The overarching goal is for the various entities to be self-sustaining so that they are able to continue providing their valuable services indefinitely without creators and users fearing that the site will at some point no longer exist. (As a side note, even if any particular application on the $RLY network stops functioning for any reason, the tokens and NFTs will still exist on the blockchain powered by the Association and still be owned by that individual)
That said, the delineation we’re trying to correct and clarify is that the $RLY Network Association, which is a non-profit Switzerland-based entity we’ve set up, will never take a fee. The Association’s business model is to be like an endowment given it’s oversight of a large treasury. Rally.io and Rally Asia (TBD name) will eventually need a business model that enables them to be self-sustaining. But that doesn’t have to come immediately as the budgets we’ve proposed would give Rally.io a long runway.
Rally.io hasn’t even hit its real exponential-growth path yet as we’ve been so focused on getting core functionality built and getting ready for decentralization, but already are at roughly $1M/day in txn volume. By keeping fees zero or negligible for as long as possible via this initial funding and focusing on exponential growth unlocks, I hope that Rally.io and Rally Asia can become self-sustaining and when the time comes, charge negligible fees on txns. And finally, independent 3rd parties can spring up and offer new creator services and business models.
I am way behind on all this, having concentrated on my community and my own coin, and then on the current coin holder community, where I have been supporting about 60 creators through a sort of ETF Is each coin a project, a product, or an application? Is my ETF really an ETF? What will this mean for the future development of the Rally.io interface, and the ease of use for people who don’t know crypto to feel comfortable buying and holding?
Wondering what the plan for decentralizing the Rally sidechain is? My understanding is its a proof-of-authority chain (centralized), is there a plan in the works to move it to proof-of-stake or delegated-proof-of-stake (or other)?
Great question Lauren. I think the details of the sidechain are an area where we are completely dependent on our partner, Forte, and their own path towards decentralization. And certainly the consensus algorithm and accessibility of their nodes is outside of our direct control.
That said, I think it’s incumbent on the $RLY Network Association to advance the decentralization of each piece of our architecture as much as we can. To that end, we’ve got a few work streams in flight:
Advance concepts of transparency, self sovereignty, and verifiability on the private side chain in partnership with Forte
Explore a chain agnostic strategy in which the RLY Network sits on top of multiple base chains allowing users and application developers to pick the flavor the best needs their preferences in terms of security, scalability, cost, and decentralization. In the immediate term, we are exploring possibilities of replicating the stack that sits on top of our private sidechain on Ethereum Layer 2s and independent, public Layer 1s such as Solana.
Create bridges from our private sidechain to public chains so that users can take full custody of their assets if they choose. We’ll be looking at this for both fungible and non fungible tokens currently minted on the sidechain and once we iron out a few compliance details we should be ready to make this available for some of the creator coins currently on rally.io
So while the “how” and “when” of your direct question about specifics of decentralization of the current sidechain are still not completely clear, we have multiple ways in which we’ll continue down our path of progressive decentralization and offer more options for trust minimization and self sovereignty.
That makes sense. In that spirit, I’d also love to see a blockchain explorer (i.e. Etherscan or generic equivalent) for the private sidechain.
Multi-chain strategy makes sense, would also be cool to see rolled up stats on RLY (and creator coins?) activity across the many venues those will no doubt end up on.
Kevin & team,
I love the grand vision for Rally and this super-ambitious plan.
I’m trying to imagine where will it take creator tokens 5 years from now. Exciting.
Few questions:
Rally Protocol - Some of the protocol components are:
i) RLY tokens (currently ERC20 on Ethereum)
ii) TBC (currently as smart contracts on sidechain (I think))
iii) Flow control mechanisms (currently on side chain)
I’m referring to the ‘$RLY ecosystem concept diagram’ and trying to understand if at some point TBCs will be deployed directly on Ethereum, and will the protocol be Ethereum native with the sidechain being the hub of rally.io (with KYC and everything).
This is an allocation from the current RLY treasury right?
I’m trying to understand better the relationship between different entities, especially DAO / Network association -
i) DAO - grants
ii) Network association - maintains the tech stack
Who controls changes to the protocol?
If for example, we want to issue a new TBC or change current parameters, who will spearhead this, DAO or Network Association? Changes to the protocol can be done by the network association without the Rally DAO being involved?
I think the relationship between the Network Association/ DAO should be further explored, and also the side-chain / Ethereum relationship. I believe that the closest Rally will be to Ethereum (with contracts being deployed directly on it), the more value it can absorb from it (with Ethereum being the sun of the digital assets universe right now).
I love this play and the team gathered around this vision, and certainly want to be part of it.
I know Rally isn’t an investment vehicle and price discussion is discouraged, but can anyone speak to the expected dilutive effects of the proposal in the short term? It feels like the elephant in the room. To be clear, I think the long-term benefits far outweigh any short-term $RLY price considerations, but I’m worried some existing creators and their supporters will lose interest in the platform if the USD value of their coin is greatly reduced over the next year or so before these exciting new projects start adding meaningful value to the network.
Investment - the action or process of investing money for profit or material result. Anything is an investment vehicle if it has monetary value to anyone. Interestingly, there are several creators that are really into crypto, and just like everyone else with a coin, having their own coin clearly is not for the vanity of having their own coin, but to enhance their money making potential. If that does not make cc’s an investment vehicle, I do not know what does.
And I think the projects will add to the coin value in the short term and long term, if they are done correctly. They should help draw more creators and participants into the coin ecosystems.
@KevinChou + team — thank you for all the thought and time you have put into this. It’s been a gift to get to read this plan.
Is there a more granular budget for each of (the five) projects that’s publicly available? I’m also curious about the tx fee schedule, and can see the answer is somewhat “we don’t know yet,” which is fair.
I love the innovation behind what is being built for Creators; I’m sorry to stick on budget/fee Q’s. I do think it’s important to give as much focus as possible to that, and as soon as possible.
Having been very involved with the fledgling crowdfunding/D2F model in the early 2010’s (and seeing its rise and fall), I think it’s really important to build trust around as much transparency as possible for creators right now.
My background is only specifically with musicians. My guess is that the first question they (and their team) asks is about how Rally monetizes and is sustainable.
I know there’s a lot of euphoria around DAO’s and creator economy fixing everything (and I love to see it). But I also think there’s a huge demo of musicians who are going to be hesitant based on scars from FB’s bait-n-switch w/ ads, PledgeMusic’s disastrous ending, etc.
How do we enroll them in a way that facilitates trust? DAO’s I think are an important piece, but I think it goes beyond that with the other projects each having a clearer business model as well.
Thanks again for all that you’ve done. An exciting inflection point right now!
Long time lurker, first time contributor on the forum. I joined the team in early July as Head of Finance for Rally.io. I am extremely honored to be part of such an amazing project and community. I look forward to engaging with the community throughout our journey.
This question came to us in Discord: How do we measure the return on our investment from the overall budget being requested of 345M $RLY and 86M $USDC?
The three primary measures for success are
$RLY backing sidechain tokens,
the number of new user wallets holding $RLY backed tokens, and
the number of new $RLY backed tokens created by tokenizing economies for creators, communities and brands.
The first tranche of funding for each entity will be released within five (5) days of approval of the snapshot proposal which will be posted on Monday, August 23, 2021. This will enable Rally.io to further grow its team and deliver their objectives. For Rally Asia Project, $RLY Network Association, $RLY Ecosystem DAO and SuperLayer Labs, the funding will enable these projects to launch and progressively drive Rally towards decentralization.
Prior to the approval of the second tranche on November 30, 2021, Rally.io and Rally Asia will submit their own clear and measurable milestones and/or KPIs to the $RLY Network Association. The milestones and/or KPIs will be quarterly measurables that will be considered for subsequent funding requests in tranches three to five. Since all organizations are still in the process of experimentation to drive exponential growth, funding might not be entirely contingent on meeting or exceeding these measures. The details will be presented to the community.
The approval of the decentralization budget does not mean all $RLY liquidation will occur immediately. For budgeted $RLY, there will be volume restrictions as determined and set by the $RLY Network Association to help phase into the circulating supply. From September to December 2021, the impact of the budgeted $RLY will be no greater than 32m $RLY per month.
Thanks for addressing this, Johnny. Appreciate it. I’m going to read between the lines and note that the price of $RLY isn’t one of your three primary measures of success. That’s fine but somewhat telling. I’m personally not sure if the price of $RLY even matters for Rally’s long-term success, but I think it’s worth thinking about from the perspective of an existing creator or supporter who might have to watch the value of their coin decrease in terms of dollars – potentially by a lot. As the Head of Finance, do you have any projections for the effect of this rather large spend on the price on $RLY? I know this sort of thing is difficult/impossible to predict, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
So the circulating supply will roughly double by the end of the year? Am I reading this right? Apologies if not. Just trying to wrap my head around it.
1 - Yes is the short answer to TBCs being deployed on trustless, decentralized blockchains! The longer answer, which I’ll only touch on as @DaddyFatSax is the expert here, is that various applications over time will be able to use different chains and put more and more business logic on-chain, especially the TBCs themselves.
2 - Yes
3 - DAO is community-run with a specific budget to invest in the ecosystem as $RLY token holders see fit. The DAO can make grants, loans, partner with other DAOs and crypto projects, or put the funds into liquidity mining or whatever the community decides. I hope the community takes an exploratory and experimental mindset, versus a conservative one. It will operate as a direct democracy governance model. It’s funded periodically by the Network Association.
The Network Association will develop and maintain the core blockchain technology, control network-level rewards, and oversee and invest the bulk of the $RLY treasury. From a governance standpoint, the proposal in this phase of decentralization (which is not the end state) is to have trusted delegates from the outset, and then have $RLY token holders add and turnover the executive board over time starting in 18 months (Q1’23). It operates as a representative democracy. The next 18 months gives us time to focus on decentralizing the technology further and for us all in the community to figure out the process and vetting for the representatives to govern the Association.
The Association will have power to change the network rewards in the protocol.
And definitely agreed on getting much, much closer to Ethereum than we are now. One of the goals of decentralization is to enable our Network engineers to much more quickly advance our core Layer1 work, while enabling the Rally.io team to focus on application-level functional improvements for creators and fans.
I anticipate that the dilutive effects will be minimal. As the finance team has posted, the community treasury has over $105M in USDC today.
The budgets totaling $86M USDC in the proposal goes all the way out through the end of 2022, so there’s no need for any entity to liquidate $RLY for USD. The $RLY is primarily for recruiting either team talent, in which case we’ll be working with the Association to set standards for team (generally vesting over 4 years) or creator talent in which case we’ve locked up far more $RLY than we’ve issued to talent and expect to continue to do so.
We’re also increasingly able, and vendors want, $RLY as payment for services. In many cases, these vendors do not liquidate much of the $RLY as they want long-term participation – anyone who takes $RLY as a payment these days generally wants long-term alignment, not USD immediately or they’d simply ask for USD!
Our number one rule as management in the Rally corporation as it stands right now is that no employee can talk about price. Why? Because the USA’s SEC has strict rules about this, and we’re a USA-based team. But obviously we’re a creator and community monetization platform!
And yes, monetization can happen with a ‘stablecoin’ token design, but that is clearly not what we’ve built at Rally.io or $RLY. We created a digital asset that has utility for tokenizing creators, communities and brands, whereby the price is determined by supply/demand in a global marketplace.
So you’ll never see us talk about price, but we know that creators, fans, and the crypto community care about price because it affects the monetization rate vis-a-vis other monetization methods (be it ads, subscriptions or other fiat paymnets). Our core belief is that if we create tokens that are useful, used by exponentially growing creators and users, and the network is designed such that $RLY is utilized and captures the value created, we’re all going to do fine as a $RLY community.