VDP-3 VitaDAO Tokenomics Proposal

[PaulHaas]

Summary

VitaDAO is a global collective on a mission to fund novel longevity research and democratize IP - making it accessible to patients across the globe. Vita will acquire early-stage IP assets and finance data creation to potentially advance these assets to the clinic. Our core goal is to bridge the valley of death in early-stage research by creating a global longevity research community that can distribute risk and perform better asset evaluation through crowd intelligence.

1 The VITA token is the lifeblood and DNA of the VitaDAO ecosystem. VITA is obtained by contributing work, data, IP, or funds to VitaDAO. The core function of VITA is to curate the best longevity IP and fund novel open science data creation around it.

2 VITA tokens grant the rights to participate in a) which IP is funded; b) how it is funded; c) how it is governed; d) how the VitaDAO treasury is governed. As such, VITA grants no ownership of the IP or expectations of profits surrounding it. VITA holders have no rights to any of the IP held by VitaDAO, but decide how it is commercialised and brought to patients.

3 VITA is designed following a sustainability loop principle. As R&D projects are funded and begin producing data, their respective value grows, increasing the overall value of VitaDAO. As the VITA ecosystem grows, more funds become available, attracting higher quality IP and enabling the funding of further projects and growing the VitaDAO ecosystem.

VitaDAO is governed by 3 core stakeholder groups:

1. VitaDAO Members that hold VITA and participate in governance.
2. Working groups consisting of select individuals that steward the organization.
3. Service providers consisting of organizations that provide core infrastructure or services.

Genesis

The diagram and table below propose the initial VitaDAO token distribution. Overall, 30% will be distributed to the community for the initial genesis, whereas 70% of tokens remain available unminted in the VitaDAO treasury to ensure the longevity of the entity. The initial genesis auction should be considered the first proof of concept financing to prove VitaDAOs IP and funding model, whereas members could choose to issue further tokens at any time. Furthermore, tokens may be allocated to various incentive schemes and mechanisms as proposed in the VitaDAO whitepaper V1.0.

*64,298,880 represents the lifespan in minutes of Jeanne Louise Calment. She is the oldest person to have lived for a period of more than 122 years.

She lived approximately 64,298,880 minutes on planet earth, which will form the basis of VitaDAO’s DNA. VitaDAO’s token supply is capped and may only ever be increased, should anyone surpass her lifespan forming our core mission at VitaDAO.

The genesis distribution event will liberate 10% of VitaDAOs total token supply to interested participants fully open to the public via interaction with a smart contract auction system on the Ethereum blockchain.

Since VitaDAO operates via a public auction system, the token price is dictated by the community. We estimate that a minimum of $2,500,000 will be required to support the first cohort of research projects and form the base requirement of a successful auction.

VitaDAO will be fully decentralized and community-owned from inception. As such, no entity will own VITA tokens prior to the genesis contribution event. No tokens have been issued or sold to individual contributors, as nobody controls VitaDAO until inception.

VITA’s genesis contribution event will run via a fair launch public auction, granting all participants equal governance rights. Once the first 10 % have been issued, the VitaDAO core community may begin voting on its first governance proposals to allocate further tokens to working groups and service providers.

Importantly - the approval of these allocations to working groups, contributors, and service providers is at the full discretion of genesis members and their approval. They form the core of VitaDAOs decision-making body.

Working Groups

Vita working groups form the hive mind of VitaDAO and are structured according to genesis requirements and individuals that have contributed time, resources, and risk. Over time, Vita members may vote to realign these requirements. For genesis, the following structure is proposed:

Working groups allocate tokens to various incentive schemes designed to curate its community and attract the most promising research and IP. Below is an example of early incentive schemes incentivising researcher participation and on-chain liquidity provision.

Working groups are guided by VitaCore - a group of individuals that formed through the collective hive mind and decision making in various working groups.

VitaCore allocations draw from their respective working groups and are proposed on an individual basis as follows:

VitaCore allocations vest 40% upon launch to grant core governance. Consecutively, 60% vest linearly over 12 months.

Beyond VitaCore, VITA is allocated to numerous advisors and open source contributors. Below is an example that includes various contributors and core advisors in a first non-exhaustive example. We assume that core contributors receive 125 VITA per hour for their contributions. This list serves as an example (incl. John Smith) and is in no way final or inclusive of all contributors, which should be finalised by the community.

Again, we propose these allocations vest 40% upon launch and 60% linearly over 12 months.

Service Providers

VitaDAO service providers have developed the core infrastructure required to launch the DAO’s smart contract infrastructure, raise awareness and steward its initial community, ensure its legality and IP NFT holdings and essentially birth the community required for its genesis.

Service providers are companies operating from various legal jurisdictions with functional teams that supported VitaDAO at full operational risk without receiving remuneration. Their belief in democratizing longevity research is what brought the VitaDAO community and working groups to life.

Service providers are remunerated both in tokens and fiat, depending on their risk profile. Core providers include:

• Molecule GmbH: architecture, operations, awareness, BD, genesis IP, IP NFT workflow, legal
• Decentralized Matter: awareness, community inception, marketing and DevOps
• Linum Labs AG: smart contract development and deployment support
• Keyko AG: tokenomics and system audit
• Curve Labs: governance and system audit
• Arctoris Ltd: contract research automation and R&D

Service providers will individually submit a scope of services for allocations and fiat values, and pending approval will continue to support VitaDAO for a minimum period of 3 - 12 months post-launch. Final service provider commitments can further be finalised post-launch. Allocations above 0.5% in tokens will support VitaDAO for a minimum of 12 months post-launch.

As one of the largest service providers and working group initiators, Molecule will lock its tokens into an on-chain multi-sig. Further, it will distribute its allocation across its operational team to ensure broad governance participation.

An initial team distribution may allocate 1.5% across the Molecule team, intending to mirror working group allocations and incentivize broad participation.

Other service providers are encouraged to adopt similar models.

Genesis IP

Within the genesis service provision, we propose to fund VitaDAO’s first end-to-end proof of concept with the Scheibye-Knudsen Laboratory at the Aging Research Lab at the University of Copenhagen.

Molecule has out-licensed the full rights to this project and will transfer it to VitaDAO at the nominal sum above. In addition, VitaDAO will fund the first set of laboratory experiments and begin receiving its first data assets. We propose to conclude this as a once-off deal to kickstart the VitaDAO research economy. Both the IP NFT transfer and contract research agreement will be submitted to VitaDAO members as an initial vote.

Conclusion & Open Questions

VitaDAO is an open and participatory vehicle that aims to reward its members equally for their contributions. This proposal reflects the input and suggestions of its current working group members, advisors and contributors. It is designed as a first token economic system to ensure VitaDAO’s longevity. None of the allocations reflected here are final or exhaustive.

Open questions:

• Effects of allocations on early voting behavior
• Service provider invoices
• Definition of vesting schedules
• VitaCore Sign-Off
• Vita Contributors & Advisors Finalisation

• Agree
• Agree with revisions (please comment)
• Disagree

[timrpeterson]

As lead of a working group, can we provide 1-2 sentences in this doc on how our token allocations will be spent over the 12 months? Also, can we add 1-2 sentences on how these % were determined?

[tylergolato]

I think this relates to the governance proposal - WG leads will have discretion over how their token allocations are spent and utilised. This is for the leads to decide. They can also request larger allocations if needed in the future, but this provides a starting point. This is my understanding.

[timrpeterson]

Thanks Paul. Great write-up. In general to me, the %s seem low for everyone. How about 15/15/15 with 55% in treasury? I worry if there is too much kept in reserves early people won’t have enough incentive.

[theobtl]

@PaulHaas

Service providers will individually submit a scope of services for allocations […]. Final service provider commitments can further be finalised post-launch.

Sounds good, plus I’d suggest that each service provider not only specifies their desired allocations but also justifies them explicitly by describing their expertise, envisioned role and specific contributions. VitaDAO could provide a template so that these information are available for all service providers in similar detail.

Not only for the sake of financial transparency, but also to make it easier for anyone to understand how VitaDAO gets work done, by whom and where to start as someone who has just joined VitaDAO.

[vincent]

depends also a lot on the token price (0,5-1,5$ would make a range)… think it might make sense to incentive this continuously similar to a startup… early employees get X% equity which vests, and they get more for contributing more continuously… so in 6-12 months the DAO could add incentives to the ones who contributed and to new ones joining etc.

[papa_raw]

Love this. Some thoughts:

@PaulHaas

2 VITA tokens grant the rights to participate in a) which IP is funded; b) how it is funded; c) how it is governed; d) how the VitaDAO treasury is governed.

I’ve mentioned it before but I truly believe that a token should not be the only pre-requisite for governance. It does not prove any sort of expertise or capability on its own — especially in the context of governing public goods (which any life extension related IP should clearly be). A second check and whitelist would do a lot of good here.

@PaulHaas

As R&D projects are funded and begin producing data…

How is this data monetized? The sustainability loop principle was drafted by Trent with Ocean’s data markets clearly in mind. Being specific with the monetization architecture would go a long way to explaining the value of VITA in these early stages. Perhaps this is a proposal for a first builder cycle.

@PaulHaas

We estimate that a minimum of $2,500,000 will be required to support the first cohort of research projects and form the base requirement of a successful auction.

$2.5m is actually would I would have ballparked as well. In the future somebody will have to draft a clean burn rate. But this should at minimum support a year of solid progress. There is an open Q here though: if the auction does not raise this amount, will funding be returned (i.e. an assurance contract?)

@PaulHaas

Vita working groups form the hive mind of VitaDAO and are structured according to genesis requirements and individuals that have contributed time, resources, and risk. Over time, Vita members may vote to realign these requirements. For genesis, the following structure is proposed:

I’m not sure this level of specificity is very useful. Tokens should be thought of as adaptive problem-solving incentives; to this end, it may be that one group is much heavier than another. The only way to find this out is to press forward and discover / solve issues in real time. I think what would be more helpful here is issuing tokens to WG participants based on their estimated / measured involvement (e.g. somebody who is committing 10h/week in a WG is eligible for some token issuance scale vs. somebody committing 40h/week). Rather than issuing a target budget, I propose monitoring issuance over time and correcting / reviewing discrepancies.

@PaulHaas

In general there’s two ways to do market making:

(1) Get a group to do it (they usually handle listings as well)
(2) Heavily incentivize a pool for farmers

I’m a bit skeptical that 1% is enough to satisfy (2). I’d want to see this number closer to 5-10% than 1% over the course of one year. If VITA is the lifeblood of the DAO, than we can think of liquidity pools as mitigating blood clots.

Another important decision must be made here: will the incentivized pool be in USD or ETH? This is very strategic: choosing one or the other will change how VITA responds to market liquidity shocks

@PaulHaas

Service providers are companies operating from various legal jurisdictions with functional teams that supported VitaDAO at full operational risk without receiving remuneration.

It is not clear what this means or why this framing would elevate VitaDAO as a competitive hiring vehicle. I would revise the language.

[audieleon]

Updated proposal to reflect the deployed market cap of VITA, which throws off the math a little bit…

The deployed cap was 64,298,880 VITA - which was one of the considered values for Jean Calment’s age in minutes.

[NickVitaDAO]

An update on this would be appreciated. I.e,. when is this going to vote / what are the next steps before going to vote?

[timrpeterson]

Currently all 10% of the SP allocation is distributed to existing SPs. This is different from the 10% WG allocation, which is currently only ~2% allocated to existing WG members. I think it makes sense to leave some (3%?) of the 10% SP budget open to future SPs. Related to this, Molecule GmbH should have the largest share by far, but currently with 8.25% it controls 10-30X of everyone else. To me, that seems disproportionate. Something more like 5% for Molecule seems more fair to me. If that is not agreeable, i’d propose to instead increase all existing WG member allocations by 1.5-2X to balance out with Molecule’s allocation.

[PaulHaas]

The core difference is that SPs helped build VitaDAOs core infrastructure for WGs to emerge on. The goal with this token economic distribution is for WGs to take over infrastructure development.

IMO in many cases the work that SPs have delivered, including their teams who receive salaries, is disproportionate to working groups allocations, meaning WGs own more for their future work. Additionally, you will see that SP members who worked in multiple working groups, like Tyler Golato or Theodor Walker, are removed entirely from WG allocations to match this.

Do you suggest increasing working group lead allocations? I.e. your allocation goes to 0.75 - 1.5% of the total longevity WG budget? IMO that would put a massive strain on budget.

[PaulHaas]

VDP 3.1 Tokenomics Proposal Amendment

Based on final input from the community, VitaDAO is putting up the following genesis tokenomics for vote by VITA genesis token holders based on feedback on VDP3: VDP-3 VitaDAO Tokenomics Proposal.

The allocations below differentiate minimally from VDP3 but aim to finalise allocations and introduce global governance invitations and lock-up schedules.

This vote aims to determine the allocations of 1) VitaDAO working groups, VitaCore leaders and VitaDAO Genesis Contributors and; 2) VitaDAO Infrastructure Service Providers.

1 Distribution and lock-up:

All VITA allocations below follow a global governance invitation determined by VitaDAO upon approval of VITA token holders. All allocations herein shall be granted 40% upon on-chain DAO approval, with the remaining 60% being linearly distributed via the VitaDAO Multisig for continued support over a period of 12 months.

VitaDAO thanks each and every one of the organizations and individuals that helped bring it to life.

2 Working Groups:

VitaDAO proposes to provide working groups with the following genesis allocations:

VitaCore allocations to working group stewards are proposed as follows:

Of total genesis working group allocations, 500,000 VITA are proposed to be allocated to over 30 individuals and contributors who helped the VitaDAO core genesis, as outlined in VDP3. These core allocations will derive from the working group budgets.

3 Service Providers

Beyond working group members, service providers contributed their teams, resources and efforts to bring VitaDAO to this point without receiving allocations from working groups.

Many working group allocations such as technical or tokenomics remain unclaimed, as Service Providers provided the core infrastructure and consulting services to enable a genesis. As such, they are not included via WG budgets but are distributed via SPs.

Genesis allocations for Service Providers are proposed as follows to participate in VitaDAO governance. They follow the same vesting provisions as Working Groups.

The remaining 1.0% of SP allocations is proposed to be reserved for the initial IP NFT transfer and acquisition of the Copenhagen research project, which is to be presented in a separate proposal.

[Senso]

I’m not convinced sufficient information has been presented to make a qualified decision on the proposed token allocations.

For the DAO to make such decisions on an informed basis, the contribution of each party should be more transparent.

This is particularly important, as the amount due to be distributed is large (at $1 USD/token, ViteCore allocations alone account for $1.8M USD).

Having followed every post on Discord and Telegram for well over a month, it is unclear how each party listed in this proposal has contributed to the DAO (e.g. you would expect someone who is the Lead of the Awareness Working Group to be visible in the community). Consequently, I encourage more visibility into how the Working Groups operate, including how their respective members contribute.
Overall, this would benefit the general modus operandi of the DAO, but is particularly important in light of a token allocation vote.

Moreover, I would propose a 1-year cliff and a longer vesting period (4 years is standard in the startup world and seems more reasonable to me). The proposed vesting schedule seems rather short-sighted, especially in light of the long time-horizon of longevity research projects.

[theobtl]

@Senso

Having followed every post on Discord and Telegram for well over a month, it is unclear how each party listed in this proposal has contributed to the DAO

This is a very valid concern, I agree with your there. I’ll need to think about how to best resolve this and share my thoughts later today.

For context, I’d like to add that the VitaDAO community was rather closed until the public launch - and still is in many ways. Specifically, working group channels on Discord are and have always been closed, so there is currently no way to have insights into contributions to such private channels unless you are a working group member.

@Senso

Consequently, I encourage more visibility into how the Working Groups operate, including how their respective members contribute.

Fully agree. The question of If and how to open up working group channels is an ongoing discussion and could resolve this partially. The current idea is to open up all working groups at least as read-only channels, except two that are potentially sensitive (legal and deal negotiations), but this is all open for feedback and to be decided by the DAO.

Similarly, some research work took place on Google Docs which are semi-private too - only refined drafts and further discussions are publicly visible on Discourse.

Also, a lot of development work took place outside GitHub or in private repositories. VitaDAO’s GitHub was made public only shortly after the public launch.

These are just my ad-hoc observations of how things are, but of course no satisfying response to your questions. We’ll need to tackle each of these issues and make them more transparent.

@Senso

The proposed vesting schedule seems rather short-sighted

Again, you have a point. What do others think are appropriate periods of time?

[vincent]

@theobtl

Fully agree. The question of If and how to open up working group channels is an ongoing discussion and could resolve this partially. The current idea is to open up all working groups at least as read-only channels, except two that are potentially sensitive (legal and deal negotiations), but this is all open for feedback and to be decided by the DAO.

Agree with Theo and valid questions raised @senso! It’s easier to see from the inside how much effort were put into all aspects, from gov, tech, awareness to longevity, thus also agree that we should open up some more working groups (read-only for non-working group members to reduce noise).

One problem with a much longer cliff+vesting is that no working group member could be an active participant in governance and also the comparison with startups breaks in the sense of that startup employees are highly compensated additionally which working group members are not (so we can’t expect all contributors to wait 2-4yrs to receive a payment for their services)

Coming from the crypto space, the compensations look pretty low on comparative basis to me if one considers the efforts/hours put in, and the uncertainty/illiquidity of selling in years, there is 0 payment for most working group contributors and all is reliant on a long-term appreciation of Vita, no one knew if Vita would raise enough funding while they contributed weeks/months of work.

[longevion]

Thank you @Senso for raising these questions! I think we are all aligned with the longevity of this DAO (pun intended) and we’re not planning to sell.

I’d like to hear ideas from the whole community on how we could have lock-ups that allow voting but not selling. Of course, we can unlock a small % of the vested tokens to be sold, just for regular salary-like expenses, especially for those of us that are focused on this full time.

So vesting of locked tokens for voting on the one hand and a secondary unlock-vesting of tokens that can be sold.

Out of the box thinking encouraged! <3

[Senso]

I really like the idea of distributing a certain proportion of tokens that allow voting but not selling during this pivotal early phase. If a working group member does not intend to sell in the short term, such a lock-up shouldn’t make a difference to that person. However, it will instill a sense of confidence in the VitaDAO team and project to people that aren’t recipients of the working group token allocations.
This approach should also address @vincent’s points regarding liquidity and compensation uncertainty.

Also very happy to hear that there is talk to opening up the working groups (at least making most of them “read only”). That should help drive more engagement and confidence in the DAO.

[schmackofant]

Fully agree with @Senso

[papa_raw]

@longevion

I’d like to hear ideas from the whole community on how we could have lock-ups that allow voting but not selling. Of course, we can unlock a small % of the vested tokens to be sold, just for regular salary-like expenses, especially for those of us that are focused on this full time.

Curve Labs worked on an implementation of API3DAO’s Aragon smart contracts to allow exactly this. It took a while but it’s done now (there was also a staking module… basically not only were vested tokens able to be voted with, you could stake them too and earn rewards).

We’ve had some internal discussions on how to do this in a more lightweight manner rather than a bespoke implementation… our idea was/is to issue a separate governance token whose balances can be adjusted by some controller. The gov token issuance would match 1::1 vested tokens + held tokens; then you can use Snapshot with the gov token. But this still requires someone to run a script each month/voting cycle and adjust. So it’s not super-lightweight.

Re: vesting times — three years tends to be the max in crypto. Two is more common.

[papa_raw]

Regarding opening up WG convos…

I might be in the minority here but I believe the privacy of WG convos is more important than “opening them up.” Typically when small, specialized groups of people have a safe and specific space to talk, they are more candid about the options and strategy and are able to land on an effective solution together. There’s this line of thinking with “social control surfaces” in Web3 that everything should be fully transparent all the time, but that invites a lot of noise and sometimes (often?) causes less engaged folks to overreact (esp. token holders).

If you think about it, there’s a reason most corporations control PR and information flow for certain accounts (i.e. having an account manager control information flow with client). It helps protect + sustain alpha for that org. Good thoughts take time to formulate and all it takes is one hypercritical or uneducated voice in a small group setting to completely derail the success of that group (and burn out the other folks, who are usually experts in their field, and do not have time to deal with problem people…)