Are my funds protected from rugs?

Yes, your funds are protected. We reserve the right to deliver funds to projects based on certain outcomes.

Picking a winner during bull markets may be as easy as picking projects by throwing darts at a board, blindfolded. The current environment however demands almost perfect execution in order to get a project off the ground.

We’ve recently seen some really promising projects fail, not only due to market conditions but also due to flawed execution to the detriment of our community. We’ve carefully listened to your feedback and decided to roll out two new initiatives, which aim to empower our community over projects and impose strict execution guidelines on launched protocols: Lithium Shield and Lithium Shield+

What is Lithium Shield? Lithium Shield is our brand-new approach to further protect our community, which stipulates that all raised funds will be delivered to a project in line with their vesting schedule of the respective round. Given projects execute and vest their tokens properly, they receive their funds. Should projects fail to execute and vest properly, we look to refund investors the remainder of the raise and cancel the allocation.

It’s worth noting that this does NOT imply Lithium creating risk-free investments. Lithium Shield looks to protect the community in case of real edge cases like we saw with Astra Guild Ventures where horrific execution and maligned incentives resulted in aggressive selling.

Astra Guild Ventures price performance

What is Lithium Shield+? Certain projects operate under Lithium Shield+, our supercharged community protection strategy and has additional protection designed to skew the risk-reward of participation significantly in the favour of our investors.

The core addition to Shield+ contracts is that Lithium requires projects to remain over the public raise price until the second vesting tranche is complete. Should it fall under this price and stay there for 7 consecutive days, we will refund investors (minus Lithium’s costs), and cancel the allocation.

It’s worth noting again that this is NOT risk-free. To expand on this point with Astra Guild Ventures in a worked example:

• The vesting was 20% at TGE, then 13.33% a month for 6 months

• On the second vesting point, 33.33% of the tokens would already have been vested

• 66.67% would therefore have been returned to investors, however, after Lithium’s 10% cover fee, investors would have received back 56.67% of their initial capital.

The aim of Lithium Shield(+) is not to remove the risk of investing in early-stage crypto projects, but rather to hold founding teams accountable for the promise they make to their investors, forcing a relentless drive for perfect execution.