Mars Hub, Terra’s original lending system, made an announcement on January 31 about launching its separate Cosmos app chain. This announcement was accompanied by the distribution of MARS tokens to customers who held Terra Classic during either of the two snapshots.

According to a statement published on January 20, the Mars Hub mainnet will go live with 16 genesis validators. Some of these validators are Block Pane, Chill Validation, Chorus One, Cosmology, CryptoCrew Validators, and ECO Stake.

After launch, there will be a possible expansion of 34 more slots for permissionless validators.

During the launch, a total of 50 million MARS tokens will be allocated to the genesis validators and then restored to the community pool after an interval of one month. According to the statement, “This temporary delegation will help protect the network from attack by a rogue validator who could acquire a substantial MARS delegation soon after genesis and begin to tamper with on-chain transactions.” This is noted in the statement. The first mainnet release is the third and final stage of a process that initially consisted of a private testnet for developers and other select community members, followed later by the release of a public testnet.

In early February 2023, the Osmosis blockchain will be used to establish the first settlement on Mars.

MARS tokens will be claimable by qualified addresses through an airdrop that is activated along with the mainnet. This will unlock a total of 64.4 million tokens for anyone who held MARS during the two historical snapshots that were taken in Terra Classic.

The recorded state of a blockchain at a specific time is saved in a file called a snapshot. This file contains all the transaction and address data that was previously stored in the blockchain.

The distribution of MARS tokens was decided by snapshots taken before and after the decoupling of Terra Class USD (UST). These snapshots were taken on block 7544910 (May 7, 2022, approximately 11am EST) and block 7816580 (May 28, 2022, approximately 11am EST).

Tokens will be accessible via Station, Terra’s new cross-chain wallet, starting six months after the platform’s introduction.

Users who held the MARS token in Terra Classic will also gain the ability to rule.

The failure of Terra LUNA and its stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) in May 2022 had a widespread effect on cryptocurrency markets, causing the values ​​of tokens used in decentralized finance (DeFi) projects that were hosted on the Terra protocol to , like Mars Protocol, to plummet.