Proposal to Amend Community Treasury Fundraise Terms

The community approved the community treasury fundraise at the end of 2020 to support full decentralization of the Rally Network, and just last week, the final terms were approved.

I’d like to start a discussion about amending the final approved terms in light of current crypto market conditions. For context, when we first introduced the idea of a community treasury fundraise in mid-December, the price of $RLY was around $0.06. Today, along with the rest of the crypto market, $RLY has rallied (!!) and is currently at $0.28. Even more importantly, the daily volume has grown ~6,000% and liquidity in Uniswap and Balancer has grown ~250%, both indicating and creating healthy activity.

The goal of this fundraise is to empower the community with a larger pool in the community treasury to effectuate development and creator onboarding, enabling growth and continued innovation of the Rally Network. With the current heat in crypto market conditions, the community will benefit from having the flexibility to take advantage of this market opportunity.

Enable Limited Unrestricted Sales of $RLY
The approved community proposal authorized, among other provisions, that the Community Agent will determine the specific terms for any sale in its discretion, taking into account considerations such as counterparty interest and prevailing market conditions, and noting in all cases that the Community Agent will act in the best interests of the Rally community.

This new proposal will recommend the retention of the approved lock up range of 6 to 24 months, but will also authorize the Community Agent to sell certain tranches of $RLY without lock up. This flexibility will enable the Community Agent to maximize proceeds to the community treasury when market conditions are heated. Simultaneously, the Community Agent will continue to act in the best interests of the Rally Community, and accordingly will be tasked to balance such sales of unrestricted tokens with the protection of market stability for $RLY.

Please provide your thoughts and feedback.

Just posted a topic adjacent to this one - the rationale for a large community treasury and proposed use of proceeds. It’s relevant to the overall discussion so linking here as well:

I have some thoughts but won’t be able to comment at length until sometime tomorrow. That said, Are we defining “best interests of the rally community” as protecting market stability of $RLY, or balancing RLY stability and maximizing treasury contributions?

While the community is on deck to vote to authorize the agent to execute the sales, I take it that if that vote is approved, then the Agent will execute without conferring further with the core Rally team or the community before executing those sales. I’d be uncomfortable with a situation where the agent is seeking any ongoing guidance from the Rally team vs. the community in such decisions. I think we can understand why these concerns would be top of mind.

1 Like

Ultimately, just want to ensure (and have guaranteed) that there is no information asymmetry between the core Rally team and Community with regards to what the agent is doing/instructed to do and updates on actions taken on behalf of the community. Even if that information needs to be relayed back to the community via some proxy, such as, perhaps, a yet to be formed community board.

1 Like

The volume growth has only been in the last two weeks. Before that RLY had perhaps the lowest trading volume to liquidity ratio of any token. I would like to see at least a month of sustained volume before I would personally entertain this. Otherwise we could have a mirror of the launch where new people bought at “heated” times only to see their early support not sustained by the price.

From: believers in the Rally Network and concerned community members

The reason for this post is to get governance right early on in order to build autonomous and decentralized network.

First of all, thank you for providing additioan context Ira! There is Certain community members have expressed concerns about the way this token sale is handled and, in particular, the lack of transparency on the recent 10 million token transfer from what appears to be one of the internal wallets (core team, company?) and the subsequent sale of the portion of the transferred tokens on the open market. Such concerns were addressed in the community Discord: a) Discord , b) Discord . To our knowledge, we could not find any info on the community approval for the market sell of RLY. The Rally community is in limbo.

To be honest, this looks like a decentralisation theater. Community does not need to approve the $100 spend to purchase subscription software as we saw it in some of the previous proposals. It is an administrative task an has no effect of the project. On the other hand, managerial tasks, such as the community fundraise, network governance are need to be decided by the community. A simple fix is transparency!

Secondly, in order to gain trust and have transparency, the core Rally team should consider disclosing basic information as most other reputable projects already do it today:

  1. All wallets of the core team/investors/advisors and the unlock schedule.
  2. All community wallets and the Company wallets and the unlock schedule (if any).
  3. Let community know when significant amount of tokens are about to move from one wallet to the other and reasons for that (if not voted by the community).
  4. Token sale schedules.

Thirdly, most community members welcome this fundraise as it is the right thing to do However, for full transparency, the community should approve:

  1. number of $RLY to be sold without lock up
  2. discount (if any) to market price
  3. market sell or a third party sell

At this stage while there is no transparency and the community is not fully decentralized, we should scale back on the 500 million allocation for the fundraise. Especially, taking into the account how opaque this whole process is, we do not want unwarranted attention for the large token sale. We have no doubts that the network has a potential to become $100+ billion fully diluted valuation (long term) taking into account multiple industries exposure, clear value propositions, clever token design, and proven core team.

Furthermore, there is a lot of skepticism that the hired agent can legally act in the best interest of the community, because, to our knowledge, the agent does not have fiduciary relationships to the community. Most likely the agent has fiduciary obligations to Rally, Inc. Hence, the community has no way of knowing if the agent is, in fact, acting in the best interests of the community. We have NO reasons to thing that the agent is not acting in the best interests of the community. The point is that the community has no way of knowing.

Lastly, the recent RLY price run up from $0.05 to $0.28 should have no affect on long term buyers because a higher discount can be applied to the market price/average sell price for the right buyer. Therefore, it is not clear why RLY has to be sold unlocked, unless it is a sell into the market. Will RLY be sold into the market? If yes, the community needs to know. If not, there is no clear benefits of selling unlocked RLY that can easily be resold. Either way, the community should vote on the amount of unlocked tokens for sale and discount (if any).

Let’s get this governance right and build the best network and ecosystem together!

Truly yours,

QB 29, supporters of the Rally Network

@Grand, thanks for the thoughtful comments as always.

With respect to “best interests of the Rally community”, it’s a balance of both maximizing treasury contributions and minimizing instability in the $RLY market. This is, of course, a delicate balance. While the high current market price of $RLY enables a fundraise different than the one we imagined just a month ago (hence this amendment proposal), it would defeat the whole point if fundraising activities resulted in major market instability, resulting in harm to the Rally community and to the network. The agent is tasked with taking all of its actions with respect to the community fundraise to achieve the best results for the Rally network as a whole.

As for the concern over information asymmetry, I can confirm with you that the core Rally Team has no role in exercising control over the fundraise, nor in receiving material updates from the Community Agent. In terms of any ongoing involvement, the founding team has been asked by the Community Agent to answer questions about the Rally project from potential counterparties. When this occurs, they discuss the project using information that’s readily available to the public via blog posts, Snapshot, etc. The line is clear: the core Rally team can and should have no role in driving this fundraise. The Community Agent has been granted broad discretion precisely so it would not need to constantly request guidance, approvals and sign-off on each new transaction, as it would with a traditional fundraise. As a community treasury fundraise authorized by a decentralized community, the success lies in the fact that no core team and no “insiders” are receiving or using information that’s not widely known by the community. If updates or material information become available from the Community Agent, they will communicate it to members of the Rally Genesis Team who will in turn relay it to the community.

Thanks for calling this out! This is a separate topic from the community fundraise and is not related.
Please check out this wiki that has more information: https://wiki.rally.io/rally-network/founding-team/token-supply. Specifically:

Side Chain Operations: (1%)

There are various operations that are transacted on Rally side chain. These transactions also have to be performed on main net. On a periodic basis, tranche of tokens is required to be transferred for these transactions. After three months of launch, and forecasting a quarter of activities, 10 million token were transferred in Jan 2021 for these activities. The current 10 million has been estimated for the next three to four months of future transactions. This is an ongoing activity and based on actual transactions the transfers will be made regularly.

Just to confirm, the specific wallet/contract pointed out in the Discord discussion that we see making converts from $RLY to $USDC (in amounts roughly 100k-150k lately) are indeed for the Side Chain Operations (1%)?
I just want to be sure I have this correct for when I answer the question in the future on the Discord.

Thanks!

A fair bit of this detail is currently available between CoinGecko (hover on circulating supply to see addresses with tokens in wallets designated for these various buckets) and the blog post on token release schedule. It should be possible put it all in one place and make it as clear as possible.

So yeah, seems reasonable.

Yeah, related to side chain operations. Making sure on and off ramps are available for the RLY backing creator coins

Blockquote The volume growth has only been in the last two weeks. Before that RLY had perhaps the lowest trading volume to liquidity ratio of any token. I would like to see at least a month of sustained volume before I would personally entertain this. Otherwise we could have a mirror of the launch where new people bought at “heated” times only to see their early support not sustained by the price.

The difference between now and the initial Rally launch is the dramatic, exponentially increasing number of transactions on the sidechain.

Imagine what this community could do if instead of 2 BD people, we find a way as a community to get 200 sales and BD people working to get Creators and Brands on Rally? Imagine if we could partner with all the major talent agencies in the world? Imagine if we launched in multiple languages? Imagine if we got a great marketing machine together to make Rally a household crypto name?

I understand the hesitation comparing Rally to other crypto projects. I’d argue if a project like YFI or Uniswap raised a community treasury as the one contemplated here, there wouldn’t be a great way to spend the funds to actually create value for the network. They are rate limited by the number of highly unique technical + economic + crypto native talent they can get onboard.

Rally, given our web2 focus to make it a super easy, no-code way to get started as a creator or fan, is in exactly the opposite boat. We could literally have a global army of 200 (or 2,000) people we could find recruiting Creators and following the playbooks that PTM, Allie, Vanish, 3CR8, etc are pioneering. And creating the right community dashboards so we know who’s contributing and who’s not.

I’m in favor of giving the community the opportunity to raise a warchest when the overall crypto environment is healthy, and go hard after the market.

Let’s go win.

The structure of the fundraise and its terms are designed to provide the most flexibility to the Community Agent and its ability to execute transactions. This amendment to include the ability to sell certain discretionary tranches without restriction is a term designed to enable a balance against locked up tokens based on counterparty interest.

I want to reiterate that this structure is a new innovation to significantly fund a community warchest. Unlike a traditional raise, there’s no central company benefiting from the proceeds. We as a community are appropriately relying on the agent to bring savvy crypto players into the network through this fundraise, those that understand the network’s potential and the deep designs of the Rally Network. The balance of counterparty terms is best managed by an experienced agent with a wholistic view of the entirety of the fundraise and the project.

We believe in the community and the power of the treasury wielded by this community. While the core team is not going to drive the process (hence community voting on this series of approvals), as noted above, as updates or material information become available from the Community Agent to the Rally Genesis team, the community will be informed.

I can 100% relate to what @KevinChou just described. Being heavy Web2 requires a lot more capital on business operations, UI, support. Raising in this environment is generally good!

2 Likes

I went through all the comments in this thread and I think everyone agrees that the fundraise is much needed and we are fortunate to have this opportunity. Most concerns are related to the proposed unlocked token sales and the risk of being dumped on the community crushing the price. Taking into account very low token supply vs the proposed sale amount, this is a valid concern.

Do we know how much we want to raise?

1 Like

Up to 500MM $RLY have been authorized for sale - there’s something to be said about building a bigger warchest if the market enables it and the health of the network is maintained. Understanding the concerns that the sale of any unlocked tokens can have an affect on the price, the agent is committed to preserving the health of the network through balancing any such sales with those bearing restrictions, and selecting the counterparties that it brings on with these goals in mind.

I think it’s important to think about the connection between the beginning of activities approved by the initial proposal and the activity happening with the RLY token on the open market and why empowering the agent with unlocked token supply is in the best interests of building the community treasury.

Just today, we see this multiple transactions like this https://etherscan.io/tx/0x864fa18d0c731f14f94e70cf305b469c82d685c86b663a809dd59df59bc1aadb/

Empowering the agent to sell into the open market demand likely created by their activities for the benefit of the community treasury seems to be the best way to have the most successful process possible so I’m strongly in favor of this proposal that gives them the ability to do so.

4 Likes

Well put. I am glad you think this big. If there is going to be potential sell pressure in this highly heated environment it might as well be the Rally team using those funds for long term development.

3 Likes

Thanks for this info. This is new.

Thanks for providing transparency.