This post is initiated to discuss the engagement of Delphi Digital to help design Rally’s token bonding curves (TBC) and future network rewards & token emissions.
Background
Delphi Digital has over 1,100 paid subscribers for its industry-leading research service and is actively engaged with many of the most prominent projects in crypto through its Consulting and Venture arms. Their team offers consulting services to some of the top projects in crypto to audit, enhance, and design their cryptoeconomic models. Some of their past engagements include Aave, Synthetix, Compound, Axie Infinity, and THORChain to name a few.
Purpose
If the community approves the engagement of Delphi pursuant to the terms outlined below, Delphi will allocate 3-4 team members to these efforts and plan on being active participants in community discussions as they develop new bonding curve templates, network reward strategies, and any other additional ideas they believe will drive long-term value to $RLY and the Rally ecosystem.
Key focus areas / deliverables
Reviewing current TBC + designing new bonding curve templates
Network reward design + $RLY emissions
Enabling creator-level configuration on parts of rewards, fees, and TBC
Produce documentation explaining the mechanics and rationale behind proposed designs as well as additional ideas for the Rally community to provide feedback
Delphi will update the community at the end of the initial 3-month term with a review of its accomplishments and deliverables, and thereafter will continue to provide performance review updates on a periodic basis.
Terms of Agreement
3 month minimum, month-to-month thereafter (with community right to terminate following the initial 3 month term)
Monthly retainer of $55k, 60% of which will be paid in $RLY to ensure incentive alignment. All fees to be paid from the Community Treasury.
During Phase I of this engagement, which will be completed during the initial 3 month term, the Delphi team will help parameterize and model out different creator bonding curve shapes, optimizing for real world use cases and examples. Phase 2 will focus on designing network usage rewards, as that is currently and likely to be the largest source of revenue for creators.
While these are initially our primary focus areas, the Delphi team anticipates recommending additional incentives and design strategies as their understanding of this emerging sector and its key drivers grows. They’re open to any and all feedback on this proposal and look forward to working more closely with the Rally community!
I’m very excited for the Rally community to work with such a high quality organization. Delphi has done some of the best thinking and analysis in crypto economics, network design and governance space. I’m one of the happy 1,100 subscribers
All for this! Having spoken with @DaddyFatSax at length on this subject, I’m super stoked to see the community move forward with this. I recommend folks take some time to read up on the great work and forward thinking writing from the Delphi Digital team.
Perhaps you can oblige us with a couple handy links to work that the community might find relevant in considering this proposal @kevindelphi?
Absolutely - below is a link to our Consulting page, which gives a bit more context on a few of our past engagements. Also included a link to the write up on Axie’s $AXS token design (scroll to the bottom of Notion link) plus a recent update on Aave’s token architecture, which is an ongoing engagement. Happy to include more examples as well!
When I look at your key deliverables, a lot is about rewards and how to get/keep creators involved and rewarded. Are you also going to explore what role NFT’s could play here? In my vision both social tokens and NFT’s will be extremely important for the future of the creator economy. I think they can go hand in hand, strengthen eachother and Rally is in an unique position to combine both. If a mechanism can be developed that is logical and easy to use. NFT + Social tokens could be the growth angle for Rally. Just my 2 cents…
Can you be more precise around what you perceive as the conflict here? Is it that RLY based compensation empowers them to vote on proposals? I’m not sure I follow.
What it does do in my mind is align incentives to improve the network, while also limiting the drawdown of the community treasury. It also invites them to participate further in governance and further develop Rally’s network.
I think it strikes a fair balance here, but definitely open to arguments and thoughts against to be weighed against the pros that seem self-evident here.
What I did highlight in another post that is a related point, is that I feel strongly against terms that require a community vote to act to end an engagement. And that without a clear rational, the standard should be to require a vote to renew terms that allows all parties to review the value of the partnership and make any changes that seem fit. In this instance, I recognize the tremendous value that will be provided over by Delphi over the next three months, but see undo risk in an agreement to continue the partnership beyond that in perpetuity without necessitating a reassessment that goes to a community vote. The community can’t properly weigh the value of “Performance review updates” for 3 months from now and beyond, so it seems most reasonable for us to weigh that decision with an informed proposal and vote in 3 months - not baked into this one. Requiring a vote after 3 months here would ensure a continued alignment between parties. I invite a broader discussion on this with a reminder that I’m advocating for a broader principle to apply to all parties we engage, current and future, beyond Delphi.
my comment centers around on the lack of real voting or involvement from the whole community. If you are awarded 50k a month in rally tokens after 6m you have a meaningful say. If I was receiving those tokens I would be more than happy to use those voting rights to help pass votes if it aligns with the company that hires me.
Hey everyone, Jose here from Delphi Digital. Huge fans of what Rally is doing and looking forward to working closely with the community and team on the token economics and incentives
@martinmartin we will definitely be exploring the NFT side as well as we agree this is potentially a very important part of the strategy
@sixmofo in our view being paid in RLY tokens actually serves to align incentives as we’re encouraged to make Rally as successful as possible. You raise an interesting point regarding our independence. If it helps, we’ve been paid in tokens by the majority of projects we’ve worked with including Aave, Synthetix, Balancer, Aragon, and others. Our primary goal as an organization is to help drive the crypto space forward and our participation / voting is always guided by that. In the past, we have voted against teams if we believed that to be the right call (e.g. see our participation in the successful ANJ --> ANT merger)
Grand, we agree with this and would be happy for renewal of this proposal to requite another community vote
The current reward system is not incentivizing the behavior we want, nor is it rewarding the creator/community in the way that we want. A more in depth analysis & rationale behind the changes can be found here: Rewards Evolution
Did you have a look what Superfarm did? They Launched NFT’s and these NFT’s:
Generate Tokens over time, their Super token. So you invest now, the longer you stay “on board” the more income you generate.
Generate free NFT drops
Give acces to extras.
A model like this might work for the Creators in Rally. Fan NFT’s (that show visualy you are a big fan, could be a picture/artwork). Next to this status it generates income over time for the fans, the bigger fan the higher income. It could increase fan loyalty and community participation dramatically. Next to that these NFT’s could e.g. give you VIP acces or entitle you on token drops of similar Creator coins.
The creator could choose to allocate X% of it’s future supply to NFT rewards. In that way they can receive money now with the sale of NFT and lock in fan’s for a long time.
I’m not a big Superfarm fan (for other reasons) but I liked what they did here. But you are the expert! Good luck.
