Governance Proposal: QUICK Tokenomics Update - The Ultimate Refresh

In September 2024, the first of 3 governance votes was introduced where the community voted “Yes” to buy back and burn QUICK tokens using 100% of protocol revenue for a 3 month trial. Coined the ‘Trial of Fire’ that started on October 1, 2024, this buyback and burn mechanism has been ongoing ever since, slated to conclude at the end of June 2025.

The data and results of the QUICK token burn have been staggering, to say the least. Probably the most impressive stat, among many, is that over $1 million in QUICK has been bought back and burned in just shy of 9 months, and the burn rate has been accelerating recently due to the increased fee burn from the last vote. We’ve seen ~$340,000 in QUICK burns in the last 30 days, a rate of over $10,000 in QUICK/day. If continued without any increases in volume from potential bull market conditions, we’d burn ~$4.1 million QUICK/year (~20% of the supply). If we saw numbers even close to the last bull cycle, we could be burning tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in QUICK per year - as we know, we typically see larger numbers during each bull run (in general industry numbers).

Now it’s time to take things a step further and look at the broader vision for the QUICK token and the overall DEX itself - revamping the tokenomics and making big changes to the platform and team to help QuickSwap maintain a strong market position and increase long-term sustainability.

This governance proposal has been introduced to outline an updated QUICK tokenomics model designed to align both the interests of the dragon community and QuickSwap DEX, which includes allocating funds during an aggressive rebuild phase to serve 5 primary purposes:

1. Making emissions more sustainable and extending the QuickSwap community treasury token runway.
2. Onboarding Protofire as our new primary developer team to revamp the QuickSwap platform’s UI/UX with a complete redesign and overhaul.
3. Upgrade various components of QuickSwap’s infrastructure, such as subgraphs and RPCs.
4. Protofire supporting ongoing DEX operations and fixing existing bugs/issues.
5. Protofire leading new product building and innovations, plus chain deployments.

Continue reading the entire proposal below for more details and information.

Next Steps:

• To begin, the governance discussion on the official QuickSwap Reddit will run until Saturday, June 21 at 12:30 PM UTC
• Once the Reddit discussions finish, a formal Snapshot vote will begin and run until Wednesday, June 25 at 12:30 PM UTC
• Once you’ve read this entire blog post, make sure to visit the official QuickSwap Reddit discussion forum to share your perspective with your fellow community members

The ‘Trial Of Fire” - How Did The Token Burn Perform Over 9 Months?

As of June 18, 2025, here’s an overall breakdown of where the numbers lie in regards to the burn, which started on October 1, 2024 (almost 9 months in total):

• Total Supply: 953,735,035 QUICK
• Circulating Supply: 756,993,676 QUICK
• Burned Tokens to Date: 46,295,262 QUICK
• Burned Tokens Since October 1, 2024: 44,696,429 QUICK
• Burned Tokens on October 1, 2024: 1,598,833 QUICK

The burn has been accelerating rapidly over recent months, especially after the recent fee upgrade vote. In the last 30 days alone, QUICK has not only been deflationary but also has burned $340,000 USD worth of QUICK. That is over $10,000 in QUICK per day being burnt!

QuickSwap has been (and continues to be) the only deflationary DEX in the world. The ongoing buyback and burn has helped the QUICK token become more scarce, and has given holders increased confidence. Social media has also been buzzing with community members and KOLs discussing the burn and deflationary aspect of QuickSwap.

Proposed QUICK Tokenomics Update

As mentioned earlier, the goal is to move the QuickSwap DEX to a much more sustainable model for the long-term in regards to emissions. This would require changes/updates to the QUICK tokenomics model and how the QUICK token is split.

The QUICK token is extremely decentralised and almost all tokens went to the community - part of this proposal aims to give the Foundation more of a budget to work with to fund operations to revamp the platform and build more and new innovative products, as well as support new deployments and ecosystem growth on chains like Base. The Foundation has always been “long” QUICK (never arbitrarily sold QUICK but has instead held since the beginning).

Unfortunately, due to market conditions, and because the QuickSwap Co-Founders and Foundation gave 96.75% of tokens to the community, had no token sale, and never took VC funding, development has been somewhat limited. Some members who are part of the Foundation even volunteer for free, such as Roc Zacharias, QuickSwap’s Co-Founder - Roc will continue to volunteer and none of these tokens will go to him. This community funding will help finally achieve the goals that have been outlined in this governance proposal, primarily by bringing on Protofire as a new all-star developer team and continuing QuickSwap’s already top-notch BD and Marketing teams.

A full breakdown of the proposed updates to the QUICK tokenomics are below:

• Foundation Allocation: 3% of the total QUICK token supply to be allocated for the Foundation, which will be used for initiatives such as the following:
• New Developer Team: Protofire’s seasoned developer team of senior engineers and experts would be supporting QuickSwap moving forward (more information below).
• Leadership Change: Sameep Singhania, Co-Founder of QuickSwap, will be stepping into an advisory role for QuickSwap; tokens will not be used for this. Sameep has volunteered to take no pay, for the good of QuickSwap.
• UI/UX Redo: As part of onboarding the new developer team, one of the first proposed steps will be to revamp the DEX’s UI/UX. This includes improving functionality and speed, design overhauls, more advanced features, and more.

Token Emission, Burn, and Revenue Rehaul:

• Currently, the way emissions and burns work is that QuickSwap emits x amount of tokens per day, and burns x + y emissions per day, resulting in net deflation. However, it still introduces tokens into the circulating supply before burning them, which is somewhat arbitrary and unnecessary. One of the negatives is that this system gives QuickSwap a limited lifespan, as tokens will eventually run out.
• Instead, we can achieve the same net effect (without using uncirculating tokens) by ceasing to emit tokens altogether for emissions and instead taking revenue - this revenue can be used to supply emissions directly and then burn the additional revenue.
• Additionally, during QuickSwap’s aggressive rebuilding phase, we are proposing the following changes to the way revenue is split, some being temporary.

1. For 4 months, the community portion of the revenue will be used as follows:

• 60% for farming rewards: This would replace emissions that will no longer happen; emissions would now be covered and we would be building UP the treasury instead of depleting it. The result of this is that farming rewards can now run indefinitely, and the net buying of QUICK at current revenue levels could increase drastically during a bull market.
• 5% burned: This is now a pure burn, since there will be no more new token farming emissions entering the supply.
• 10% TOL (Treasury Owned Liquidity), ideally the ETH/QUICK pair
• 25% to a temporary 4-month developer fund

2. After the first 4 months:

• 50% of QUICK to be used for replenishing farming rewards (now sustainable emissions, where no new QUICK tokens enter the supply)
• 40% of QUICK to be burned (again, this is a pure burn, not a net burn)
• 10% TOL (Treasury Owned Liquidity), ideally the ETH/QUICK pair
• Developer funding ends

*TOL: These funds will belong to the Treasury, where it will have the power to create chosen LPs (ideally ETH/QUICK) and move them where it makes the most sense, such as new chain deployments. In addition, the Treasury will use the funds to farm rewards and either compound or sell them with the long term goal of community treasury sustainability.

As of this week, QuickSwap emits ~125,900 tokens per day. Over the past month, the protocol has averaged daily burns of ~400,000 tokens. This vote proposes a pivotal shift: enabling farm rewards to continue indefinitely while simultaneously growing the community treasury instead of depleting the community treasury over time.

At current levels, this approach not only allows QuickSwap to build a robust treasury but also ensures the protocol remains net deflationary.

If the majority of the community votes ‘Yes’ on this proposal, everything outlined above would be implemented to shape the new QUICK tokenomics, which would go into effect sometime shortly after July 1, 2025.

Protofire Developer Team

Protofire is a developer team consisting of various senior engineers and experts who have longevity and experience in the Web3 industry - they’ve worked with 201+ projects, had 600,000+ unique wallets use their smart contracts, and hit 35,000,000+ transactions.

Their team has partnered with several large L1/L2 networks, infrastructure, and DeFi protocols, including top Web3 names like Ethereum Foundation, The Graph, Balancer, Filecoin, Web3 Foundation (Polkadot), Chainlink, Gnosis, StratEx, and others to build features that deliver a competitive advantage to its partners and users.

As previously mentioned, QuickSwap is looking to bring the Protofire team in at full-time capacity to have them fully revamp the UI/UX, fix existing bugs/issues, and provide ongoing dedicated support to manage the infrastructure + UI/UX.

To initiate this transition, Sameep Sanghania, Co-Founder of QuickSwap, would step down from his role leading the core developer team - moving forward, he would serve as an Advisor to QuickSwap. Sameep will be focusing his time on building a new innovative zkCLOB DEX product - ‘KalqiX,’ with plans to be integrated into QuickSwap in the future (pending a future community governance proposal). It’s hard to say in these early stages, but this could be a big part of QuickSwap’s future.

Here are a few of the recent grants received by Protofire and what they delivered:

• Ethereum Foundation & Optimism - Grants in 2022 and 2023 to develop and maintain Solhint, the most adopted Solidity linting tool that Protofire has developed for the Ethereum developer ecosystem.
• Balancer - A grant in 2022 to understand users’ and institutional investors' fears and demands. Protofire did a comprehensive survey including interviews and reports to drive Balancer’s strategy. Protofire has continued to maintain parts of Balancer governance to this day.
• Aave - In 2023 Aave gave Protofire two Grants to develop a Credit Delegate Marketplace to increase the yields of their users while unlocking completely new use cases, using Atomica to make the process peer to pool.
• Web3 Foundation (Polkadot) - A grant in 2023 to create an Open Zeppelin-like smart contracts factory for the Polkadot ecosystem.
• Chainlink - Multiple Grants to design new network integrations, and create plug-ins for products such as Hardhat and Foundry.
• Gnosis/SAFE - Official deployers of SAFE deployments on new chains. They are “SAFE Guardians."
• StratEx - Lead development team for StratEx, focusing on vault and strategy design, UI/UX, and security.

Protofire has already spent some time working on QuickSwap in the past (i.e. audits and building staking protection for QuickPerps), but is now looking to come aboard full time to lead QuickSwap development including UI rehaul, new innovations and products, security, and maintenance. The Foundation has built a close relationship with the Protofire team over recent years and is confident that their ability to execute is unmatched in the industry.

“I’ve never worked with such an incredible dev team in all my years in Web3” - Alexios Atlas.

For more information about Protofire projects, visit their pagehttps://protofire.io/projects. There, you will find in-depth explanations about other projects they develop besides the grants mentioned above, which will include clients such as Gnosis Safe, The Graph, MakerDAO, 0x, Filecoin, Cowswap, and many more.

Join the Discussion

As always, QuickSwap community members are encouraged to participate in and contribute to QuickSwap governance discussions and proposals across all of QuickSwap’s online forums, especially on Reddit. As a Dragon, you are a valued community member and your opinion matters – but you have to participate in community voting procedures to make it count.

Critical decisions guiding QuickSwap’s strategic development will always be determined by way of decentralised governance. QuickSwap’s future is in your hands, so make your voice heard!