Token Design & Distribution
Last updated
Last updated
SMILE is a utility token created in collaboration between BioFoundry and Lumina Probiotic to accelerate innovation in oral health. It represents a strategic partnership between a DeFi launchpad and a pioneering SynBio company, designed to accelerate the transformation of oral health through decentralized incentives and community engagement.
SMILE serves multiple stakeholders and goals in the ecosystem. The token is more than a simple funding tool – it provides tangible benefits to consumers, creates alignment with Lumina's success, and functions as an incentive mechanism in the emerging DeSci ecosystem. The utility of SMILE can be understood in three parts:
Consumer Rewards Layer: Everyday users and early adopters are rewarded for contributing to Lumina's mission. For example, customers who join the Probiotic Trials Rewards program earn SMILE tokens by using Lumina's oral probiotic and sharing their feedback or saliva swab data. This is akin to "clinical trial mining", where community members are incentivized like liquidity providers in DeFi. By engaging in trials, referrals, or early product feedback, users accumulate SMILE as a reward for supporting scientific progress and providing valuable real-world data. This not only builds customer loyalty but also accelerates R&D; Lumina gains iterative data for improving the product, and users tangibly share in that progress.
Early Alignment with Success: Holding SMILE tokens represents a community member's early alignment with Lumina Probiotic's potential success. For instance, if Lumina achieves significant operational or revenue milestones, the Foundation may allocate a portion of its available resources in a way that supports Lumina's success and related oral health causes. Similarly, the Foundation may, under strict pre-established parameters, allocate SMILE tokens towards future initiatives that further accelerate the transformation of oral health via synthetic biology.
Broader DeSci Incentive Mechanism: SMILE is designed as a focused incentive mechanism that not only rewards current community engagement but also serves as a model for future incentive structures in the DeSci realm. By tying reward mechanisms to measurable outcomes (such as user engagement in clinical trials or consistent product feedback), SMILE becomes a benchmark for future projects in the oral health space. In this way, early participants not only earn rewards for their direct contributions but also help set a standard for how community-driven incentive programs can operate effectively in biotech.
To kickstart this ecosystem, SMILE's initial distribution is carefully structured to balance community accessibility, project funding, and long-term sustainability. The total token supply is allocated across several key categories, as shown below. This allocation was determined during the Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) launch – a decentralized token sale mechanism – and via reserved pools for ongoing initiatives. Figure 1 provides a visual breakdown of the token distribution, followed by details for each portion of the supply.
The initial token allocation is as follows:
50% – LBP Participants (Public Sale): Half of all SMILE tokens are distributed through a two-phase Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool, ensuring fair price discovery and broad community distribution.
20% – SMILE Foundation Treasury: Twenty percent of the supply is held by the SMILE Foundation. These tokens will be used to fund research and expansion efforts, community grants, and other ecosystem growth initiatives.
15% – Team: Allocated to the Lumina and BioFoundry team members, founders, and advisors who are driving the project. These tokens are subject to a 2-year linear vesting schedule.
10% – Incentives for Trials & Data: A dedicated 10% pool fuels data-centric programs—like Probiotic Trials Rewards, regular reporting bonuses, and other data collection efforts. For instance, participants who submit oral health data after using Lumina Probiotic can receive SMILE from this pool. By incentivizing real-world feedback, these rewards expedite the testing and deployment of novel consumer SynBio products, which often stall without sufficient user engagement and efficacy data.
5% – BioFoundry Ecosystem Support: The remaining 5% is allocated to BioFoundry and its affiliated entities for co-launching the project and to fund ongoing ecosystem and infrastructure support.
Having allocated the tokens, it's important to understand how SMILE will circulate and function within the ecosystem after launch. The utility design (rewards, alignment, and DeSci funding signal) described above translates into a set of interactive token flows between the community, the Lumina project, and the BioFoundry platform. Figure 2 illustrates these flows and relationships in the SMILE ecosystem, highlighting how value moves around and how various participants engage with the token:
This diagram shows the lifecycle and utility of SMILE tokens within the ecosystem. Starting from the left, Lumina Probiotic's success (e.g., product sales or milestones) provides resources that the SMILE Foundation can optionally use for token buybacks or burns (via governance decisions), aligning token value with real-world progress. The foundation also allocates an incentives pool to the Probiotic Trials program, rewarding users with SMILE for participating and submitting oral health data. Community members (right side) acquire SMILE either through the initial LBP sale or by earning rewards; they can stake or hold their tokens (indicating long-term support) and use them to participate in the community. For example, holders might stake SMILE in future to unlock platform perks or to signal support for future oral health projects. Finally, the foundation's treasury and the community's token-based signals feed into funding new projects – promising oral biotech ventures could receive grants or backing if the SMILE community supports them. Together, these flows ensure that SMILE continuously incentivizes participation, ties its fate to Lumina's achievements, and expands its impact to new frontiers in oral health science.
In practical terms, here's how these dynamics play out:
Earning and Using SMILE: As Lumina's customers and trial participants use the product, they report their experience and data (for instance, submitting a quick survey or a saliva sample after using the Lumina probiotic). In return, the SMILE Foundation distributes tokens from the incentives reserve to these users as a reward. This is mutually beneficial: users get a stake in the ecosystem's success, and Lumina gathers real-world evidence to refine its probiotic. Users who earn or buy SMILE can then choose to hold it as an asset, trade it on the open market, or potentially stake it within the BioFoundry platform. Staking (once introduced) might grant users additional benefits – for example, priority access to new products, eligibility for special NFT drops or other community rewards, or simply the ability to earn yield in the form of more SMILE tokens. By holding and staking, community members deepen their involvement, essentially becoming long-term partners in the oral health mission.
Feedback Loop with Lumina's Success: The token's design deliberately creates a feedback loop: if Lumina Probiotic does well commercially (e.g., high product sales or maybe a partnership deal), the community can vote to channel some of that success back into SMILE. The SMILE Foundation, which might hold equity or revenue-sharing rights in Lumina's business, could use proceeds to buy SMILE tokens on the market and burn or hold them. This reduces circulating supply or boosts demand, which can increase the token's value for all holders. It's a way of saying "thank you" to early supporters – instead of dividends or direct profit-sharing, the project performs token buybacks that benefit the community. All of this is done at the discretion of token holders via governance proposals, keeping it transparent and avoiding any implied promise of returns. The key point is that SMILE token holders are aligned with the product's impact: as fewer people get cavities thanks to Lumina's innovation, the community that believed in that innovation early on is rewarded in parallel, creating a win-win scenario that's uncommon in traditional biotech funding.
Platform-Wide Impact (DeSci Funding Signal): Perhaps the most forward-looking aspect of SMILE is its potential to influence and fund future projects. Imagine a year from now, a new startup emerges with a groundbreaking idea for gum disease or a next-generation toothpaste. In the BioFoundry launchpad, they could present their proposal to the SMILE community. If SMILE holders are excited about it, they could stake tokens to "vote" for that project or even donate a small fraction of their tokens to help bootstrap it. A high level of support might signal BioFoundry (and other investors) that this project has strong community backing, thus securing it a spot in the launchpad or a grant from the SMILE Foundation treasury. In this way, SMILE becomes a platform-wide currency for oral biotech innovation – a token that not only originated from Lumina's probiotic, but now empowers the community to decide what the next Lumina could be. Over time, this could give rise to an entire ecosystem of oral health solutions backed by a common community token, each reinforcing the value of the other. It's a novel model of decentralized R&D funding: the people who care most about the mission (patients, dentists, health enthusiasts) collectively fuel the science they want to see, using SMILE as the vehicle.
As we conclude this overview of SMILE's design and distribution, it's worth looking ahead to what this token could become. SMILE is more than just a token for a probiotic; it represents a new decentralized backer model for biotech innovation. In traditional biotech, early supporters (like venture capital or early customers) rarely get to participate in the value creation beyond maybe receiving the product.
Looking forward, the success of SMILE could demonstrate how community-driven tokens might support scientific progress in areas far beyond oral health. If a decentralized network of supporters can drive a cavity-fighting probiotic to worldwide adoption, similar models might be applied to developing new vaccines, novel therapeutics, or other health technologies that have passionate supporter bases. SMILE could pave the way for "patient investment DAOs" where communities rally around a cause (be it curing a disease or tackling a global health challenge) and collectively fund and accelerate the R&D through aligned incentives. In such a future, tokens like SMILE serve as the glue between researchers, patients, and investors – aligning incentives so that if the science works, everyone benefits, and if the community contributes, their support is recognized.
It's important to note that SMILE is an experiment at the frontier of DeFi and biotech (DeSci). While we are optimistic about its potential to catalyze oral health innovation, we are careful not to overstate specific outcomes. SMILE is not a promise of profit or a traditional investment; it's a community token whose value will ultimately reflect the strength of the ecosystem we build around it. The true measure of success will be in metrics like cavities prevented, data collected, research funded, and startups launched – with SMILE as an enabling tool for those achievements. Our forward-looking vision is one where buying a token equates to buying into a cause – here, the cause of better oral health for all. In that spirit, every SMILE token holder, whether they contributed $10 or $10k in the LBP, becomes a part of the journey to end tooth decay as we know it.
Together, through SMILE, we're breaking new ground in how science is funded and shared – and if we succeed, the world will have a lot more to smile about.
