State of the DAOnion Address

Howdy everyone, it's been a busy couple of months since I began my position as the DAO project manager. That's okay though, when you're passionate about what you're doing, it feels much less like 'work.' I like to stay busy and feel like there's still a lot to do, so that's a good thing I suppose. Speak of having a lot to do...

One thing that has come up quite a few times is that people think we need an overall vision or gameplan for the DAO. It's easy enough for me to tell you guys what I see that needs doing and to try to encourage us all to work together and find solutions for those issues, but I'm often a bit more reserved in that department as I feel like that's something the DAO as a whole has to figure out. Hopefully you'll find the title of this post quite ironic and humorous like I do.

All of that said, I'm going to share what I feel like are our current big three priorities that we should be working on in the near term (which I'm already drafting proposals for) and I'd suggest you guys share anything that you feel may be higher priority in the comments. With the new community proposal guidelines in place, we'll likely see more "temperature check" polls that don't go to a full vote and that can be a good thing. The goal is to get more involvement from the community and to create the best proposals possible. We all want this game, the DAO and our community to succeed!

Tournaments

The first big issue that I feel we have to address is tournaments. Opinions are all over the place on this topic. The core issue that I see with tournaments at this point is that we have never had a stake-weighted decision on how to structure the prizes, what formats we want, or even the entrance requirements.

After two months of discussions on the topic, myself and several members of the community that have been very involved in finding solutions have ultimately decided the best path forward is to run multiple proposals and give everyone several options to choose from and if no options receive enough support to pass a vote, then we will have to examine the feedback and go back to the drawing board and do better.

The good news here is that while it is a lot of work to redo our tournament structures, they will finally be ratified by consensus when we're done. The DAO should be taking charge of how its inflation is apportioned and ensuring that it is being used to incentivize growth for both the game and the DAO. Which brings us to the next big topic...

Liquidity Pools

I want to preface what I'm about to say here with the caveat that I personally feel like the 'liquidity mining' protocol that our project and many other defi projects have used over the last few years is fundamentally flawed and has proven over time that it is a failed concept. After speaking with many of the large liquidity providers and pitching ideas about having the DAO taking over liquidity pools, I feel like the majority of them understand why we need to make some smart long-term moves with our LPs even if they won't all support efforts to change things.

I've spent a lot of time researching our LP incentives and looking for better ways to approach the entire concept of liquidity pools. It just happens to be a serendipitous event that @blockchainff turned me on to this SushiSwap Bond promo which aligns very closely with a much needed shift in the defi industry.

For those that want some further understanding of why I think the concept of 'liquidity mining' is a failure, to put it simply: we're spending a massive amount of inflation to borrow liquidity to prop up pools, some of which don't do enough volume to warrant the inflation, and that borrowed liquidity is going to go away when we stop paying for it.

What does this mean? Well currently it means we're printing about $150,000 a month of inflation to borrow liquidity that we don't even need to be borrowing. The DAO holds more than enough tokens to take over every LP we have completely with no overall liquidity loss. Instead of printing $150,000 a month (at 3 cent sps mind you, this amount increases with token price), we could use idle assets the DAO already owns to turn that expense into revenue for the DAO or similar to the bond concept, we can outright sell the inflation ourselves and own the liquidity so that we spend the same but aren't left with nothing in the end.

I am still working to build out a comprehensive reform plan for our LPs. Obviously anything I suggest will still have to be voted on and I expect there will likely be some resistance from key players that are enjoying the benefits of the flawed system, but that doesn't mean we can't try to do better. Whether we want to continue offering bonds or reroute that inflation to future rewards or exchange listings, those are all things to think about when working towards LP reform. Which brings us to our last topic for today...

Exchanges

Well there's definitely a lot of opinions on this topic and we do not have much if any consensus at this point. That's okay though as there are two more pressing issues and we ultimately don't have to do anything with this one. That said, I am asked damn near every day when we're going to get a big listing. I'm going to lay out exactly what has to happen for us to make moves in that direction. If the DAO wants to make these moves, I am capable of handling it. If not, we won't.

Currently I am still searching for a quality "lending based" market maker. (I discussed the different types of market makers in this post.) We hired FlowDesk to help us retain our Crypto.com listing for the time being, but we went with the bare minimum cheapest option which is not going to help us expand into new exchanges at all. I understand people don't want to "spend money" on market making, so if I find a quality lending based MM I will be bringing it to everyone's attention.

If we want a shot at a tier 1 exchange, we need market making support on every exchange we are listed on and any new ones we gain moving forward. We have to have higher volume for bigger exchanges and that cannot happen without higher liquidity on targeted markets. There's no reason for people to overpay for our tokens on an illiquid exchange when they could just buy pretty much any other token and swap it for SPS outside of a centralized exchange and most retail buyers are on Coinbase and Binance anyway.

If we get our liquidity and subsequently our volume up, we have a much better shot at negotiating bigger exchange listings that aren't going to take up to 20% of our DAO holdings to buy a listing. I understand many people don't want to spend money when SPS is low, I also understand many people want 'wen binance?' to be 'now binance!' and feel like we're intentionally castrating our projects growth. I can't tell you what we should do as far as if pursuing centralized exchanges is right or wrong at this point. All I can do is tell you what we need to do if we want to do the thing.

Summary

There's a lot of work ahead of us and I know that these are only a handful of issues that I feel should be prioritized based on my own personal thoughts as well as feedback gathered over the last couple of years both as a Splinterlands employee and as a member of this community. Hopefully we can all work together to solve these problems and many more.

I want to ask that everyone please try to keep things civil as we move into these discussions. There are some very contentious topics and I don't think we're going to get very far if we can't all try to compromise a bit and interact respectfully with each other. Thanks for your time and the opportunity to serve the DAO!