VDP-11 New 10% VITA Mint for Treasury & Strategic Contributors

I really like Niklas additional points. Identifying at least via anon account would be helpful. That way interactions can be started and the community can actively collaborate with them.

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I love the idea of both bringing in strategic partners and raising more for the treasury.

A few questions that come to mind:

  • I don’t know exactly how current tokens are structured. I assume that these are being minted from the pool that’s allocated for treasury, not increasing the total supply cap. Is that right?
  • What price would these people buy in at? Is it the market price, a set discount, or some other mechanism?
  • How do we choose who these 21 people are? Is it open to anyone who is willing to buy at such a large quantity, or is there some selection process?
  • What’s the thinking for the anon piece? It seems like a huge benefit is the strategic input and collaboration — it seems like this may be wasted with anons.
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After talking to some people, I think I’m starting to get it… but if someone could phrase things more simply for all of us here in the tokenomics n00b club, that might really help get more support.

Some suggestions:

We are giving {person? org?} X in exchange for Y.

X = 10% of tokens that are currently inaccessible on exchanges? 10% of all tokens? APY based rewards (somehow?)?

Y = Funds/USD? Expertise? Holding tokens without the option to freely sell in order to {stabilize token price? Something else?}

We {do/do not?} already know who/what these 21 entities will be. The reason they need to be anonymous is :record_button::record_button::record_button:, not because they’re super shady or ashamed or be associated with our community.

The major risk is :record_button::record_button::record_button:, but that is unlikely to be a problem because :record_button::record_button::record_button:.

The more realistic downside is :record_button::record_button::record_button:, but this is more than compensated for by the upsides, which are :record_button::record_button::record_button:.

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Agree

From the initial post I gathered that these 21 contributors are anon/unknown right now, but by the time the proposal goes to a vote, all voters would at least know who those contributors are (twitter anon or otherwise) to be able to confirm them. Not sure if I understood it right, though. Might need some clarification.

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insightful additions, especially the second point ( identification via Twitter handle)

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From my layman’s view, I think this is a good idea, you don’t want to restrain capital and (does it have to be always mandatory) expertise inflow.

“Receiving more contributions than we can deploy for 12-18 months” => is a good point.

The 4 major pitfalls in my opinion for this are:

  • Governance issues.

  • Diluting or giving the impression to dilute the token with new tokens.

  • Be absolutely certain about the Lockup period and a yearly allowance (see Jed McCaleb and Ripple).

  • Regulatory clarity (securities).

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But I guess you don’t want either a single organisation or few individuals to have a too big of a pie of tokens, especially if you consider the price is still low, it can become a drag in the future. This could still be acceptable if they bring recognition through their funding or expertise.

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updated it to represent the latest discussion we have to focus on roughly 5 high value add investors!

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Updated again following discussion with @theobtl

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This was a really good comment Ariella! My initial proposal was a shot in the dark to spark a conversation - we’ve now come up with a much better structure. Really appreciate your input.

X = 10% of all tokens

Y = treasury funds + expertise from those entities

We should know their identities, but I propose we do a twofold mechanism 1) institutions with known identities that join the DAO and 2) an onchain whitelisted auction

The major risk is changing our community culture through additional entities, but that is unlikely to be a problem because the community should align and vote on those entities.

The more realistic downside is change in our processes, but this could be really positive as VitaDAO professionalizes itself into an industry facing organisation, attracting more talent, capital and resources to democratize longevity.

– Thank you! Loved this thinking style

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Great that the proposal has been updated for further clarification!

Sounds like a fantastic opportunity for the DAO to grow both our community and influence (via increased treasury), with this VDP being the first step.

Updated my vote to strongly agree.

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Are the conditions (buy price, APY %) different depending on how long you choose to vest? What’s the incentive for the investor to choose 5Y over 1Y?

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Just a random thought, but would buying back tokens on the open market by the Dao for those organizations makes any sense (wouldn’t improve treasury).

Do they have preferential conditions, how is the rate determined.

Overall, I think deploying some of that treasury is good.

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Also apart from locked funds for a specific time period you can imagine something like:

Unable to sell more than 0.5% of average daily volume “for each day of the week, including weekends and holidays”.

During the second and third years of the agreement, this amount grows to 0.75%, while it accounts for 1.0% in the fourth year. Beyond the fourth year, the amount is set to 1.5%.

(this is from an existing agreement)

Released with contracts.

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Agree. I think raised funds should go to regular core contributor payments at market value, and ideally be in a stablecoin. Re-iterating this opinion as I think it’s important.

A bit of a shameless plug here for PrimeDAO’s “Seed Launch” module (Curve Labs built this). If you want to organize a whitelisted round of vested tokens instead of selling to each group individually this is a pretty fantastic mechanism for doing so.

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Pro:
It will increase DAO treasury, it allows vitaDAO to fund more and larger projects.

Con: (I think that’s what the telegram members will tell me)
10% of tokens to 5 investors, this is not going to participate well in the decentralization of governance.
Increase the market cap without increasing the token price.

Question:
At what price will the tokens be sold? Will there be a reduction from the market price?

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Just two more minor comments before we’re good to proceed here, I think:

  1. To align the structure with our general template, I’d suggest to put the content into sections, as outlined at the end of my post.

  2. Just so that it’s absolutely clear that this proposal isn’t about anything following after “More info on next steps”, I’d suggest to delete it from this proposal and move it elsewhere (either to a new placeholder proposal or a discussion thread in Tokenomics Squad - Governance Forum | VitaDAO).

@PaulHaas, does that sound fine to you and if so, could you as the proposal author make these formal changes?

Then it’s good to go on Snapshot, IMO. It’s been live for a good amount of time and has the required amount of “Agree” votes.


Summary

Motivation

Specification

Implementation

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We don’t need funds from others. We have a plentiful treasury. What we are interested is growing our network and top end signals. Thus, I propose the on-chain version of VDP-11 should include the following parameters and nothing more:

  1. # of institutions: Rather than specify a number of tokens that will be sold, I think it will be better to specify a number of institutions we will accept into VDP-11. I suggest that number is 5.
  2. Minimum token purchase: I suggest we also make a minimal amount of tokens in USD that each institution buy is $100K USD. This will make the offering not overly exclusive to account for individuals who may not be especially wealthy or who are conservative to allocate much to a nascent project like VitaDAO, but whose ownership of VITA tokens would represent a particularly strong signal.
  3. Discount on current market price: I suggest the discount is capped at 25% on current market price. The exact % can be a soft governance decision at a later date but I think many agree it shouldn’t be substantial discount (> 50%).
  4. At least one year vesting period: To ensure alignment, it should ideally each participant’s tokens should have at least a one year vesting period ensured by social contract. This will match the genesis social contract vesting length as well as the vesting length in the putatively VDP-21 soon-to-be Phase II (i.e., Discourse) 123 year VitaDAO budget plan.
  5. Use existing Genesis tokens rather than minting new ones. I propose we sell genesis tokens unlikely to be used by used by SPs and WGs before the VDP-21/123 year plan (or offshoot plans) is enacted which will have to be before July 2022. This will be when the one year vesting of the genesis tokens occurs. Using existing tokens will be most compatible with the VDP-21/123 year plan. In this plan I set it up so that future VDP-11-like institutional buy-in can be part of either the annual Community Auctions or Research Auctions. These two auctions are offset by six months, so people will have two chances a year to buy VITA at a discount to market price.
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Fantastic input! My 2 cents:

Adding additional funds to the treasury: I don’t have insight into the deal flow working group, so I can’t say whether the DAO has sufficient deal flow to effectively deploy significantly more capital.
In general though, I would think that adding more funds would give us more options in terms of projects we can engage with and drive more awareness about the DAO, as we can ramp up the number of projects funded. Moreover, we don’t have a cost of capital / hurdle rate we need to meet, so I would think there’s little or no downside to bringing in additional capital to the treasury?

# of institutions/#of tokens sold: I think either approach could work. I’m not sure there’s a need to have a low cap on the number of strategic contributors though? All things considered, having multiple noteworthy institutions and individuals join VitaDAO’s mission with a vested interest seems to be a good thing.

Discount on market price: I’m not sure why there should there be a discount in the first place? It was my understanding that a significant part of the reason for these parties not market buying was that token price would then increase dramatically - if we can confirm that they will get the tokens at market price, that should be a strong value proposition in itself.

Vesting period: Agreed - minimum one year vesting, potentially more.

Using genesis tokens: Very interesting idea! Limiting the number of tokens needed to be minted seems beneficial.

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10% of the token for strategic contributors makes sense to me.

Just hope the DAO to clarify in coming stages, thanks :slight_smile:

  1. Eligibility on 5 WLs
  2. Distribution mechanism among those 5 WLs
  3. Lock-up/Unlock mechanism
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