Foundational investments now, vertical investments later

General
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There needs to be a focus on boring infra, policies, and procedures. My reactions after a few weeks of lurking and one 1 AIP Idea proposal: it’s still too early to fund vertical expenditures.

Related thoughts:

  1. $5.5 billion FDV without dedicated personnel building foundations. Currently, DAO is only capable of writing checks for others to build tall and fast. We need deep and wide ownership.

Step-forward: Establish DAO Communications Team and Processes - #54

Consider: SNX model; democratized, specialized representation.

  1. Lack of participation.

Consider: Aavegotchi is one of if not the most active DAO. Consider their system of xp for meaningful proposals and votes (gotchi xp drives in-game rewards and level-ups). https://wiki.aavegotchi.com/en/dao

  1. Require self-identification of benefits and risks and ROC/KPI in all proposals. To the extent there are similar proposals, include a comparative of the other submissions. Providing an objective foundation will help drive meaningful discourse. For example, you want $1M for x: quantify direct and indirect benefits, the timeline back to break-even, and material risks.

  2. ApeCoin DAO cannot accept revenue. A cost-center without resources, direction or ownership of economic upside is unsustainable.

Rounding out 1 and 2, subDAOs may drive discrete participation and drive collective value to $ape.

Potpourri from my AIP Idea:

$ape subDAO staking in exchange for finder’s fee using veSPOOL model of fee accrual and vote influence, also signaling willingness to participate in marketplace decisions with possible incentives tied to good proposals and implementations following the aavegotchi model of xp? or maybe $ape staking unlocks gated marketplace with tiered-down finder’s fees based on thresholds of $ape staked? Lots of indirect ways to encourage marketplace adoption while driving utility to $ape.

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I completely agree with this! Infrastructure in the DAO should be built out first, then we can look at how to attract tech projects for grants & power cool ideas. I think many of us are learning that. Hindsight- working groups should’ve been setup within the first 6 weeks when activity was high.

@Amplify and myself have went back and forth on this a bit, as has the proposed comm team. There’s a lack of general participation that makes it hard to find talent to fill these roles. An area where me and amp differ, is that I think we should gauge DAO participation in the coming months befor creating these addtl structures. Whereas he says it could be a chicken-egg situation. Build it & they will come?

On gamifying XP and encouraging participation, i had a call w/ Thrivecoin this week. There are some others leading that charge. I think we’ll see them enter the scene. Things like small rewards and leaderboards for participation are likely to become areas of conversation soon. I’m excited about anything that could drive more daily participation in conversations both here & on twitter. There are options for how to best do this!

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Agree 100%. Like @0xSword said we have been working through this recently. I definitely want to focus more on policy and procedure before moving onto working groups or governance councils. Although, I do think the proposed Communications team is much needed and will be crucial towards scouting and assisting active members to organize and create these working groups and ratify policy.

I’m glad you brought up Synthetix, I’ve been taking a very close look at their Council’s and how they structured governance. I’m currently working on an AIP draft for ratifying the nominations and elections process for the ApeCoin Board. If anyone would like to help out or take a look, please feel free to message me here! :slight_smile:

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  1. ApeCoin DAO cannot accept revenue. A cost-center without resources, direction or ownership of economic upside is unsustainable.

For point #4, are you saying that some part of the DAO needs to have some ownership or control over economic upside of future proposals?

As things currently stand, we haven’t worked out a way to do this legally, but people are starting to get interested in figuring this out.

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Love the idea! @Marklar
And @Amplify, i would love to take a look at your ideas. Thanks in advance for your effort on this :slight_smile:

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Yes, exactly this.

Aligns economic incentives and also allows self-sustaining initiatives (e.g., marketplace finder’s fee used to maintain, market, and develop marketplace. And so forth.

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A few thoughts for consideration:

  1. To prevent multiple votes, there should be a snapshot of wallets eligible to vote as of the start of the Voting Period.

  2. Eligibility should be opt-in for everyone. Otherwise, as-drafted, automatic re-entry should have an opt-out.

  3. Not immediately clear, but if this is an extension of AIP-1 it should explicitly state as such.

  4. Specify time zone.

  5. Specify and define each discrete period: Nomination Period, Voting Period, Elected Term. The phrase “election cycle” elicits some confusion.

  6. Consider process in the event an Elected Term is not completed, either by voluntary or involuntary action (e.g., removal).

  7. Consider what happens if someone withdraws during Voting Period after votes have been cast.

  8. Consider requirements for nomination, if any. Individual? If organization, primary PoC? etc.

  9. Consider fixed $ape cost rather than fixed USD cost. Better economic alignment for the DAO as Special Council pay subject to price exposure.

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Thank you so much for taking a look over my AIP draft. I am going to make some changes, but the draft will be largely put on the backlog for now as the ApeCoin Foundation Administrators are currently working on a draft of their own. :slight_smile:

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You should post your draft in general discussion to give the community an early jump on thinking about the types of things they want included. The more pre-draft discourse, the better imo.

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:slight_smile: It’s pending, should be up today or tomorrow. :pray: Thank you, and good idea!

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Very much agree there needs to be a focus on infrastructure, policies, and procedures.

Regarding this:

This is something I’ve been looking into and I recently had a chance to ask @bc about it. It’s really complicated, but not impossible to do. We’d have to hire a bunch of really smart people to figure it out though, which is expensive.

If I understood him correctly, there’s multiple problems that need to be solved and would be very costly to figure out. I’ll give you some examples.

One is related to revenue being generating in different countries. We would have to figure out how to file taxes all over the world.

Another is related to regulations. It would make the DAO look like an investment. How would we register with the SEC and other regulatory bodies across the world? Would KYC be needed?

There may be workarounds, but I don’t know if anyone has put much thought into it. I think it boils down to what the members of the DAO believe it’s role should be. Is the DAO just meant just to exist to distribute funds into the ecosystem, and once that is done, that’s it? If not, we need a plan.

What to do with profits has been a recurring issue. It was an issue the merch proposal that was rejected faced AIP-13, and for the Marketplace proposal that just passed AIP-98

For the marketplace proposal, @zheerwagen reached out to many members of the community and what to do with the profits was discussed. In response, they decided that “all $APE fees will be routed to a community held multi-sig with use of funds to be voted on in a future AIP. This gives the DAO more time to determine how to best utilize new funding sources while taking $APE off of the market in the interim.”

What to do with profits is still a challenge in itself. This is a screenshot from the Market place proposal:

image
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Hope this info helps a bit!

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Here is a link to the post in case anyone missed it. :slight_smile:

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it does help, yes. my marketplace AIP is in pre-draft stage and starts under the multi-sig presumption approved in snag but also offers immediate solutions and long-term ideas to resolve this issue.

completely understand the risk profile and why risk mitigation is as important as revenue generation.

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Look forward to your proposal and ideas!

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Your post conjured similar thoughts I had specific to gaming/music (that’s my love and specialty). The thoughts below would correspond to the sub-dao idea OP laid out.

In terms of artistry (game deving, music, art, movie shorts), DAO funding could be best used to create the Ape version of Newgrounds. Many advantages IMHO:

$5.5 billion FDV without dedicated personnel building foundations. Currently, DAO is only capable of writing checks for others to build tall and fast. We need deep and wide ownership.

A site like Newgrounds for Apes serves as an artistic IP hub. Instead of writing checks for others to build disparate platforms, we get a lightning rod for all artistic ideas Ape and automatic IP percentage in any submission (could be stipulated in ToS). This is deep and wide ownership that also serves as a testing ground for ideas to more fully fund, ideas that may not be ready for Otherside (or the artists may not have Otherside land).

Lack of participation.

I think more participation comes when the UI for each sub dao gets prettier. Like, I wouldn’t expect many artists to dig down into these posts to argue the fine points of governance. But, they will submit their artwork to a site like Newgrounds for selfish reasons, and after they have invested in that pretty front end, eventually find their way to the governance backend to protect their investment of time and energy.

Providing an objective foundation will help drive meaningful discourse.

Creating a sub dao “frontend” with a ToS cuts down on duplicate proposals and uncorroborated ideas asking for big bank. As in, if you’re an artist, you can now easily show your participation in ApecoinDAO by just being a frequent submitter of art and commenting on others’ artwork, etc. Investors can make better decisions about risk of working with artists and teams, because the artists’ work is on display and its popularity can be easily gauged. Also, the artist’s participation in the community is much easier to discern.

ApeCoin DAO cannot accept revenue. A cost-center without resources, direction or ownership of economic upside is unsustainable.

Collecting IP gives the DAO time to figure out how to drive monetary value back to itself without losing out on real value.

I think a good example of this already happening comes in the Comm “subgenre” with the work from @Wizav.eth and others around Apeclub. This site and the sites being built around it form a great looking UI that communications-based apes can interact with easily and eventually find their way down into governance. It also focuses the comm “IP” for Apecoin — if you’re looking for a local club, you know to come here.

So in short, every subdao builds its own frontman UI to gather the people who are interested in that thing, then funnel those people through to core governance.

Thinking out loud, so some ideas may be better expressed when I think of some witty allegory/metaphor for them.

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