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

[papa_raw]

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.

[RUM]

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?

[theobtl]

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.

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Summary

@PaulHaas

Tokenomics WG proposes to mint an additional 10% new vested VITA for new strategic contributors

Motivation

@PaulHaas

VitaDAOs community has been approached by many mission-aligned and strategic institutional biotech and web3 entities. Purchasing VITA on DEXs is impossible for these entities or in this volume. Working group members believe it would be beneficial to grow the DAO treasury and include these entities.

Specification

@PaulHaas

We propose to split this decision into multiple proposals.

Decision in VDP11: does VitaDAO want to mint an additional 10% of tokens, bringing total circulating supply to 40%. In a first step, these tokens would be transferred to a ringfenced multisig, with its sole purpose to enable treasury growing transactions with entities approved by Vita holders.

Implementation

@PaulHaas

Once this decision is made, working group members and VitaDAO community could engage those entities and 1) prepare an institutional raise and 2) prepare a whitelisted on-chain auction. In either cases, we propose these newly issued tokens are vesting. If the decision is no then the DAO expends no further energy here and we continue as is.

[timrpeterson]

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.

[Mads]

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.

[YMChoi]

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

Just hope the DAO to clarify in coming stages, thanks

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

[vincent]

The idea behind this proposal is to allow for follow-on proposals related to getting specific strategic partners onboard as well as resources to fund more research

One follow on proposal for example could be related to getting strategic partners onboard or another public auction for example, with a fraction of this mint… so it would last for multiple of these initiatives and ensure further funding for more research.

I’d propose staying with a 10% mint, and having these in a separate multi-sig controlled by the same multi-sig signers, but separated just dedicated for this purpose.

[VitaDAO]

Note: The proposal was updated to reflect the reduced scope more explicitly. This thread will be closed soon once the proposal is live on Snapshot. To continue the discussion on what happens if VDP-11 passes, please go here: Continuing the discussion what happens after VDP-11.

[VitaDAO]

This proposal has passed phase 2 and has been uploaded to Snapshot.
The phase 3 vote is open until Jan 27, 2022, 4:46 AM UTC.

See also: How to Vote on Snapshot