Why Two Tokens?
The simplest version of this question is: why not just have one token that does everything? The answer is that having one token that does everything creates a serious problem for a protocol like Landblock.
If the same token grants both protocol access and governance voting rights, then governance power becomes purchasable. Anyone with enough resources — a large corporation, a foreign government, a well-funded lobby — can buy their way into disproportionate control over the rules of the network. For a protocol that exists to serve governments and land rights holders across the globe, that is an unacceptable vulnerability.
Land administration is a sovereign function. The governments and registries that join Landblock need assurance that no single commercial actor can buy veto power over protocol decisions — or steer the network toward serving private interests over public ones. Separating governance influence from economic activity is how we make that assurance credible.
The two-token model also reflects what we actually need each token to do. LDBK needs to flow freely — it is a fee instrument, and frictionless utility is what makes a fee instrument work. LGT needs to be earned, not bought — it represents standing in the network, not purchasing power. These are fundamentally different things, and a single token cannot serve both purposes without compromising one of them.
LDBK — The Utility Token
LDBK is the Landblock utility token. It has a single purpose: paying for access to the protocol. It has no governance voting rights whatsoever. Holding LDBK gives you no say in how the protocol is run — only the ability to use it.
Concretely, LDBK is used for three things. First, query fees: when an institution — a bank, a court, a government agency, a development organization — queries the Federation Liaison Service to verify a land record, that query costs LDBK. The fee reflects the computational and cross-chain messaging costs of the verification, plus a protocol sustainability contribution. Second, federation service fees: registries that publish proofs to the network pay LDBK for the service, including cross-chain relaying via LayerZero. Third, fee discounts: holding LDBK provides reduced rates on protocol operations, creating an incentive for regular users to hold a working balance rather than acquiring tokens only when needed.
For institutions that want to abstract away token management entirely, the protocol includes a paymaster — an ERC-4337 Account Abstraction contract that allows organizations to pre-fund their account in LDBK and have gas and fee costs handled automatically, without their users or staff needing to interact with wallets directly. For a government land registry submitting thousands of proof publications per month, this is the practical path: top up the paymaster account, and the token mechanics disappear behind a clean API.
LDBK is an ERC-20 token on Polygon (the primary chain) and is OFT-enabled via LayerZero — meaning it transfers cleanly across all supported chains using a lock-and-mint mechanism that keeps total supply constant. A registry anchored on Cardano pays for its queries in LDBK on Cardano. No bridge complexity, no fragmented liquidity.
LGT — The Governance Token
LGT is the Landblock Governance Token. It confers one right: the ability to vote on protocol decisions through the Landblock DAO, implemented via Aragon on Polygon.
What does that mean in practice? LGT holders vote on protocol upgrades, changes to data schemas and verification standards, the addition or removal of supported anchoring chains, changes to DVN security configuration, ADR ratification, and amendments to the protocol constitution. These are the decisions that determine what Landblock is and how it works. LGT holders make them.
One important distinction: LGT is OFT-enabled for cross-chain transfers, but governance voting rights are attached to LGT on the primary chain only. A registry that holds LGT on SUI can transfer it back to Polygon to vote. LGT on secondary chains is utility-bearing in the sense of proving membership, but votes happen on the primary chain. This is a deliberate design choice — it keeps governance coordination simple and auditable in one place, rather than requiring cross-chain vote aggregation that would introduce bridge risk into the governance process itself.
LGT is implemented as ERC20Votes — the OpenZeppelin standard that enables on-chain vote delegation, snapshot-based voting, and the full Aragon governance integration Landblock runs on.
The Neutrality Lock
There is one governance action that LGT holders cannot take with a simple majority: amending the neutrality clause.
The Landblock protocol constitution contains a foundational principle — the DAO governs the protocol only, never land outcomes. Courts and governments decide what is true about land. The DAO decides how truth can be recorded. These domains must never overlap.
To prevent any future majority from eroding that boundary, changes to the neutrality clause require 85% of all circulating LGT — not just participating voters — plus a 90-day minimum deliberation window before the vote can close. Lowering either threshold requires the same process. This is not a governance quirk; it is the most important design decision in the entire token architecture. Governments considering this protocol need to know that no commercial actor can one day vote to give the DAO authority over land outcomes. The neutrality lock is how we make that guarantee permanent.
How LGT Is Distributed
LGT distribution follows three buckets, each with a different mechanism:
The first bucket is founding stewards — the builders, launchers, and protocol designers who created Landblock. These allocations come with a vesting schedule. The vesting exists because the founding steward allocation is large enough to matter for governance, and vesting ensures that the people receiving it remain committed to the long-term health of the protocol rather than extracting value and leaving. Founding steward LGT is earned over time, not granted upfront.
The second bucket is active registry participants. This is where the tokenomics directly connect to the mission. Registries that join the network, publish proofs, participate in governance, and actively use the federation protocol earn LGT over time through that participation. The more a registry contributes to the network — the more proofs it anchors, the more queries it responds to, the more it participates in DAO deliberations — the more governance standing it accumulates. This is intentional: the registries that do the work should have the most say in how the work gets governed.
The third bucket is contributors — developers who build on the protocol, researchers who advance the underlying standards, curators of the Legal Reference Library, and community members who contribute meaningfully to the ecosystem. These allocations are managed through DAO working group decisions, which means the registries and stewards who have earned governance standing decide which contributors have earned LGT recognition.
Specific percentages and vesting schedules for each bucket are not fixed at launch — they are set when the network reaches a size where the right calibration is knowable. The DAO reviews and can adjust allocations annually via vote and ADR. This is a deliberate choice: a protocol in early growth should not lock in distribution parameters that may need to change as the network scales.
What the Fees Fund
Protocol fees collected in LDBK support four things. The first is infrastructure operations: the Federation Liaison Service, the billing service, the indexers, the admin tooling, and the server infrastructure that makes the protocol accessible. These are real operational costs, and LDBK fees are the mechanism by which users of the protocol contribute to sustaining it.
The second is LayerZero messaging costs. Cross-chain proof verification routes through LayerZero, which charges per message. Those costs pass through to the fee structure transparently — the protocol does not absorb them, it charges for them. Users who need cross-chain verification pay more than users who query within the same chain, because cross-chain verification costs more to provide.
The third is the DAO treasury. A portion of protocol fees flows into the DAO-controlled treasury, which funds protocol development, security audits, contributor grants, and ecosystem growth initiatives. The DAO decides how treasury funds are spent — not Landblock as a company.
The fourth is registry onboarding. The protocol provides a donated onboarding mechanism for registries in lower-income jurisdictions that cannot immediately fund their own LDBK holdings. These registries receive a fee subsidy from the DAO treasury, funded by the fees paid by higher-volume users of the network. The network's commercial activity subsidizes access for the registries that need the protocol most but can afford it least.
Cross-Chain Token Mechanics
Both LDBK and LGT use LayerZero's OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token) standard for cross-chain transfers. The mechanism is lock-and-mint: when you send LDBK from Polygon to Cardano, your Polygon LDBK is locked in the OFT Adapter on Polygon, and equivalent LDBK is minted on Cardano. When you send it back, the Cardano tokens are burned and the Polygon tokens are released.
The result is that total supply is constant across all chains at all times. There are no liquidity pools, no price impact from bridging, and no fragmented supply across multiple canonical instances of the token. The OFT Adapters for both LDBK and LGT are deployed on Polygon Amoy testnet. When Phase 7 completes and SUI is live end-to-end, the first cross-chain LDBK transfers will be available on testnet.
What This Architecture Is Designed to Prevent
Token design is as much about what you prevent as what you enable. The Landblock token architecture is specifically designed to prevent three failure modes that have undermined other blockchain governance systems.
The first is governance capture: a single well-funded actor buying enough tokens to control protocol decisions. The two-token model mitigates this because LGT governance standing is earned through network participation, not purchased. You cannot accumulate LGT simply by buying LDBK. And even large LGT holders face the neutrality lock for the most consequential decisions.
The second is short-term extractive behavior: token holders who maximize short-term fee extraction at the expense of long-term network health. LGT vesting and participation-based earning align governance incentives with the long-term health of the registries using the network. Stewards and active registries have the most governance power — and they are also the parties with the most to lose if the protocol degrades.
The third is protocol capture by commercial interests: a situation where the commercial success of the protocol becomes the primary governance objective, displacing the public-interest mission. The neutrality lock, the DAO's explicit scope boundaries, and the participation-weighted LGT distribution all work against this. The registries — government entities with a mission to serve landowners — hold the majority of governance power as the network matures.
Where We Are Now
Both LDBK and LGT are deployed on Polygon Amoy testnet. The OFT adapters for cross-chain transfers are live. The Aragon governance integration is operational. The paymaster contract is deployed and tested.
The full LGT distribution — across all three buckets, with final percentages and vesting schedules — happens in Phase 3, when the DAO transitions to full on-chain governance. Before then, founding steward LGT is held by the Gnosis Safe multi-sig, and governance operates through the founding steward council under the protocol constitution.
The mainnet launch — currently targeted after the Phase 7 multi-chain integration and a full security audit — is when LDBK fees begin flowing in earnest and LGT governance over a live network becomes real. The testnet period is where we validate that the economics work the way they should before any of this matters at production scale.
If you have questions about the token architecture, the DAO structure, or how a registry would onboard and earn LGT, the best place to ask is the Slack community.
The Landblock token model is documented in the protocol constitution at landblock.app/docs, including the two-token rationale, distribution buckets, and neutrality lock mechanism. Technical specifications for LDBK and LGT — including the OFT adapter architecture — are in the architecture documentation. Join the community on Slack or reach us at landblock.app/#contact.