Shell Protocol price

SHELL

At the time of the token generation event on January 22, 2024, 200 million Shell Protocol tokens were created. These were apportioned as follows:

80M - DAO Treasury

70M - Cowri Labs

40M - Early Community

10M - Shell Foundation

The Shell DAO has the power to mint more tokens beyond the 200 million supply apportioned above, but that would require a governance vote.

Shell Protocol was designed with one, and only one, protocol-level fee. This fee is an "unwrap" fee, to be applied only when users remove value from the main smart contract (the Ocean). Initially, the fee is set to zero.

As more people use Shell, more volume will flow in and out of the Ocean, and the protocol collects more revenue.

The Shell DAO is the beneficiary of this revenue. SHELL token holders collectively control the DAO via voting. Hence, SHELL tokens directly benefit from the revenue collected by the Ocean.

The fee has a hard-coded cap of 0.05% to prevent rent-seeking behavior. It’s also a security measure—in case the DAO is compromised, an attacker can’t lock user tokens in the protocol by setting the fee to 100%.

Cowri Labs is the development team behind Shell Protocol. It is distinct and separate from the Shell DAO, the Foundation and the Protocol. Cowri Labs is a for-profit, US-based company that has raised capital from outside investors.

Note that as an independent company, Cowri does not (nor could it) own or control Shell (a decentralized, non-custodial protocol). The Cowri team built Shell Protocol from the ground up, starting back in October 2020 with Shell v1. The company is based in Honolulu, the hometown of its founder Kenny White. Although team members work remotely from different parts of the world, you can occasionally find them co-working by the beach at Shell Hale (pronounced HAH-leh), Cowri's solar-powered Hawaii hacker house.