Community Engagement Proposal: Miguel Vias for Liquidity Growth Strategies

Community Treasury
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Hi all, I am incredibly excited to introduce you to Miguel Vias. Miguel is a payments and cryptocurrency markets expert particularly focused on developing liquidity growth strategies for early-stage products and projects. He recently served as Head of XRP Markets at Ripple, where he managed a team that drove XRP liquidity growth, as well as the adoption of the company’s flagship remittance product, the first ever to commercially use a digital currency as a bridge asset. Before Ripple he was in charge of the precious metals product team at CME Group, the largest derivatives exchange in the world. Miguel currently sits on the Board of Directors of Digital Asset Management and is an advisor to Addigy and Linqto, where he helps with liquidity growth for the platform’s offerings.

Miguel is interested in lending his expertise to open up new strategies for Rally to drive its liquidity and growth. His network is massive, and his knowledge of the cryptocurrency payments space, crypto market strategies, and drivers for growth is powerful and unique. His collaboration with the Rally network would be instrumental for the community’s growth.

Check out Miguel’s LinkedIn and view his intro video:

The proposed engagement terms will be as follows:

  • 166,667 $RLY per month for a period of 5 months from Advisors and Collaborators pool, plus $25K USDC per month from the Rally community treasury.
  • Full-time focus on Rally.
  • During this period, KPIs will be established and achievements will be shared with the community for review.
  • At the end of the 5 month period, unless the community and Miguel would like to renew the engagement, the intention is for this advisory arrangement to end.

Please share your thoughts and comments!

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Could we detail more his role as we have hired a few people already that seem to overlap his expertise?

Bremner HIRED
His collaboration with the Rally Network would enable him to use his expertise to build go-to-market initiatives to drive further creator adoption of the Rally Network. In his activities, Bremner would oversee sales and marketing campaigns that will introduce Creator Coin to new, diverse creators and networks, and operationalize creator onboarding, enabling creators to successfully onboard and drive adoption of their Creator Coin economies. Additionally, Bremner would help increase the awareness of Rally’s core value propositions through content marketing and brand marketing initiatives. {Engaging Bremner Morris for Go-To-Market success}
Spitzer HIRED
His collaboration with Rally would enable the community to effectively engage audiences throughout Asia, India, the Middle East, and beyond. He would advise on international strategy, compliance and payment structures, international talent and platform partnerships, people strategy and all elements of go-to-market priorities at an international scale. {Community Engagement Proposal: Robb Spitzer for International Expansion}
Vias PROPOSAL
Miguel is interested in lending his expertise to open up new strategies for Rally to drive its liquidity and growth. His network is massive, and his knowledge of the cryptocurrency payments space, crypto market strategies, and drivers for growth is powerful and unique. His collaboration with the Rally network would be instrumental for the community’s growth.

I am all for deepening our bench but want to make sure we are not having a lot of overlap. Overlap is great but it starts red tape and then real estate battles. As we make these high profile hires is our infrastructure set up handle the success these individuals bring?

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Thanks for the response, @sixmofo - always appreciate your voice and your participation on this forum.

Important to note that there is no overlap when it comes to what Miguel will be doing and why Bremner and Robb were engaged. Bremner’s existing go-to-market creator platform expertise is important for Rally because of his focus on fan and creator facing ways that Rally can be expanded and brought successfully to market, including through developing targeted marketing campaigns and creator success initiatives. Robb is using his Asia and overseas market expertise to advise on how Rally can grow internationally, especially in the key markets of Asia with hugely engaged creator/fan bases and the interest in crypto, but where we lack expertise on cultural and international compliance gotchas that he can help navigate, as he’s done it before for other projects.

Miguel has expertise in an area that is not focused on creators and fans going to market; rather, if engaged, he will be reviewing, addressing and advising on ways to build liquidity and functionality that will expand on the strength and scope of the $RLY ecosystem that drives the Rally network as a whole. It’s important to understand the magnitude of what Miguel has envisioned and executed for crypto thus far. As head of XRP markets at Ripple, he led the team that launched the Ripple remittance product, which was the first product ever to use a digital currency as a bridge asset.

His ability to build out deep liquidity for a network token is key. As interest in the Rally network grows, both because of creator and fan interest, it will be crucial that $RLY have deep liquid markets globally. This means that $RLY will be able to support large amounts of transactions, both buying and selling, without impacting the market one way or the other. This stability, or lack of volatility, will give all network participants more confidence in $RLY and make it more likely they become and remain part of the network. Practically speaking, this means healthy $RLY volumes on CeFi and DeFi exchanges across the world. Miguel’s experience in doing exactly this, charting a path to deep, global liquidity, could not come at a better time for the Rally community. He will be laser focused on executing a step by step plan that will leverage current and future momentum to ensure the $RLY’s liquidity network is as solid as its community needs it to be.

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I will always be one to comment on money out the door. Going forward I would like to see clauses in these contracts that lock these individuals into a vesting period of 2/3 yrs like other platforms. If you get into a start up you have to have to have skin in the game and not just a 6m consulting gig!!! My goal is not to challenge the leadership of Rally but we keep having these 6m sexy contracts pop up every other month. I know our plan is ambitious … it makes me just wonder at times when I look to other concepts/platforms in Defi space.

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Thanks @sixmofo - and yes, longer term lockups are definitely worth exploring for longer term gigs. As time is of the essence in these nascent stages, and folks like Miguel have the spot on expertise to build out the infrastructure to ensure stability for the entire network in the long run, it’s worthwhile for the community to consider these engagements, and to enable the Rally network to continue to break new ground.

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@sixmofo. I understand your concerns. For me, if I look at the big picture; The Rally project is so ambitious, it could potentially radically change the future of the creator economy. I think if you want to make such a big impact you should also think big. And I personally love that the Rally team dares to dream big and act big. Getting the best people on board is crucial for the Rally mission. And for me the risk is limited. It’s only 6 months of Salary. I think we should do anything to keep momentum and move to the hypergrowth fase. We need to be the first Social token to reach the true network effect. So, awesome job Ira and welcome on board Miguel! You have my vote!

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@martinmartin Appreciate your big picture view and perspective, and your support of Rally continuing to go big and move fast. True network effect achieved through continued momentum and growth and with expert assistance is definitely crucial. I’ll move this to snapshot shortly, and let’s see how the community votes. As always, further feedback and discussion while the proposal is live is always welcome.

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Hi Miguel,

Welcome to the Rally community and I’m excited to hear that you may join us soon! You are uniquely qualified for a role like this and so it would be great to bring you on board. I have a few questions and would appreciate any responses or thoughts on these. Would love to hear directly from you here if possible. Thank you so much.

  1. While deeper liquidity across exchanges for RLY makes intuitive sense, one might worry that fragmenting CC liquidity for anything but the very largest Creators will introduce unnecessary volatility into those economies. Can you say a bit more on what “sustainable liquidity” for a creator coin would look like? And how that might differ between a tier1a creator economy vs. a smaller economy.

  2. Are you affiliated with the community agent that conducted the community fundraise? I’m curious because they must certainly have engaged with a number of the folks in your circle and I can imagine it would be beneficial if the core team could connect you.

  3. There has been tremendous organic adoption of RLY across CeXs that seems slated to continue as the defi and broader investor communities recognize and seek to participate in Rally’s vision. While Ripple (at different times revealed in the SEC Ripple Complaint) cut a number of deals that included payments to exchanges to list XRP, is this part of your strategy for Rally? If so, would any terms be put forth to the community for voting beforehand. I’m not familiar with how this is generally done, but given our market positioning it is hard to believe that we would need to create incentives to list Rally!

  4. Following on from this question, what kind of autonomy would you need in this role to be successful in making deals or arrangements to develop deeper liquidity for Rally (RLY + CCs) that can help protect Creator coin economies from volatility.

  5. You mention working with other defi communities. Do you have any specific community in mind and any further thoughts on how Rally might partner with them?

I really appreciate your thoughts on these questions, and any further information that you would like to share about your full-time focus on Rally in this role. Please feel free to reach out to me on discord as well with any follow-up questions or thoughts!

Cheers,
Grand

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Follow-up question on engagement terms.
@ira, @KevinChou, @sixmofo
When the community engaged Bremner Morris in Feb. and there was some pushback on the 166k RLY amount, Kevin posted this:

Token value - When we work with outside talent, and to be clear we’re very focused on decentralizing Rally in every way possible, we generally use a trailing 30-day price to to set the upside consideration. About 7 days ago when we started this negotiation with Bremner, the trailing 30-day was at $0.23…

Can you share why the RLY amount in the engagement terms hasn’t changed accordingly for the most recent community hire and for this proposal? I noticed the amount for the Community Ambassador RLY amount was dramatically cut, though the responsibilities of the role remained generally the same - which all seemed reasonable given the dramatic change in price.

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@Grand

Thank you so much for the warm welcome and the awesome questions. I was hoping I’d get a chance to participate a little here so this is great!

  1. Fragmentation is certainly not a friend to deep markets, but crypto is almost by design distributed from a liquidity perspective, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. With respect to CC’s, in a future state, sustainable liquidity likely means having a presence on the major exchanges for the larger creator economies so that arbitrage opportunities engender organic connectivity between the liquidity pools. There is possibly an intermediate step on some defi platforms before we get there, and that may be where the bulk of the smaller creator economies end up living, with a few cefi exchanges sprinkled in.

  2. I am not affiliated with the community agent that conducted the community fundraise, but if it’s helpful, I’d love to connect with them.

  3. This is a GREAT question. Really thoughtful. I do not advocate paying anyone for doing something that is already in their best interest. So simply paying for a listing is not high on my list of things to do! That said, having deep lasting partnerships with the exchanges is a strategic advantage that we as a community should leverage as much as possible. We want to be top of mind for the exchanges, who have many other projects pulling them in other directions. Practically speaking this probably looks like marketing partnerships where we work with exchanges during, or post, $RLY launch to increase awareness of Rally among their customer bases. Additionally, there might be opportunities to work with the exchanges on community governance if enough of their customers become $RLY, and eventually, CC holders. To be 100% candid, with respect to sign off on terms with partners, I’m not sure how it would work but I would be as open as possible to make sure we are on the same page.

  4. I think in terms of negotiating deals, I’d need a fair bit of autonomy as negotiating by committee is, in my experience, never a good thing. That said, I would assume we would put in place guidelines for amounts I could negotiate, and tiered approvals based on the size of deals. I wouldn’t want to take up the community’s time with smaller deals, but at the same time, I would not expect, nor would I want, to spend community resource without full buy-in.

  5. As I mentioned above, instinctively I think defi will be a key component to long term, healthy, and sustainable liquidity. This means it will be crucial to develop a strategy to get the Uniswap, Aave, dydx, Compound, Yearn (to name a few) communities to rally around our creator communities. A first step might include directly participating on those protocols or it might make more sense to partner with friendly market participants to do the heavy lifting for us. I still need to think about this a bit more.

I hope this was helpful and obviously feel free to ping me any other questions you might have. One of the primary drivers of my interest in Rally is the incredibly cool community it has behind it. Becoming a full-time part of that community over the next few months will be an honor!

Best,
Miguel

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These are very good responses! Thank you for explaining some of this to me and sharing your thought process on these things. I’m convinced you would be great in this role and look forward to learning more from your experience and understanding of the space!
Only thing I would add is in relation to #5: we have a fair sized balance of BAL in the community treasury from Rally liquidity mining pools that’s been gathering dust. I think they would be a great partner to Rally based on the types of discussions I’ve seen in their forums, particularly with the V2 launch around the corner. @coopahtroopa is a Rally advisor with a presence in that community when you are ready to explore further.

Good luck and thanks again!

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Thanks for the kind words @Grand. It means a lot to feel so welcome and I’m glad the response was helpful. With respect to BAL, I’ll certainly touch base with @coopahtroopa. Seems like that may be a bit of low hanging fruit.

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I view all of these people as key hires in the same phase of business cycle that fill core needs for the network. Imagine if you were hired a few weeks after a peer and you had a dramatically different compensation? Part of our challenge as a community is that we make comp public for star hires.

From a practical perspective, it is really hard to convince world class talent that they missed the boat by a few weeks and will have drastically different comp than a peer.

One will say, “But Kevin! I trade, and I have to deal with volatile prices one minute to the next!” True, but that is engaging in Rally as a capital provider, where one can spread capital across many crypto assets or even social token / NFT assets. By contributing one’s labor as these key hires are doing, all of their eggs are in the Rally basket. The short term volatility is not as relevant as what are the problems that need to be solved to create value. The problems Miguel is solving for the community haven’t changed from a few weeks ago, and if he solves them, he’ll create enormous future value which is what we as the community want.

One of the first things I’ve learned recruiting and retaining talent is to make things fair. When comp is public, the most straightforward way to keep things fair for peers is to make peers equal.

I do think Miguel is the last person to be hired in this “phase” of the network. I think with NFTs coming out soon, TBCs v2 coming, v2 rewards out now, and graduation to some CEFI picking up Rally, it does feel like Rally Network is entering a different phase. But we all have to remember, we’ve been recruiting Miguel for months now; so while the community sees this post a couple days ago, this is months of work now coming together for the community to evaluate.

Regarding Community Ambassador comp getting cut - I think that shows a good path of adjustments we’re making. When Community Ambassadors were first signed up in October 2020, we were clearly in a different phase of our network.

I know Miguel will solve huge problems for Rally. It’s exceptionally hard to find someone with the depth of experience he has in both crypto and traditional capital markets. And I think he’s just a really great human being which is a big bonus in my book :wink:

Hope this helps clear up approach and thinking,

Kevin

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We still did not address the point that Grand brought up about pay.

[When the community engaged Bremner Morris in Feb. and there was some pushback on the 166k RLY amount, Kevin posted this:

Token value - When we work with outside talent, and to be clear we’re very focused on decentralizing Rally in every way possible, we generally use a trailing 30-day price to to set the upside consideration. About 7 days ago when we started this negotiation with Bremner, the trailing 30-day was at $0.23…

Can you share why the RLY amount in the engagement terms hasn’t changed accordingly for the most recent community hire and for this proposal? I noticed the amount for the Community Ambassador RLY amount was dramatically cut, though the responsibilities of the role remained generally the same - which all seemed reasonable given the dramatic change in price.]

We were awarding these contracts in the past when rally was a fraction of its price now… we need to be consistent in our approach. Yes… other contracts benefitted from the pump in Rally token but they took the risk. Again not an expert but Grand brought up a great point.

Also, as we hire the marketing/sales etc…no one is asking about the infrastructure. Does it have the capability to an influx of use. We don’t see much chatter on this front.

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I’m going to need to remember some of this should I start a business! I really like your perspective here, and this explanation - particularly around key hires in the same phase of business cycle and keeping things fair for peers.

This is it. And,

Now we know! This was missing for us in the community, and fills in what appeared to be an inconsistency in your approach.

To respond to @sixmofo’s continued reservations here, should we look at this through the lens of when Miguel was first engaged, and that these hires are coming in as part of the same phase of business cycle, with public comp, and an imperative to solve problems that will unlock tremendous value and stability for the network…then it all adds up pretty neatly to offering the same amount. I don’t think it’s worth losing a single day of Miguel’s expertise over 50-500k RLY over the next 5 months, when a single partnership can eclipse that many times over. Shooot, even a single trade.
Miguel gives the impression of someone who is intrinsically motivated, and together with his experience and expertise - I think we’ll see his impact quite clearly in the weeks to come. The core team continues to impress with the talent they’ve attracted to Rally at the highest levels of leadership on down. Together, with a growing roster of creators and increasingly active community members we are on a clear path to changing the game here with Rally. Let’s go!

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Hi Miguel - is there a way to get a hold of you on Discord? And what are your thoughts on starting this process?: https://community.binance.org/topic/18/guidelines-on-how-to-list-your-token-on-binance-dex

Thanks!

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@Grand I’m miguelvias on discord and will jump in to the rally discussion in there over the weekend.

As for Binance Chain, I think it makes sense to start that process once we get a liquidity strategy for that and the other DEX’s. Some of this can happen in parallel but the last thing we’d want is to have $RLY up there without solid liquidity. Much to do…but psyched you guys chose me to help move things forward. Thank you!!!

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Hi All,

I just wanted to give the community a quick update. It’s been 7 days since the community approved my engagement proposal, and in that time I’ve begun to put some thoughts together around partnership sequencing and a possible budget for those partnerships. My plan at the moment is to post a budget proposal and approval request to the community early next week. Much like Bremner’s (though not nearly as eloquent!) my proposal will detail where I think we are from an $RLY markets perspective and what we need to do to get where we need to be in the next 5-6 months. I should have that out by Monday or Tuesday. In the meantime, I’ll be on the community call tomorrow and look forward to meeting some folks.

Hope everyone is doing well!

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Thanks for the update brother!

I’m looking forward to see what ideas you have :smiley:

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Looking forward to it!

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