build bitcoin applications that use bitcoin directly (at the app layer). Ripple will integrate businesses top to bottom and left to right.

Further, if you understand Bittensor’s model, the subnet token is really used as an indirect method to determine the percent allocation of the TAO emission that the subnet gets. If my understanding is correct, the subnets will not be paid in their subnet token for the services they render to others (whatever that is) but will instead take payment in TAO. What that really means is that Bittensor is capturing the app layer with their token, not just the orchestration layer. Further, Bittensor is a much closer competitor to Polkadot than folks realize as these subnets can basically have “miners” that run any software service via compute. It is not just AI inference.

If there was a JAM token, I think it would have to be a spinoff of the Bittensor model that encourages app development via emissions. If you combined the combo of Integritee, JAM Grid, and Bittensor, you really would have a true level of global compute at virtually any scale. I would imagine that this is the end goal.

Ultimately, all the software will eventually get copied at scale given both opensource and the significant advancements in AI (both of which will act like a flywheel with each other in software development). If that is the case, like I said, everything will get copied.

If a JAM token is created, I would imagine it would be something similar to TAO that captures the app layer (or at least part of it).

And if I really think about it, a JAM token might be even more complementary versus adversarial at the app layers. If users of JAM agreed to use the JAM token as application layer payment, this could actually be very complementary across the board. Polkadot would serve as back-end infra (settlement, consensus, data availability, storage, compute, and gas for asset hub contracts and payments). JAM could be airdropped across multiple ecosystems similar to what Cardano is doing with Midnight. Then the rest of JAM would be issued on an emissions basis to the apps that agreed to get paid in JAM and reserve their token for purely governance of their app. Theoretically, as markets become more efficient, the app would be valued based on revenue, expenses, and treasury amount. This would create a network effect at the app layers, chains wouldn’t lose valuation and they would keep their governance, and polkadot would encourage coretime use and not need to rebrand.

[SFX-1]

Great post, yes a combo of Integretee, TAO and JAM sounds great!

[SAXEMBERG]

Hard NAY on the Linear Airdrop, Conditional Airdrop and Parallel circulation.

Soft NAY on a full Token Rebranding. Although Fantom to Sonic was a good one. Even to this day we get questions on why Polkadot’s ticker is not POL and it’s actually Polygon’s (even though it originally was branded MATIC) and why Polkadot is not just called Dot (drop_the_polka_its_cleaner.gif).
Soft AYE on a rebranding for Polkadot to get better logos, a different brand presence or even an image refresh after JAM’s launch. This definitely indicates that there has been a big update and will spark curiosity.

[gbaci]

i think project and token rebrand is the only viable option to keeping things as they are.

the arguments in favor of a rebrand are:

1. Polkadot+DOT has bad rep to most in crypto cos of how Polkadot v1 performed relative to its close competitors. important to note that this could change with time (and greater meaningful adoption). a rebrand helps us frontrun this. it helps us tap into the speculation-driven mindset of most crypto buyers.

2. far from being just a marketing gimmick, the logic/context of the situation somewhat forces us to really consider this option. for one thing, technically speaking (based on my limited non-technical understanding) JAM is not really Polkadot. it can run Polkadot though.

3. Gav brought up the consideration that there is a risk that JAM is overshadowed by the Polkadot=relay chain+parachains narrative. this is very important. educating people is hard, especially when they have no incentive to care.

my main concern about the rebrand is quality of execution. if it can’t be done in an elegant and painless (to the holders and other stakeholders), then we should likely not do it. but if it can be done, then that changes things.

JAM itself is a major leap in blockchain. trapping it behind the currently underperforming Polkadot brand is not exactly ideal.

[sourabhniyogi]

A reasonable rebrand that no one seems to be suggesting is:

KSM token => JAM token

and the Kusama chain become the JAM chain upon the cessation of the Kusama Relay Chain.

Then instead of 2 tokens DOT + KSM, there is just DOT + JAM.

The kind of innovation CoreVM + CorePlay requires the legendary spirit of Kusama.

Kusama is getting a 10MM DOT injection.

Polkadot can take its time to bring the JAM protocol, but of course it should and will.

JAM 2.0 concepts of Work report forwarding would then be immediately explorable between the 2 JAM Chains.

If there are any need for new tokenomics (like very low inflation), this can be explored in KSM=JAM. It looks like a SPAC.

[flez]

Unrelated to the JAM token discussion, I do have strong concerns around the “rebranding Polkadot to JAM” narrative.

My understanding is that JAM is just a codename for the next iteration of Polkadot Cloud, not a rebrand. Infra buyers search for terms like “web3 cloud” and “cloud services,” not fruit spreads.

Muddy messaging only gives competitors room to take the lead. We’re risking our first-mover advantage in the Web3 cloud space. Polkadot Hub and Cloud should be front and center. Not to mention we already invest ~$700k/mo marketing the Polkadot name. A rebrand now would be short-sighted and damaging imo.