# Polimec Basics

## Vision and Mission of Polimec

Polimec’s **vision** is to transform finance for a fair and decentralized future.

Polimec’s **mission** is to shape the future of finance by democratizing access to capital and transforming the landscape of direct ownership. By leveraging decentralized technologies, Polimec delivers products and solutions for a more inclusive world, where everyone has the power to participate and own.

## Purpose of Polimec

Polimec provides an automated framework for projects to raise funds within a broad and diverse community with transparent and fair access for all. The protocol provides access to fundraising and manages the issuance, distribution, and conversion of tokens to mainnet.

Polimec allows different stakeholders to participate in funding rounds, and minimizes information asymmetry between participants and issuers to grow their community. The underlying reward mechanism ensures that the interests of the various participants and projects are aligned for sustainable fundraising.

Furthermore, the native [PLMC token](#user-content-fn-1)[^1] enables access to fundraises and a variety of additional functionalities such as evaluations, staking[^2], liquidity provisioning, governance, and more.

## Roles on Polimec

[**Issuers**](https://hub.polimec.org/learn/network-participants/issuers) are projects raising funds on Polimec. After providing the necessary documentation and structuring their funding process, issuers are subject to approval from evaluators to enter the funding round and depend on participants to achieve a successful fundraise.

[**Evaluators**](https://hub.polimec.org/learn/network-participants/evaluators) are incentivized to assess projects accurately, as they earn rewards for successful evaluations or get slashed[^3] for unsuccessful ones. The evaluation process is intended to be transparent, with evaluations recorded on the blockchain and evaluator DIDs[^4] linkable to social media profiles.

[**Participants**](https://hub.polimec.org/learn/network-participants/participants) are actors categorized as retail[^5], professional[^6], or institutional[^7]. They can browse projects and participate in those for which they are eligible. Unsuccessful funding rounds will result in an automatic refund of the participants’ contributions. [Contribution tokens](#user-content-fn-8)[^8] are automatically converted to [mainnet tokens](#user-content-fn-9)[^9] once a project’s mainnet[^10] goes live.

[**Stakers**](https://hub.polimec.org/learn/network-participants/stakers) earn staking rewards by delegating to collators[^11] who help stabilize the network. Staking rewards for collators and their delegators are paid out in PLMC on a round-by-round basis. The effective staking rewards rate is determined by the amount of PLMC staked in relation to the total supply.

[^1]: Native token for Polimec, serves four purposes: evaluation, participation, staking, and governance.

[^2]: Holding/locking up tokens to contribute to validating transactions and supporting functioning of the network, and in return, earning rewards.

[^3]: Penalty mechanism in blockchains that involves the deduction of a portion of staked tokens for certain types of malicious, erroneous behavior, or i.e. inaccurate funding prediction.

[^4]: Decentralized identifiers, globally unique persistent identifiers that do not require a centralized registration authority and are often generated and/or registered cryptographically.

[^5]: Natural persons that do not qualify as professional participants.

[^6]: Natural persons with the necessary knowledge or experience and/or sizable assets at their disposal.

[^7]: Legal entities which qualify as professional, such as financial intermediaries or companies with professional treasury departments.

[^8]: Tokens issued by projects which successfully raised funds on Polimec, serving as proof of participation for participants of the respective funding round.

[^9]: Tokens that operate on a project’s fully operational blockchain (mainnet).

[^10]: A project’s fully operational blockchain.

[^11]: Node operators in parachain networks that collect and execute transactions, generate state transition proofs, and provide unsealed blocks to validators for proposing a parachain block, while also facilitating message passing between different parachains.