Ink Foundation announced on June 17 that it would mint 1 billion INK tokens to fund user-run liquidity on Ink, the Ethereum layer-2 network backed by Kraken.
The foundation has permanently set the supply cap and will release the mint date and contract address after completing the audits. The end of audits, together with predefined usage thresholds, also marks the detailing of the eligibility process for the airdrop.
Furthermore, the announcement clarified that INK holders will not participate in the governance process of the rollup itself.
INK does not influence Ink’s technical parameters, which remain under the Optimism Superchain framework. Instead, holders will steer incentives and resource allocation for protocols that deploy on the rollup.
The foundation will distribute INK through an airdrop tied to a liquidity protocol powered by Aave. A wholly owned subsidiary will manage the drop and apply industry-standard Sybil-deterrence checks to curb farming.
The Aave-based venue will supply lending and trading functions and serve as the first building block in Ink’s DeFi stack, according to the June 17 statement.
The foundation said it minted INK to move the project into its next development phase and to align users, builders, and protocols around the token.
Kraken launched Ink on Oct. 24, 2024, describing it as an Optimism-based network that enables users to trade, borrow, and lend without intermediaries.
Ink’s founder, Andrew Koller, said the team would “accelerate the move on-chain with an interoperable L2” and aimed to open a developer testnet later that year with a full rollout for retail and institutional users in the first quarter of 2025.
Five days later, Optimism’s chief growth officer, Ryan Wyatt, revealed that the Optimism Foundation approved a 25 million OP grant for Kraken to bring Ink into the Superchain ecosystem.
The grant earmarked 5 million OP for OP Stack engineering and placed the remaining 20 million under transaction volume milestones intended to feed fees back to the Optimism Collective.
At the time, Wyatt said the offer mirrored packages extended to other firms building on the OP Stack.
