Echelon Prime prime

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Echelon is an ecosystem of blockchain-enabled games, starting with a trading-card game (TCG) known as Parallel TCG. The development studio behind these games is Parallel Studios. In Oct. 2021, it raised a $50M Series A round at a $500M valuation, and earlier this year it announced a $35M funding round.

Parallel TCG

In Parallel TCG, players compete for glory and can earn PRIME tokens—the native token of the Echelon ecosystem—by winning ranked games. (Players can play Parallel TCG for free and do not need to have a web3 wallet. If they want to win larger prizes, they must set up a wallet and buy Parallel NFTs.)

The game moved into open beta in Feb. 2024 after launching in closed beta in July 2023. Most of the Parallel TCG cards and other items (e.g. cosmetics) exist as NFTs on Ethereum mainnet, with the rest available as NFTs on Base, an Ethereum L2. (See all Parallel collections.)

Parallel Colony

The second game in the Echelon ecosystem will be Colony, an AI-powered strategic survival simulation game in which AI avatars collaborate and compete to survive. A public alpha version of Colony, which is being built on Solana, should go live in late 2024 or early 2025. Before the release, the team will publish a whitepaper to describe Colony in more depth. (For now, there is this 13-page explainer.)

Like all games in the Echelon ecosystem, PRIME will be the native token of Colony. Players will be able to earn PRIME for successful gameplay as well as use PRIME to create new AI avatars and buy in-game items, for example.

Wayfinder Protocol

Uniquely, Colony is being built with a separate protocol that Parallel Studios is developing. This protocol, known as Wayfinder, is a blockchain-enabled tool designed to enable autonomous AI agents that are user-owned. (More on Wayfinder in this 54-page whitepaper.)

Wayfinder will eventually have a native token, tentatively called PROMPT. As per the whitepaper linked above, 40% of the total supply will be distributed to PRIME holders who decide to ‘cache’—basically another word for ‘stake’—their tokens for between 21 days and three years. (The longer a PRIME holder caches, the more PROMPT tokens they will receive.)

Demand to cache PRIME has proven to be popular. As of Jul. 31, 2024, nearly 44% of circulating supply is cached for a weighted average of 498 days, according to this Dune dashboard.

PRIME is the utility and governance token for Echelon and its ecosystem of games (e.g. Parallel TCG, Colony, Project Tau Ceti), powering various token-gated products, services and experiences through sinks.

Several Sinks exist in Parallel TCG. Some, like Terminals and Artigraph, are cosmetic. Others, like Payload and Echoes, are critical for achieving scale. Sinks lock up circulating supply, refill the Gameplay Pool, and reward stakeholders through Sink Distributions.

The PRIME token itself launched in mid-2022 but was non-transferable until the community voted to activate transferability in March 2023.

The total supply is 111,111,111 PRIME and circulating supply can be viewed at echelon.io/prime. Token unlocks are scheduled to end by December 2027.

The initial distribution of PRIME was as follows:

• Gameplay pool (31.7%)
• Parallel Studios reserve (19.7%)
• Parallel Studios investors (16.2%)
• Caching (14.1%)
• Echelon Foundation reserve (11.2%)
• Prime Events (7.1%)