$RLY Grant Structure for Businesses Building Atop Rally

$RLY Grants
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Rally Community,

As Rally Network continues to grow, several interesting individuals and groups have taken notice and have expressed interest in building substantial businesses on top of Rally. This dynamic is one that we as the community should be super interested in cultivating - by establishing a model for new and independent businesses to be built on top of Rally, we can more rapidly achieve a more fully decentralized state while creating long term network value.

There are two distinct proposals that I’d like to put up soon, with a third to follow. I recommend the following general structure for these “pilot programs”, which we can iterate on over time:

-Small initial $RLY grant
-Scaling $RLY grant tied to project-specific milestone (for example, a $RLY grant tied to project’s outside fundraise)

This structure aligns incentives while keeping things simple. To illustrate, using placeholder numbers, a Rally-focused agency would receive roughly $50k worth of a $RLY grant to get going, and then a variable amount of $RLY tied to an outside fundraise for the agency (i.e. 50% of a $500k fundraise = $250k worth of grants in $RLY). This structure would allow the agency to more easily raise funds to get off the ground, while also providing “skin in the game” before the Rally Community has to fulfill the majority of the $RLY grants. More info on the proposed projects below:

Josh Katz - Rally-focused Music Agency
As an existing Rally advisor for the music vertical, Josh successfully brought on Portugal. The Man and helped guide them towards a successful launch. He is all-in on social tokens and wants to start an agency specifically geared towards bringing big name musicians onto Rally. He is also interested in helping creators launch NFTs with other NFT projects using Creator Coin when this becomes a possibility.

Ecommerce Loyalty
The owners of Sur La Table and One Kings Lane are interested in using a cryptocurrency to reward their loyal customers. These brands have vibrant communities and want to use cryptocurrency to bring that community together in new ways.

  1. Loyalty system of ~1% crypto-cashback on all purchases
  2. Crypto gift card, limited to small dollar amounts
  3. Stake and get a discount on all purchases through the staking period

Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) - Alternative Financial Network App
Chris Lyons of the CLF brought to us an idea to launch an alternative financial network on top of Rally. The concept is to build a simple-to-use payments app, similar to CashApp or Venmo in user experience, built on top of Rally APIs but powered by a “Culture Coin” for the black community. He feels that while the black community brings immense value to other platforms and social networks, they don’t have much ownership or upside. He is excited about putting together a fundraise to fund the development of a Culture Coin App, along with a core operating team, and working with Rally to launch this “Culture Coin” community token.

More to come on the above projects, and we will also have plenty of room to iterate on these models going forward. Just wanted to start the discussion and get any thoughts/comments from folks as we head into this direction.

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Mahesh, this is clearly a forward thinking proposal. I meant to start a discussion around the very same topic, but you bit me to it. :wink:

It is not a surprise that integrations and projects built on top of decentralized networks create a moat and help develop the ecosystem faster. Our team at Linen has been thinking a lot about the needs of creators and their communities with regards to Creator Coins. In fact, several community members of Rally and Linen inquired us about the addition or Creator Coins to Linen for easy tracking of balances and the ability to buy, sell, convert and transfer of Creator Coins. All this led us to seriously consider focusing on providing proper crypto banking and investment tools to the less tech savvy creators and their fans. If fact, our smart-contract based wallet is already geared towards retail users that can deposit crypto and earn yield on Compound. Currently we support long-term non-speculative use cases.

If the community thinks that the Rally Network, its creators, and fans can benefit from the value that Linen can bring to the Rally ecosystem, we would love to be considered for the grant program to start aligning long term interests to further the Rally ecosystem.

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Cool ideas for sure, I’m sure we can make cases for all sorts of grants over time. Near-term I think the focus should primarily be on driving clear network value, primarily transaction volume and/or user accounts on the sidechain. Note that all three projects I laid out do this.

If Linen can paint a strong “business case” around driving these metrics in the near-term then it’s worth considering. Also, if I’m missing any other important key network KPIs LMK!

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It’s great to see such high profile inbound interest in Rally! In thinking about Ecommerce Loyalty or really a number of use cases and communities, it brings to mind the limitations of Rally’s current model that boasts a single CC bonding curve to meet the needs of an increasingly wide variety of communities. While there are advantages to a “simple” uniform model across all creators, and benefits to launching this way, I think with the project off the ground it would be great to draw on the research that went into developing this one size fits all curve, and further exploring if we can introduce alternatives that are optimized around different types/sizes/unique use case communities.

In my opinion, the current model currently risks pricing out so many fans from engaging with their creators for the very use case that the coins were created to support. It can work both ways with a depreciating or inflating economy. For instance, I paid 20$ in RLY creator coin for a CD from 3cr8. That 20$ is now well over 200$ and for a time more than that. How does it feel as a consumer to pay 10x? Imagine the inverse? Will I be reluctant to spend CC this way again? What happens when you send your most loyal fans through such a journey and how does this effect your brand. (As an aside, I’m still very happy with my purchase, the entire experience and how it was received. Just using this as an example! Thanks @Todd3CR!!!)

Even the defi degens are crying in discord about RLY price, but while the Rally network is not beholden to them or price preservation, Creators and brands do have a responsibility towards their fans that they want to honor, and our network should plan accordingly to mitigate unintentional adverse effects for outsize brands/creators and their fans who want to join the network. It goes without saying that we want every Creator and fan to join and have a positive experience, but these larger communities joining bring a larger impact while the network hasn’t reached enough scale.

In a similar instance, we might see how a more gradual curve or a different relationship between the price of RLY and a given CC could support greater engagement with a coin whose primary use case is geared towards retail purchases or other.

With so much on the line with increasingly large partnerships that are on the table, we can’t afford to expose them to such a risk. In their shoes, I wouldn’t take it on either. How can we reassure them, and in fact ensure them of the benefits? There are alternative ways to protect a brand, such as locking CC purchases for some x period of time like 6 months, and only opening them up to earn through the loyalty rewards in the interim. That said, I think we owe it to explore and model out what we expect could happen to the RLY network and a given CC, particularly for larger creators that could have a transformative impact. How we can leverage the tools at our disposal to maximize the network effects for all participants and ensure a positive onboarding for those new to the promise of blockchain technology and decentralized networks.

I know the team has done a tremendous amount of work and thinking on this, so it might just be sharing some of that out to the community and less about exploring forward.

Ultimately, I believe there are a number of opinions and a great deal of expertise in the community on this subject (beyond the core Rally team), along with other social tokens offering a menu of bonding curves, and I see a huge value in engaging the Rally community; bringing all these together to explore and get creative on how we can better serve a wider variety of communities and be prepared to hit the ground running with them. It’s not to say that we will adopt these, just that we’d be wise to explore our options.

TL;DR: I support grants like this, and ask if we are deploying adequate resources as a community into exploring how to meet the needs of groups/businesses/networks/individuals who could have a transformative impact on the network. Can we explore ways (protocol upgrades/alternatives) to onboard big creators and businesses that will ensure a less disruptive, and more positive impact on the network with their inclusion.

A few thoughts…have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Grand

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Spot on Grand. The vision was to always have multiple and/or dynamic TBCs to support different use cases. I think some of these projects, particularly the ecommerce one and Culture Leadership Fund projects, warrant some revamping on the TBC side to make their launches successful. There will be a long build phase for these projects (multiple months / quarters) so we’ll have time to do these properly.

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Here is a video post from Josh Katz explaining his background and his proposal to build his agency on top of Rally! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SaI05I4DEUVDw95HW2GCjs5CM8aoM3kv/view?ts=60135708

Proposal forthcoming…

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We need to extend the voting … 3 days for the release of $250k of rally is not a light matter…
I would like to know more about this. Are we getting a stake? Who setting the time line and goals? Who is checking up on things?

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Agreed it’s a sizable grant. However, the initial grant is just 250k RLY with the remainder contingent on Josh himself raising a funding round for an agency whose main purpose and livelihood is based on bringing musicians to Rally. IMO, and obviously as the writer of the proposal, I believe this is a worthwhile experiment to create a template for other businesses to be built atop of Rally. This is one of the best levers to scale the network rapidly. On top of that, we’ve worked with Josh before and he has proven track record having brought on Portugal The Man. I would work with his agency and confirm details of his fundraise personally as the administrator on behalf of the community.

As an FYI, I think we as the community can have better guidelines around proposal format, voting duration, and other things based on the type of proposal and amount of funding being asked for. I know this is being actively worked on. But for now, the discussion started two weeks ago and there has been follow-up.

In any case, I see the No votes are trending so the voting system is doing its job if folks are not in favor of this.

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Hey, just commented on Discord, but I’m adding the comment here.

Musicians are a natural target. They receive hardly any of the royalties from their music, but they can capture a lot of value from their fans. On YouTube it’s common to see musicians get their start there but then leave the platform because the opportunity cost of creating videos is too high. They make much more from touring, which makes it hard to create videos. A direct connection to the audience not only creates value today, it increases longevity—music superfans can stay loyal for decades.

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Couldn’t access the video (wrong permissions) but I would be interested to see a one pager containing the following from Josh:

  • A one pager outlining the agency’s commitment to building on Rally
  • Some notion of which artists would be coming on board
  • An idea of the business model at work here

I think the idea is to demonstrate that the agency will ultimately build on Rally and thus generate value to RLY holders, rather than a straight equity stake in the agency.

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Great point @joonian. I’ll get some of this follow-up information from Josh and adjust the gdrive access so the video is accessible to all (as it should have been).

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What goals or metrics do we have in place to make sure our investment is being looked after. While we do not want to micro manage the investment, we do need some type of progress report. … I would suggest we come up with some guidelines and some targets we would mandate upon receiving our investment. The recipient would then have to provide the community some type of presentation we can review? One of the biggest problems with seeding ideas/companies centers around responsibility. Investments require monitoring and due diligence on our part after the seeding

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We’re definitely breaking new ground here, @sixmofo. Since not everyone in a community is suited to doing this kind of due diligence, I’m proposing that a central administrator (me) oversees this relationship and works with Josh to report progress back to the community. I have a background as a venture capital investor and currently run all creator growth and operations at Rally. To your point on not wanting to micro-manage, I actually DO plan on managing this closely on behalf of the community.
Note that over time, even I will be independent of Rally Inc (timeline for our progressive decentralization plan is actively being worked on). For future relationships like this, maybe we can have some sort of committee vetting the community’s investment.

Even though this vote passed, Josh is still preparing a 1-pager with some notes per Joon’s comment, and he’ll also be presenting on this Friday’s Community Call. I didn’t set any specific guidelines or KPIs since this is an upstart agency (it’s like asking a startup day 1 to provide KPIs/metrics). We also know Josh can deliver - he brought PTM and bringing on another big musician this week. So from my perspective, if he’s confident enough to bet his career on this agency and sell investors on it, that’s a strong case to make a matching $RLY investment.

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I’m going to lean in on my faith that Mahesh will manage this situation appropriately.

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