Love this thoughtful note. I have started sharing with relevant parties, and I know others on the initial team have too. FWIW, I’m 100% supportive and will personally commit to supporting a new unlock schedule because I’m committed to the long term of this community and the creator economy.
There are roughly 100 investors, vendors and employees that have tokens that make up the token group Mason is addressing. When we first started this journey in July 2018, the overall blockchain ecosystem was nascent. We couldn’t get the tech working. We tried again with a sidechain approach and made some progress. The crypto markets crashed and we lost talent we needed. Then COVID hit and we were running out of money, so we made the hard decision to do layoffs but still honor those we laid off with tokens, as well as raise a bit more money to get through the rough times. We structured vendor relationships to get paid in tokens instead of cash to get through the lean times. All this is simply background for our community as we try to navigate the road ahead.
@Masongos hits the nail on the head that the original design for token emissions was to get to 50% community and 50% investors/team by this point in time. And specifically, that meant ~1B tokens between CAR and developer/creator/partner grants. As we got going, we couldn’t onboard creators and their fan communities fast enough nor develop the ecosystem fast enough to distribute tokens in a way that would be productive for the ecosystem without flooding the market with unproductive tokens.
So what do we do? I don’t know the answer, but I see at least two fronts to tackle this imbalance:
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How do we productively unlock the treasury faster? Currently we have ~200 creators driving ~50M RLY tokens on the sidechain. To close the gap to get to another 700M RLY productively distributed, we need another 2,800 creators. 700M RLY is a very large budget to get 2,800 creators onboard. How can we as a community, alongside Rally and Unite and SuperLayer and the DAO get more productive usage onboard faster?
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Legally and practically, how do we get 100 parties to each make the decision to voluntarily lock up longer? For many investors, employees and vendors, the holding period has already been about 3.5 years (July 2018). I’m not suggesting this is the only way, but it’s what’s coming to mind first – and I recognize that I’m part of this group, so I hesitate even proposing this and will certainly not vote myself on this. But what if we came up with a staking program that forced longer term commitment for the 1,1B tokens unlocked? What if the budget was X% of that, and whomever opted in would have to lock their tokens into a smart contract for another year? What if we take that same budget, and create 3 staking pools for 1 more year, 2 more years, and 3 more years? This staking program would of course be open to anyone. The downside of this program is that it puts more tokens into the group we’re trying to productively dilute! The fallback here is Mason’s original idea, which is that we ask 100 parties nicely to voluntarily lock 70% of their tokens but I fear that unless there’s a program, there’ll be little response to this.
I don’t think what I’ve proposed is the answer per se, but I hope to spur conversation and ideas here for everyone to consider and refine.
Kevin