Shimmer Growth Committee as part of Tangle Ecosystem Association

Governance Proposals Shimmer & IOTA [Phase 1] Discussions
18

I think the Community Treasury Grant Committee is a great thing, but if time is now of the essence and there is a concrete use for the money, I would give as much capital as possible to the Shimmer Growth Committee and with it the second 50% of the Community Treasury. Perhaps this could be set up as a loan of sorts to the TEA, which would have a term of 6-12 months. If everything goes according to plan, then the Shimmer price should rise in the coming months as a result of these actions implemented by the Shimmer Growth Committee, and with it the assets of the TEA, which will then return this amount after the DAO is established and the Community Treasury Grant Committee is ready for use.

I for one do not want to risk missing the boat now.

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19

next scam proposal.
and people don’t even read. Wall of text wins

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20

What a HECK!
How can anybody support this proposal.
10 % of the shimmer tokens have been allocated at TEA, 10 % at the community treasury for setting up a DAO.
The active governance members already realized that it lasts too long to set up the DAO, hence there exists a recent and well-made proposal to make available 15 % of the communities’ tokens every year.
The poposition of setting up a shimmer growth committee is nothing else but action without proper planning.
We’d rather discuss this topic in the next governance calls and very pobably come up with a combination of shimmer growth and community grant committee.
Do not support this proposal!

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21

I am against this proposal for several reasons.

Currently, the treasury is valuated at ~14M. This is a pile of money, but it isn’t much for a treasury. I expect about 300k fixed running costs per year. If we hand out 100k a month, this is sufficient for about 9 years at the current token price. While we certainly hope for it, we cannot guarantee a pump. Once funds are depleted, the treasury is dead, so we need to be sure that we can survive a bear market. If the price goes down 50%, that 9-year countdown runs double speed. Currently, a two-year bear market with an average price of 0.04 wouldn’t be too much trouble, and the treasury would be down to 57% of the tokens. If we only run with half, we are down to 14%! And run dry the year after, even if the price rises to 50% above current levels. That is a significant increase in risk. I do not think we can afford this.

Also, this proposal would dump up to an additional 5% of the supply over the next year. This will significantly affect the token price. Don’t forget that.

If I understood the proposal right, this would make it three organizations, treasury DAO, TEA, and the Growth Committee. Every organization has fixed costs, which will quickly eat up the budget. In the current scenario where we have to housekeep our money, adding additional members to the payroll feels off.

Also, do we need to rush this so hard now? We are currently implementing community feedback into the grant committee setup. I expect this to be voted on-chain in late November/early December. After this, we would have to run the big election in the following months and set the entire thing up from a legal PoV. How much would of a “time save” would we achieve with this? Not too much, if you ask me.

In addition to this, I feel like mass marketing is not going to help us right now. Aside from minting and sending tokens & NFTs, there are no use cases to try out. They come with EVM, once our community has built the first dapps on it. IOTA still is burned in the crypto space for not delivering due to all the 2018/19 drama. If we make up big promises again, those people won’t follow. We need things working. Period. Rushing this is contra productive and a waste of money in my eyes.

And last but not least, why take the community funds for this. The reasons you described (non-public partnerships, industry knowledge) work perfectly for the TEA. I do not see any need for an additional committee. TEA has 10% of the supply for itself. If IF wants to go and do marketing, go for it. Task us to elect some community liaisons for TEA - no big deal. But I do not see any reason to use the community funds for this.

As described in the grant committee draft, everything above 200k dollars (since MCap is above 100M) is a Tier 4 proposal and requires an individual vote from the community. In my eyes, the community undeniably deserves a say if we spend more than 1% of the entire treasury in one go. The growth committee would bypass direct community engagement for quick actions. Having five people control 50% of the treasury clashes with the core principles of a DAO.

If we truly need some quick dollar, we have to vote for this. The budget can be topped up if a majority wants this chance. Or we can decide to spend funds bypassing the grant system. We can look for ways to speed up the governance process in extraordinary cases, like going directly to firefly or making exceptions to phase 2 timings. But using the community funds without engagement is an absolute no-go to me.

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22

Not arguing with your reasons, but just wanted to state that all of that calculations are based on a very thin liquidity.

If teams that get a grant don’t have exit liquidity my guess is they won’t bother getting a grant in first place cuz SMR will continue being highly volatile asset.

EVM might improve the situation a bit but that’s a wild speculation.

Again, not arguing with your reasons but giving some additional context on your calculations.

1 Like
23

I think we have to differentiate and leave our initial potential emotional reactions out here.

The Community Treasury committee, as planned with the 15% allocation, will still be set up and operate fully community driven following the plan we have been working on for the last months. But we have seen that the process of enabling this is really slow, and contribution is slow, which is understandable as you all just contribute in your free time. But, the market does not wait for us to finish our community governance process, The winners of the next market cycle are currently shaped and positioned.

And therefore, to use all opportunities that can enable growth in Shimmer, more is needed than the community Committee can achieve.

15% is nice, but these will only be available to proposals that are brought to the committee from someone, so it is totally unpredictable what will actually happen and what will receive funding from the Community Treasury.
It depends on the proposals that come in. So the Community Treasury committee is a “passive” measure. We have no idea and no influence on what is coming in there.

Enabling real growth of the network will need more “active” measures, and they need to start as soon as possible, optimal, together with the launch of the Shimmer EVM that is around the corner.

Also, the community Treasury committee would never have access to certain measures that have proven to be extremely effective in other networks. The entities that are able to engage in such measures won’t write public proposals to a community committee to allocate their resources to an ecosystem.
Some of those partners will not want to be public and usually only approach core teams / Founders. And those are the measures that we have seen in our competitor networks playing out very effectively, surpassing IOTA in the last years.

Also, targeted marketing and growth campaigns must be facilitated effectively and professionally with those key players in the space. All these measures can be extremely effective for the growth of a network, but they will not be in reach for a rather slow and totally public process like the planned Community Treasury Committee.
So, much more is needed that the community alone cannot reach and enable.

Therefore this Groth committee and the use of additional tokens from the community is, in my eyes, the best and most effective way to exponentially grow Shimmer in Value and awareness in the space.
This growth will also fill up the Dollar Value of the community treasury, easily outweighing the invested funds needed for that measure.

Ultimately, we all want to succeed and make the most possible impact with Shimmer. This opportunity presented will be the one chance to really grow and break out of the valley where IOTA has been sitting for the last few years.
The network, the technology, and the Tokens holders deserve that everything possible will be done to put us on the same level and ahead of our competitors in the space.

If it costs us Tokens now to have a much larger Treasury value, later on, I would say that is an excellent risk-reward ratio.

We have always complained that nothing is done to grow awareness, no marketing, nothing that others are doing, and that all surpassed us in relevance and adoption.

Now Dom’s proposal offers this chance. If we all work together, this will be possible. Yes, it will use some tokens, and yes, it requires trust in the IOTA Foundation that there are professionals in place with the knowledge, experience, and connections to execute what is needed.
But in my opinion, the effect that can be enabled by this is much larger than the costs of this process, and therefore, we should do this with the maximum effort.

So again, things will run in parallel, the Community Treasury committee can take care of a lot of things, but some stuff cannot be done by the Treasury committee.

You need the connections to key players that open doors for us, and we need to bring such key players in. Yes, it costs tokens, but everyone here will greatly profit from this process.
And in the end, all of this will enable us to be seen again in the wider space and be recognized for what we have been building in the last 18 months.

When we are ready to reveal IOTA 2.0, we can then do this out of a position of strength, showcasing a highly adopted and successful Shimmer network to the space, and then really hit with IOTA into the next upcoming narrative and surpass SUI, Aptos, Celestia, Cosmos, Polkadot, etc. and all those that are currently ahead of us.

So my advice, think rationally about what is best for everyone, leave emotions out and only think about the potential risks and rewards. You will see that there is no reason not to do everything possible to move this project out of the shadow in which we reside. We all deserve the best and most effective measures to be taken now, nothing less.

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24

Where the initial emotional reaction you are talking about is agreeing with whatever random idea Dom shows up with? Out of all people I am quite frankly confused why you would possibly agree with this. It makes no sense.

Will that stay at 15% or be increased to 30%? Considering you half the total funding of the community treasury?

That is a decission, you don’t have to do that.

And the IF has already 180M Shimmer for that. At no point do you or Dom share why this is not enough for a year (or hell a few months to bridge the gap until community treasury can also be operating).

No. You cannot claim this seriously. “easily outweighing”? You heard it here first, giving half of the community funds away will more than double the token price…

And yet your entire post is about emotion. At not a single point do you (or Dom) explain why the existing funds are not enough. Why is 180M Shimmer not enough, but will increasing it from 180M to 270M more than double the token price of Shimmer? Based on what? What changed since a few months ago when it was assumed a 180M/180M split was good, that we now think a 270M/90M split makes more sense. I am not saying this is not possible, but what I am saying is if you want people to think rational about it, you should give rational arguments for this instead of only playing at emotions.

In the end it is of course clear that vast majority in the poll is voting in favour for it. So I wonder if this also makes you reconsider the current proposed community treasury. If such a large majority is in favour of even before the treasury started removing 50% of the funds to be able to spend it without details like accountability, code being open source, etc, then should those requirements be in the community treasury? Why have all those requirements when it is clear the community doesn’t really seem to want that? (Hell you yourself apparently don’t want it for 50% of the funds to get started with). You don’t need to raid the community treasury so closed source software can be funded, you can just change the rules. That makes more sense than working around the rules.

Anyway based on the initial poll results we know how this will likely end. It is just sad to see you are playing this purely on emotions, while claiming we should be more rational.

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25

I do think Sissors raised a valid point: why is 180M suddenly not enough but 270M is? In my opinion valid arguments have to be given by IF for this additional uptake. But I do support Dom’s proposal. The reason is stated in Pylo’s last paragraph: we have to act fast. That argument alone may warrant the extra funds. But again only if IF can explicitly account for it

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26

Dear communities of IOTA Ecosystem,

as a reminder I’d like to quote Kappy and Dom:

In preparation to the IOTA CommunityDAO, and in order to fully decentralise Shimmer, we will have our own treasury that will be fully governed by the community. (From Kappys Governance proposal the majority agreed on)

A mild increase of the total supply of the network, allowing the community to fund whatever project they see fit could therefore make a vast difference in the adoption and the activity of users and applications in the Shimmer network. (Doms governance post the “Position of the IOTA Foundation”)

After the 25% Shimmer increase passed, all of the sudden a proposal beeing made giving the community funds into the hand of five people. It is mind-boggling how +90% of the community can support this idea.

Why aren’t the funds of the TEA sufficient?

And as for Phylo, I am shattered for this level of bias, which completly contradicts your position as the CommunityDAO lead. Also, it was clear from the beginning the process setting up a DAO will take time, even more with the chosen approach of the IF.

I URGE EVERYONE TO READ AND UNDERSTAND WERNERS + SISSORS POSTS

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27

I can just agree with the other critical voices here. It should be clearly specified for what these funds shall be used, why they are needed so urgently now and why the TEA funds are not sufficient for that.
I have no problem if funds are used to grow the ecosystem as long as this is done in a transparent way.

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28

In my opinion, this is a major fundamental change that also changes the nature of the 20% vote.

All I’m saying that IF should stick with community opinion on this one, the new proposal changes things and is not respecting the earlier vote.

Community already voted, and now IF is moving goal posts after the shot has already been taken. It has been known since the 20% vote ground work that EVM needs to be in place for the DAO to be operational.

I would understand this push if EVM would be live and nothing would be happening, but the initial 20% split and the grounds of it have not even been given a chance to succeed. It’s up to IF to deliver the framework for the DAO to operate in (smart contracts), not push aggressively a pivot that conflicts with the earlier vote.

Community already made the decision on supply increase and how the funds will be used. This should not change, especially since IF has not yet provided the technical framework the DAO needs to operate in.

IF wants to change that retrospectively and is aggressively pushing this through with very little respect towards the earlier vote landscape.

Those tokens are community DAO tokens and as Dom said earlier, the Community DAO can’t be functional before the EVM support.

In my opinion, and considering the above, IF reps, especially community reps, should not push this proposal forward, but instead pull it back and focus on making the best use of already allocated TEA funds.

Handing over 50% of the treasury should be a Community DAO decision, period.

Token based voting is not suitable for this proposal.

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29

More funding, sooner = more opportunity, more growth.

The only hiccup I foresee is complexity with two funding channels.

Well… economists talk about opportunity cost: what is lost when one thing is committed to at the expense of another. And I think there is some level of clashing going on here in that regard with two funding tracks.

But I think those are abstract and high level and more than balanced out by the opportunity gained by what a quick funding channel represents.

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30

Either way, TEA currently owns $14M worth of SMR and wants to have another $7M (50% of the CommunityDAO) without even knowing how much they will need and when they are going to spend it.

If there should be a logical explanatation why the TEA can not be used, which so far I did not see neither by Dom nor Phylo, have a vote, whether people are generally okay bypassing the initial proposal by Kappy (instead 1:1 → 1:3). Then have votes for upcoming funding ideas by the Growth Commitee and release funds from CommunityDAO accordingly. (the ones saying but voting is so slow - TEA has enough SMR to bridge it)

Another benefit not giving 50% of Community funds out of hands is, TEA will need to be transparent. So unlike the IOTA EDF, where since over 2 years more than 4 Ti are missing, there will be transparency (ofc, only goes for the SMR which will be funded from the Community).

** IOTA EDF = early community funded 20 Ti = entity equivalent to SMR TEA
Used to be transparent, but all of sudden stopped sharing where the community money is flowing to.

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31

Ultimately the proposal comes down to this questions;
Do the voters see a larger growth potential for a more decentralized, start-up-focused approach of funding through a community-driven DAO in the midterm? Or do they see a larger potential in a more centralized, industry-focused and IF-driven approach, even if that means that the IF gets a disproportionate part of funding (and hence influence over the aim of funding)?

The obvious tradeoffs are that the idea of a decentralized, community-driven development of the ecosystem is weakend and the IF along with IF-funded projects get more influence in this initial phase, which could potentially be misused and could even have consequences for the ecosystem´s alignment in the mid-to-longterm. Apart from that I also see a loss of trust in community votings if once met decision are reversed so quickly.

Looking at the poll result until now many community members seem to see more growth potential for the second, a bit more centralized approach. This might turn out as a good or bad solution for the ecosystem, but if the majority thinks like that (even if its not a well informed decision) and giving their vote, it is legitimate. And this is how it should be. Even this discussion is a win.

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32

I dislike the (successful) attempt of pushing the community into a direction emotionally by creating the illusion of necessity and by shilling the potential great outcomes with nothing to back it up, those are far from rational arguments.

Besides that, i support being able to act more quickly - and i (and it seems like the vast majority of the community) still hold trust into the IF…
therefor i would rather like to see it being done by the IF, instead of having to vote some community members into some small committee (which probably takes a loong time aswell).

Since the IF would greatly benefit from a warchest, i’d prefer finding a way to build that, instead of redistributing community funds for no real urgent reason (at least none has been presented here - God forbid we would get some insight on why this proposal was put up…) after we just went through voting on that distribution.

Overall this leaves a bad taste in my mouth and i hope a better solution can be found.

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33

The liquidity is definitely another problem we’ll face if we dump large sums. I don’t feel it will hit the DAO too much since we decided on selling the operational funds for the treasury periodically to build reserves in stablecoins and take advantage of dollar cost averaging.

Of course I cannot predict the market (otherwise I wouldn’t bother spending my time here :stuck_out_tongue:). But having DeFi and other dapps on board definitely makes the network more interesting for potential investors.

1 Like
34

I get your point - the current grant committee draft does not consider active proposals like exchange listings and marketing. But shouldn’t the logical consequence be to account for this? To create a new type of grant where the network itself is the beneficiary? The reviewers then would have to check if the risk/reward ration is good and get the community aboard if we are talking about big projects. And as I said, there is still the option to just make it a forum proposal and bypass the grant committee.

I am not generally against doing marketing - I just feel like it isn’t good timing to reach out big before EVM is ready. When people do their research (which whales definitely do!), they should find some more than “soon”.

Of course it is a general problem of good democracy that it takes time. In this case, you can allocate a budget. But half the treasury, 7 million in current value, is a huge budget the community has no longer in control (unless its not fully spent).

Also, as @Sissors remarked, what about the TEA money? Wasn’t that the idea behind this pool to allow IF to approach partners that want NDA? Please correct me if I’m wrong here.

We should definitely discuss that on Tuesday. To the readers, feel free to join the meeting as well - time should be 2pm or 3pm GMT.

35

I think it is mainly about things that cannot be done publicly. So you cannot tell how much you would pay for an exchange listing if the exchange does not want this to be public knowledge. Same with other possibilities. Some things just can’t be disclosed, and for this, a transparent community committee is not feasible. And yes, the TEA will also spend a lot of its tokens on such things - as described here, but Dom’s proposal is about doing more than the TEA can handle alone.
And in regards to timing, I think Dom knows best how far we are and what is needed now. It seems that partners are on the brink of getting in now, but they won’t do it for free. Also, the EVM will need some essential parts for our builders to function perfectly and provide an excellent development environment for teams (like oracles and indexers). When the EVM launches, these things must be optimally in place on day one. Delays here will delay our builders and new teams again from getting the best out of the network. It is not about funding closed-source software. It is about not disclosing details of contracts and agreements to the public, which is not such an extraordinary thing, I would say.
And, yeah, Tuesday will be a good time to discuss this. The Community Grants committee will do amazing things for the ecosystem. You know how hard I have worked for this to come into existence over the last 18 months. But a community DAO cannot do everything and is surely not the most efficient way of doing certain things, so for me, it is a question of what currently works best for the overall network.

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36

I agree with the proposal, disagree with the fine print, long story short. 1. Since the ultimate goal is to grow Shimmer, the funder should be Shimmer Community Treasury DAO and Tangle Ecosystem Association, and I propose that each contribute 25%, which together is 50% of the proposal (90,681,025.5 SMR). 2. Increase the number of members of the Shimmer Growth Council from 5 to 7, and the decentralized protocol should let more people decide where the money goes, because this is $6.7 million

37

We should also consider that the Shimmer Treasury was also a “test” framework to be conducted before building the next treasury, the IOTA Community Treasury.

Personally it is hard for me to trust on such a large percentage and would like concrete facts and data to make such a move more assuring and bring confidence. However, I do believe that, though we will make a great committee, and even with the right reviewers in place; still, certain people in the IF have years of experience and understand the intricacies happening behind the scenes that many of us, or even other experts in the industry just don’t deal with on a daily basis.

If the Shimmer Community Treasury was the only treasury then I would be a bit more hesitant. Yet, knowing that we still have the IOTA Community Treasury to support the ecosystem then it helps me put faith and trust in this proposal. Also, I think it will give us good data points to consider when eventually building the framework for the IOTA Community Treasury when that day comes. We will know what the outcome of putting such large funding amounts into the ecosystem will have, and then can better form the framework knowing such information. I would also take such a risk with the Shimmer Community Treasury than with the IOTA Community Treasury personally. And of course, if things play out positively, then it will not only help the Shimmer Network but greatly boost the IOTA Community Treasury.

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