We recently reported on the launch of an interesting new DAO toolkit on July 20th of this year.
Over the past five weeks, the platform’s team has launched a novel Cardano-based funding initiative, dubbed “ISPO,” which has been running its own blockchain software using its own blockchain software. The first utility token distribution and is deploying its promised “DAO OS” module on Cardano’s testnet and mainnet, and has indicated its intention to launch the platform and its various add-ons starting in September 2022 .
On Monday, August 29th — 40 days after the project was announced — we spent some time talking with the platform’s founding team: Summon Association President Adam Rusch, Summon Labs CEO Thomas DiMatteo, Summon Labs CTO Riley Kilgore and Summon Labs General Counsel Matthew Bowen.
Blockonomi : Since the announcement of the Summoning Platform five weeks ago [Editor’s note: July 20, 2022], your DAO project has had a buoyant momentum. Last week, the platform had an initial token distribution. How does it work in this bearish market?
Adam Rusch: Thank you, and also to Blockonomi for the opportunity to provide you with this update.
The Summon Platform’s first community token distribution begins on Thursday, August 18th at 2:00pm UTC and ends on Sunday, August 21st at 11:59pm. During those 83 hours, over 10 million $SUMMON tokens were distributed to over 400 holders – earning an average of over 126,000 $SUMMON tokens per hour. [Editor’s note: The total number of $SUMMON tokens distributed during the inaugural Community Token Distribution was 10,471,736. ]
We are very excited about this event, especially since this is an exclusive community token distribution for members of Minswap, Liqwid Finance and the ADAO community. To participate in this early access program, you must hold tokens from at least one of the projects in your wallet, enforced by our novel protocol governing The Summon Platform’s PubSale token distribution system. Having purchased over $10 million in $SUMMON tokens, we are truly touched and grateful to the community members who came to support us.
Thomas DiMatteo: Community members can make any number of transactions, but the maximum amount is 12,500 ADA per transaction. This is to ensure that community members who enable us to stand up The Summon platform have the opportunity to earn $SUMMON prior to the retail token launch. It also reflects our commitment to ensuring decentralization from the outset by reducing the ability of institutional funds to buy significant stakes in platform governance.
Blockonomi : 
You said that the token sale was conducted on the summoning platform’s own software system?
Riley Kilgore: Yes. We run our community token distribution entirely on The Summon Platform’s own deployable token sale module, which we call PubSale.
Using PubSale’s novel non-custodial approach, and leveraging the power of Haskell and the Summon Platform DAO operating system, we will not escrow anyone’s funds at any time.
This is the first big test of PubSale, which I think is the first live test history of Cardano’s trustless token sale system. We are flexible enough to improve transaction batching on the fly without compromising user security at any point. We are excited to make this open source module in the upcoming Summon Platform available to other blockchain-based projects.
Adam Rusch: From the Summon Association perspective, it’s great to see Summon Labs offer PubSale, this is just the first of many modules delivered in The Summon Platform, which we think will be the best DAO operation in the Web 3.0 protocol one of the systems.
Thomas DiMatteo: Readers may be interested to know that our Dapp and interface for deploying PubSale is still at https://app.summonplatform.io. This is a cool feature that lets you see and preview how your DAO dashboard will look when you upgrade to The Summon platform.
Blockonomi : The $SUMMON token is a utility token and is not intended to be a mainstream cryptocurrency. How is the distribution different from a typical ICO?
Riley Kilgore: We want to make sure this initial distribution is only for community members who have been supporting us. Community-based distribution before anyone in the industry buys is usually not the way crypto projects are funded.
Matthew Bowen: We are very proud that $SUMMON is now in the wallets of so many of our earliest backers and that we were able to do this at what our team thinks is a very fair price. And I think it’s also worth noting that we’re building something extraordinary in one of the toughest bear markets in crypto history. Despite unfavorable market conditions, the launch of $SUMMON received a resounding response. This is evidenced by the huge success of our initial community token distribution, which has strong support from grassroots members of the Cardano community who believe in our team’s ability to lead to mass adoption of The DAO. I would also like to point out that, unlike most major projects in this space, we achieved all of this without resorting to private funding from venture capital. We are virtually unheard of in blockchain these days, and we ourselves directed The Summon Platform’s project and development to this state with a lot of sweat equity. Suffice it to say, we’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished so far in doing something that goes against the grain.
Thomas DiMatteo: Recently we have seen many large VC-backed tokens plummet in price. There are terrible emotions around, and for good reason. Projects are labelled a scam not because they are selling tokens, but because their private investors are selling tokens. It’s very encouraging to see the contrast in our community’s support for our community token distribution.
Adam Rusch: The confidence we gain from knowing that the community is behind us, from knowing that we have people who are eager to use our products, people who are willing to use our products, buy our tokens because of the utility these tokens provide, which makes We are sure we can succeed. We know that after this community token distribution, the community is eager to see what the Summoning Platform will offer them. We will not let them down.
Blockonomi: How is ISPO going? [Editor’s note: Initial Stake Pool Offering is a novel fundraising model on Cardano]
Riley Kilgore: From my point of view, I think seeing The Summon Platform make Cardano Really exciting block. It is exciting to contribute to the decentralization of the network, which is the main purpose of every stake pool.
Thomas DiMatteo: As someone who is deeply integrated into our community, not only continuously getting support but also leading this community our supporters. The block rewards we receive from the ISPO pool are critical to funding the work of our development team and core infrastructure. It’s great to see so many Summon community members wanting to receive our utility tokens to delegate ADA stakes to our mining pool.
Blockonomi : What is the future of the Summoning Platform?
Adam Rusch: One of the missions of The Summon Platform is not only to provide a portal where people can DAO with this operating system, but also to provide outreach to help teach people The best technology for decentralized governance and coordination.
We were honored to be approached by the Africa Proof Project, a project run by African entrepreneurs on Cardano to teach African developers how to become more savvy with Web 3.0 technologies so that they can grind Practice your skills and contribute to local economic development. We will work with groups like them and others to give everyone the opportunity to build skilled DAOs and other organizations that utilize decentralized governance and coordination tools.
Matthew Bowen: As Tom emphasized, we envision that the Summon platform is not just
just A “DAO Platform” Our intent is for Summon to be much larger – the modular architecture of the Summon platform is designed to allow for virtually unlimited builds and development, so in the end what we have is more A DAO operating system and portal to DeFi and Web3 utilities users are the same as DAOs. Our goal is for The Summon Platform to provide a wealth of utility for all users and organizations that can benefit from more than just the decentralized governance tools that the group is known for, because that’s really just the starting point. We see the true potential of The Summon Platform to become the “killer dapp” in the blockchain ecosystem.
Riley Kilgore: On the topic of multi-chain integration, I think once the Summon platform goes live on Cardano, we will start working out the best strategy for Summon to implement cross-chain. For example, we want to add support for the Ergo blockchain. Ergo and Cardano have overlapping communities, but Ergo is severely underfunded. So, as we continue to succeed, we want to help bring resources and tools to the Ergo blockchain.
Thomas DiMatteo: Begin summoning the platform around September 2022 as we roll out.
