A well-known decentralized trade platform called Vega Protocol has said it will shut down its test mainnet and stop using the VEGA token in the next three months. This move is part of a bigger plan to work on a new project called “Nebula.”
The plan, which was announced on August 30, is to change the direction of the protocol’s growth to Nebula, a fully decentralized exchange (DEX) that is built on Vega’s framework. This new platform will have its own token called NEB, and people who own VEGA tokens will be able to trade them in for the new asset.
The Vega Protocol says that the plan includes a few important steps. These include stopping all trading, giving the onchain treasury back to stakers, and giving validators USDT as a reward for keeping the network going for the next two months. Users will have plenty of time to get their money out of the Vega DEX.
The on-chain governance proposal for the changes outlined in our recent blog post, "Vega: The Next Phase," is live. It was necessary to split this into two proposals.
— Vega Protocol (@vegaprotocol) September 2, 2024
The first proposal, now live, effectively shuts down all on-chain operations and will determine the project’s…
The mainnet’s future will rest on whether validators decide to keep running nodes after two months. After that, there will be no more VEGA rewards or trade. We expect the test mainnet to stop working in the end, though.
Even though changes were being considered, Vega Protocol promised users that the protocol would still work properly in the long run. The community has strong support for the idea; 1.7 million tokens voted in favor and only 200 tokens voted against it. We set the deadline for voting for September 6, and only 2.5% of people had to vote for it to pass.
The plan has been mostly well accepted, but some people have said negative things about it. Some people in the crypto community, like the anonymous commenter Spreek, are worried that the new NEB token could make it much harder for people who already own VEGA tokens to hold on to them.
The news caused a quick response from the market, with the price of the VEGA token dropping by over 17% in the last 24 hours. This is part of a 64% drop in the last month and a huge 95% drop in the last year.
In 2018, Vega Protocol came out with a white paper that explained its goals as a trade blockchain with high speed. The project got $5 million in start funds in 2019 and then another $43 million in 2021 from a community funding round. Even with these early wins, Vega’s total value-locked (TVL) is only $424,000. This is very low compared to competing platforms like Hyperliquid and dYdX, whose TVLs are in the hundreds of millions.
