Star Atlas DAO (POLIS) is the governance token of Star Atlas, a sci-fi metaverse game built on the Solana blockchain. Star Atlas’ other in-game currency is called ATLAS.

POLIS launched in September 2021 and reached its all-time high of $18.55 in the same month. The token sank in price after its strong launch, falling to about $1.20 by May 2022. The token aims to decentralize the Star Atlas game by slowly but surely transferring power from its original development team to governance holders over several years.

POLIS has a maximum supply of 360 million tokens. This is a fixed supply and will not increase unless the governance holders decide otherwise. The total supply will drip into the Star Atlas ecosystem within eight years of the token’s launch.

More than 7 million POLIS tokens were sold in public token sales on Apollo-X, Raydium and FTX. The token sales were gated with white lists, and stakers of various exchange tokens and NFTs were prioritized.

In private sales with a two-year vesting period, 81 million POLIS tokens were sold, 14.4 million tokens were reserved for liquidity pools and exchange listings, 144 million are reserved for rewards and 108 million went to the team. The rewards tokens will be distributed over eight years and the team’s tokens are subject to a two-year lockup.

POLIS is designed to incentivize governance over the economy of ATLAS, Star Atlas’s in-game token. The Star Atlas DAO mints and disburses ATLAS and earns a cut of the projects it funds. Its white paper holds that DAO governors could one day vote the founding Star Atlas development team out of business – however, the Star Atlas team holds 30% of the tokens.

POLIS can be bought from public markets or from the team. It can also be acquired by completing in-game missions, growing the ecosystem through organizing or contributing to in-game governance or providing liquidity to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols that support the token.

Once the token holders have enough power, they will be able to determine the focus of the game’s development, for instance by deciding on the structure of its in-game economy. The game’s DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations, or governance modules) are separated into a complex hierarchy but put simply, the more POLIS a holder stakes, the greater influence they will be able to exert.

The token manages ATLAS, the inflationary in-game currency of Star Atlas that’s used to buy assets and earned as a reward for completing in-game activities. The Star Atlas DAO can influence the tokenomics of ATLAS, which has a total supply of 36 billion. Star Atlas also represents many of its in-game assets, such as land and spaceships, as NFTs.

The Star Atlas DAO is just one of several DAOs in the game. Star Atlas features three factions, each of which has multiple DAOs. These DAOs may reserve POLIS in their treasury.

While Star Atlas wants to eventually transition to a decentralized, self-sovereign massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, its development is spearheaded by Atmta Inc, a software development company led by Michael Wagner. Wagner also co-founded Multichain Ventures. In April 2022, a Star Atlas guild called Aephia Industries acquired a majority stake in Atmta.

The game is built in Unreal Engine 5, a game development platform. The project released a pre-alpha gameplay video rendered in the engine in December 2021. The game does not have a release date.