Hi ApeCoin DAO community,
We are pleased to publish Q1 2024 Ape Transparency Report. This report shows $APE balances, inflows and outflows, and grants that have been allocated, paid, and remaining.
Full reports linked here
Q1 2024 (Jan-Mar 2023)
A TLDR; version of the report can be found at this Twitter (link)
Yup, @furiousanger and I were right. We’re literally out of money.
When I wrote this AIP-505: Improving Funding Allocations To Benefit The DAO I had already done the math.
"The DAO treasury is rapidly declining - alongside the $ape token. At the current rate of spending and with all AIP allocations taken into account thus far, the DAO is expected to no longer be a going concern within a span of 19 months.
Oh, and btw, we barely have $100M left of disposable funds in the treasury. The treasury dashboard doesn’t take into account pre-allocated treasury funds set aside for approved AIPs (e.g. $100M Banana Bill)
In other words, going forward, the DAO needs number to go up. And the only way that can happen is via sustainable revenue generating activities - preferably short-term ones with the 3 - 12 months time frame."
Alongside these:
AIP-506: Update treasury dashboard to reflect pre-allocated funds
AIP-507: APE Foundation DAO Transparency Reports
Since I probably can’t write this here without getting banned - or something - I wrote my thoughts on X.
Please check your posts
You wrote 2023 not 2024 above.
You know that’s not my post, right?
Yes. The admin should fix it.
Not @SmartAPE apologies for any confusion.
Well I received notification that you replied to me as if that was an error on my part. Hence my response. Weird.
Like and RT done, sad but true facts… and still we approve the most stupid grands…
For the record and to avoid confusion, let me add some context to this.
In business, when we talk about being out of money, there’s a commonly used term called Going Concern. It doesn’t mean that there’s no money in the bank.
“Going concern is an accounting term for a company that has the resources needed to continue operating indefinitely until it provides evidence to the contrary. This term also refers to a company’s ability to make enough money to stay afloat or to avoid bankruptcy. If a business is not a going concern, it means it’s gone bankrupt and its assets were liquidated. As an example, many dot-coms are no longer going concern companies after the tech bust in the late 1990s.”
These numbers from the Q1/24 financial report are some indication of the financial state of the treasury as a going concern.
Currently, the DAO has no revenue stream. However, it does have token unlocks. These can be regarded as a form of endowment and not regarded as you would Accounts Receivables because it is not that. Basically it’s money created out of thin air and supported by a rapidly dwindling liquidity pool; but that’s a whole different story.
So how does that work? Lets take a walk down memory lane.
It started in back March 2022 which was the TGE with the token, though more accurately it was March 22, 2022.
The DAO treasury was allocated 470M tokens from a pool of 1B.
117,500,000 were immediately unlocked and had a immense value because the token was trading around $12. By the time the dust settled, the treasury had a value of $1.4B back in Mar 2022.
And so, a total of 352,500,000 tokens were locked.
Thereafter, the DAO’s unlock schedule was 7,343,750 per month for 48 months.
As of today, it has +18 months left of unlocks to go for a total of about 132,187,500 tokens.
Coming up on 09/22/24, the total unlock is 15.6M tokens, of which the DAO gets 7,343,750 tokens. At today’s token price, that’s about $5.5M. NOTE: The more the token value drops, the less the monthly value of the treasury allocation.
@capetaintrippy had a great explainer thread on X the other day in which he was opining on how the unlocks were no longer such a huge factor to the token because all of the major unlocks were over and done with.
He’s right, and it’s a point well made. Though I still struggle to understand the impetus for using the SOL chart instead of the APE one. But I digress.
Below is a token unlock chart.
Thus far, only the DAO, Yuga and Yuga founders have unlocks left. All other allocations have been unlocked. Over and done. Some have sold, while others are still HODLing.
The final DAO tokens will unlock on Mar 22, 2026. And so, for the next 18 months, the DAO will unlock about $100M at today’s token price. If the token continues to fall - as I fully expect that it will - that value will adjust accordingly.
For context, back on July 4th, 2024, when the token was trading around $0.80c, we allocated $100M to the Banana Bill.
FYI. There isn’t a single crypto trend - not one - whereby a chain catalyst (partnership, dApps etc) has improved the chain’s associated token by more than an average of 19%. Ever. So, whatever math you’re working in your head that tells you that our token is somehow automagically going to make a consequential comeback, don’t bet on it.
Remember the numbers from the Q1/24 report?
Lets look at this:
Now, refer to the numbers above, while extrapolating and solving for Q2/24 - Q3/24, while taking into account that DAO currently only gets $5.5M per month in unlocks. And like previous months, this valuation could go even lower.
Regardless of what happens with the Banana Bill or any program directly funded by the DAO to generate revenue, it’s facing some serious financial headwinds.
Do you get the picture now? And also why - for well over a year - I have been saying that if the DAO didn’t start looking to generate revenue, fix the voting so that we stop all the grifts and such, that we would regret it? We are there now. Plus we are down from a $1.4B treasury - and we didn’t invest in anything. So, there’s that.
While I may not be around here for much longer because I have now resigned myself to the fact that there’s nothing more than I can do here, and that nothing that any one of us does or says will make much difference, I hope that those of you who are actually still paying attention, continue to do so. And most of all, remember that I came through here and for well over year I kept harping on - repeatedly - about things that we needed to change - especially the voting system - for the survival of the DAO. WAGMI simply isn’t going to cut it.
That is all.
Hi,
Just would like to highlight some terms used and agreed to. Maybe we need to tighten up “financial reporting on a consistent and timely basis”, and if the responsibility falls on another “department” or there are breakdowns within the “chain” then this would be an appropriate opportunity to mention:
Wonder if this has ever been applied/actioned (possibly something we could look at retrospectively once guidance is created):
Conclusion:
A commitment (schedule) needs to be made concerning the release of the “foundation’s transparency reports” for each quarter.
There is really no way one could use terns such as consistency and timely manor when referring to the release of said reports - these commitments have most certainly been breached.
Out of interest:
What happened with this part @Waabam. Has this been superseded somewhere or was the contract extended for example or RFP/vote incoming to determine next administrator etc etc:
Thanks
Indeed. It’s why I wrote this proposal AIP-507: APE Foundation DAO Transparency Reports