In Rare Decision, ICO Founders Will Wait 10 Years for Crypto Paydays

The team behind the protocol, today valued at $64 million, will now voluntarily wait a decade before they can get their hands on the blockchains' tokens they'll earn for their labor - seven years longer than they had originally planned.

In the original token allocation, 20 percent of the initial supply were set aside for the team and founders to be gradually released over a three-year period.

Based on a blog post published last week, the timelines for the token release are being extended considerably.

For the developer team, the start date for the gradual distribution of tokens will be postponed for a year, and for the founders of the network, the token distribution doesn't start for a full decade.

Ryan Selkis, founder of the token data source Messari, said that he believes a multi-year vesting schedule should become a standard for new token companies.

The Nebulas team has also committed to publishing the smart contract address holding the NAS tokens and will contract with a third-party auditor to verify their finances.

Nebulas' mainnet went live the first quarter, but there are still several tools promised in the ICO that have not been completed: Nebulas Rank, Nebulas Force and Nebulas Incentive.

From May to July, Nebulas ran an incentive program for developers, distributing in total 450,000 nas tokens to 1,472 different applications.

Since many of Nebulas' token holders are investors within the United States and the regulatory framework for crypto tokens is still very much uncertain, they have not been able to execute the swap on exchanges.

The nas token - which was sold for $2 each during the ICO - is currently trading at $1.41, according to CoinMarketCap.