BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup #28: DAO Growth, GMI Index & AdFUNistration

Catch up with what happened this week in the BanklessDAO.

Nov 13

Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,

Big news this week! The Bankless DeFi Growth Index (GMI) has passed Index Coop's Decision Gate Snapshot, meaning we are one step closer to launching our second index fund. We have already had great success with the BED Index, and the GMI Index provides another opportunity to onboard retail to emergent DeFi applications.

Also, this week we take a deep dive into the details of DAO growth and engagement with the help of the Analytics Guild. We have seen tremendous growth in the past few months and we continue to iterate on the best ways to engage new members. As we move forward on this journey, we need to remember to prioritize fun and creating a strong community vibe.

Catch up with all this and so much more from the past week in the BanklessDAO!

Authors: BanklessDAO Writers Guild (Jake and Stake, EthHunter, siddhearta, EricCMack)

This is the official newsletter of the BanklessDAO. You are subscribed to this newsletter because you were a Premium Member of the Bankless Newsletter as of May 1, 2021. To unsubscribe, edit your settings here.

UMA helps DAOs diversify their treasury and build community

BanklessDAO Weekly NFT Showcase 🔥

🧑‍🎨 Artist: David Bolt

🏦 Auction Type: Open edition

💰 Price: 0.029 ETH

Conscious Money Series

bDAO: Why did you create the Conscious Money series? DB: We need symbols for money and financial prosperity that align with our best and highest aspirations (for ourselves and for one another).

These hand-drawn images explore consciousness and evolution as embodied by the Ethereum logo. Most logos represent a company or corporate entity, but the Ethereum logo represents a collective paradigm shift for humanity. It’s one of the most simple, potent, and beautiful symbols I’ve ever seen. These images portray crypto as an evolutionary force and an awakening expression of human consciousness.

I was a professional tattoo artist for many years, so I’m fascinated by the power of symbols to influence how we understand and interpret the world around us. Old money symbols imply greed, gluttony and corruption. We’ve been told that money is the root of all evil. There is a looming cultural bias implying that the pursuit of prosperity is antithetical to the collective good.

The emergence of crypto is inspiring many to reimagine money as a positive, necessary and integral part of human evolution.

Community Highlights

$GMI Index Passes Decision Gate I (DG1)

The GMI Index passed DG1 with 100% approval and was the most voted-on proposal. This passing vote signals the Index Coop's intent to begin work to research & assign Bankless DeFi Growth Index a product prioritization score. The Bankless DeFi Growth Index (GMI) seeks to capture the performance of emergent DeFi application themes. GMI seeks to provide exposure to experimental DeFi project tokens which are further out on the risk curve.

🏆 DAOpunks placed #1 in Hyype Competition

Thanks to a fantastic turnout by the DAOpunks, we had a big win in the 2nd round of the Hyype competition. The goal was to connect with the platform, join up with fellow DAOpunks, and most importantly, write about the "Lore" of your punks. Some of the submissions were so amazing, the folks over at DAOpunks have started a Lore competition! Community voting will go through three stages: Lore submissions are due by this Saturday Nov 13th at 11:59pm PST. Voting will commence Sunday, with the top ten submissions determined by Monday and those ten will be cut down to three by Wednesday. Voting on the top three submissions will close on Thursday 11/19 at 11:59pm PST, with the winning Lore to be published in the Weekly Rollup this November! It was amazing to see everyone turn out and put so much effort into the Lore pieces, winning us 1st place by a landslide!!

Hyype @hyypeHQ

Congratulations @DAOpunksNFT community to become the first NFT series to win Alpha Race #2 with 703 points! 🏆🔥 The race continues on with the search for the second winner #hyype #alpharace. Who is next? Check out the leaderboard at hyy.pe/leaderboard

📈 Forefront Social Token Index

The FF Social Token Index is a digital asset designed to track tokens’ performance within the social token industry. They aim to incorporate projects and communities into the Index (BANK being included in the list) that have significant usage and show a commitment to ongoing maintenance and development. The index sets out to provide the industry with an investment product providing passive exposure. Forefront has a good reputation and brings lots of expertise to the table. Their platform is the leading insight aggregator and will provide valuable insight to the social token landscape.

"My view, as I’ve stated many times, is that social/community tokens are going to be one of the biggest changes to global business models in history.” ~ Raoul Paul

🏔 DeFi 2.0 Summit with Rari, Olympus, Tokemak, TracerDAO, and Alchemix

RSA and David had a fantastic conversation with the humans involved at the bleeding edge of DeFi 2.0, from definitions and product innovation to the evolution of the protocols and yield bearing tokenomics. DeFi 2.0 is a super interesting topic and this is 100% the dream team to have this conversation with. Enjoy this mini master class; by the end you will have a better understanding of this space and a few new tools to fully utilize your assets!

What’s New

🐸 Frogmonkee's Brain Dump #6

The DAO can feel like it's ten years old to some of the newer people. It is, however, only six months old! Things that the genesis crew set out to do have long since been achieved. With anything that grows as rapidly as the bDAO, growing pains are a given and it is imperative to address these issues now before we start to shed talent and momentum. Take part in this forum survey to help gauge the thoughts through the various levels of bDAO contributors. We are all in this together and we are designing the future! JustDAOit.

🏦 Stake your $TOKE to vote for $BANK in C.o.R.E. 2 at Tokemak

The Tokemak system is growing! They use their native token, TOKE, to perform governance and voting inside the protocol. The latest round allows for holders to vote on which tokens will have reactors activated. BANK is on the list of upcoming reactors, so TOKE holders should head over to Tokemak and vote! Also, a nice feature and proof of their forward thinking is that the vote is held on Polygon to save on gas fees (around .25 MATIC for the transaction)

BanklessDAO 🏴 @banklessDAO

Stake your $TOKE to vote for $BANK in @TokenReactor C.o.R.E.2. event! (☢️,☢️)

TokemakThe Token Reactortokemak.xyz

🧠 Crypto Sapiens Podcast: Seed Club, an Accelerator for Web3 Communities

In this episode, Humpty Calderon is joined by Ben Jacobs to talk about Seed Club, which builds and invests in tokenized communities. With fresh eyes and a belt full of tools, Seed Club utilizes creative solutions to support communities and their specific needs. Give it a like and listen wherever you consume your podcasts!

Crypto Sapiens 🧠 @CryptoSapiens_

Ep. 8: Seed Club, An Accelerator For Web3 Communities In our latest #Podcast, we talk about investing in tokenized communities with Ben Jacobs. Listen to our conversation with @bennypjacobs core contributor at @seedclubhq to learn more. 🎧 LISTEN NOW 👇 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/see…

‎Crypto Sapiens: Seed Club, An Accelerator For Web3 Communities - Ben Jacobs on Apple PodcastsBen Jacobs joins us to introduce Seed Club, a DAO that builds, supports and invests in tokenized communities. --- Crypto Sapiens is produced in partnership with Bankless DAO. https://bankless.community --- Crypto Sapiens hosts lively discussions with innovative Web3 builders to help eve…podcasts.apple.com

✍️ BanklessDAO Medium

Catch up on the latest publications from the BanklessDAO Editing and Publishing Arm (EPA). Have a piece you would like to contribute to the blog? Submit it here.

BanklessDAO 🏴 @banklessDAO

Take a peek into the socio-cultural perspective of crypto in Nigeria as well as its inflation-based use case with bDAO's @beyondkhaleb

Crypto Interest on Rise in NigeriaBITCOIN has been a synonym for any cryptocurrency for the past decade in Nigeria. Being the first, and most popular, of all cryptocurrencies it has taken over the space as a revolutionary tool in…medium.com

BanklessDAO 🏴 @banklessDAO

Don't let profile pictures fool you! BanklessDAOs @Gandsy explores future use cases of NFTs.

Life Imitates Art — Future Applications of NFTs beyond Digital Art and Digital CollectiblesSince Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) exploded into the mainstream in late 2020 and early 2021, most people associate NFTs with pixelated Twitter avatars, squiggly lines, and jpegs of rocks. The most…medium.com

BanklessDAO 🏴 @banklessDAO

BanklessDAO's @Ap0ll0517 dives into the Core Value Proposition by Perpetual Protocol. bDAO is a proud recipient of an educational grant from Perpetual Protocol. Cover Design by @CosmicClancy medium.com/bankless-dao/o….

One of DeFi’s Cadillac AMMs:The core of Perpetual Protocol is a decentralized exchange (DEX), which is based on Ethereum and xDai. What does this second option mean for traders? It means that you can Perpetual Protocol to make…medium.com

Get Involved

🚀 Bankless Rocket League

Do you play Rocket League? Want to join fellow bDAO members?

Bankless Rocket League is a Tournament hosted by the AdFUNistration of Bankless DAO. Participants assemble into teams of three, and battle for the rights to call themselves the Bankless Rocket League Champs! Each week, two teams will be pitted against each other in a best of three matchup. The winner progresses to the next round. This will repeat until one team is left standing. Rocket League is a cross-play game, and should be able to be played in a console-agnostic fashion.

Participants should organize a team of 3 fellow bDAOers, (if you do not want to/can't organize a team, you will be placed into a random team by filling in N/A in the teammate field) Next, come up with a great team name. Remember to be creative, as this is what you will be called once you win! Good luck and have fun!

🧢 BanklessDAO Collegiate Drop Feedback

This is a customer service message for anyone who ordered our recent Bankless MF Collegiate Drop. It has been expressed that some that ordered are not happy with the quality of this drop. It is important to get a resolution together ASAP, as the team behind the drop failed to quality check the drop first. Focus on mitigating this for the future is paramount, as the bDAO merch is to hold the standard of "date worthy attire."

♠️ BanklessDAO Hold'em Tournament

Sign up for the monthly winner-takes-all Texas Hold'em tournament. To participate you must sign up and have at least 500 BANK. The bank will need to be deposited with zberwaldt, who will be responsible for distributing the tokens to the winner of the tournament. Seats are limited and awarded on a first-come-first-serve basis. Once all seats have been filled you will receive a notification of which table you are seated at and the details of when the game will run.

🙏 Sponsor: UMA — Diversifying DAO Treasuries. DAO Better.

BanklessDAO Growth and Community Engagement

By Jake and Stake

Welcome, frens, to BanklessDAO (bDAO). Over the last season we’ve seen incredible growth. According to the Forefront Social Token Mid-Year Report, BANK is the most widely held social token with over 3,955 holders! To get a better understanding of how the bDAO has been growing, we’ll take a look at data the Analytics Guild has gathered on membership levels and community engagement (shout out to Saulthorin!), as well as highlight some of the challenges we face as we continue to grow. Let’s dig into the numbers!

Our total membership had hockey-stick growth over the last season and in October alone we saw a 30% increase in membership!

Most are joining via the vanity link, although we saw an influx of new members arrive via invite, just before the Season 2 Kick-Off Call. On average, we see 752.4 new members each week over the last month. This is up from the first month of last season (357.2). This is a 110% increase!

What is puzzling here is that the chart above shows a steady count of BANK holders between 35K-150K. However, when we look at the number of bank holders of 10K-35K and 1-10K, respectively, we see a different trend.

This tells us that many of our new members have guest passes. Our guest pass program has been an incredible tool for growth, demonstrating that you can contribute to BanklessDAO and earn your way to becoming a full member.

Next, we have first day activation. First day activation is a measure of how involved new members are. We measure this by looking at whether or not they visited three or more channels on their first day. This rate has remained about the same, implying the behavior patterns of new members have not changed as rapidly as our increase in membership.

(This might be due to the abundance of activity across all DAO channels. Many new members continue to lurk for the time being.)

Similarly, our weekly retention has remained stable (above 20%) as seen in the graph below, despite the large spike in membership in September. This is good news because our retention rates scale up with the increase of new members.

New member message and voice channel activity has held the same rate.

We see a significant increase in voice activity (visualized above). This can be attributed to a number of factors including increased synchronous project activity and socializing.

We have not seen an equal increase in the number of Discourse users. This is where proposals and discussions are held before the snapshot vote is initiated. Ideally we would see an increase of forum sign ups in line with new member growth.

While the number of users is increasing, it is not rising at the same rate as membership growth. While not all users are expected to debate forum proposals, governance is everyone’s responsibility, and the best way to stay informed on the hows and whys of Snapshot proposals is to read Discourse discussions.

What we have seen is an increase in daily engaged users. Presumably, this means more people are taking an active role. If you want your voice heard, participate in forum discussions!

On the other hand, there is more consistent Snapshot voting! We’re seeing more than 300 unique addresses per snapshot vote. This is in line with the amount of BANK used per vote. Presumably, the participation increase in non-season-related Snapshots is due to the new member growth we’ve seen over the last two months.

More than a third of all Snapshot proposals have occurred since Season Two began (6 weeks ago), and we’re still less than halfway to season end!

We’re still seeing velocity increases in membership growth, membership participation, and governance generally. The rate of forum participation is not growing at the same rate, so we recommend staying up to date by reading and participating in forum (Discourse) discussions.

Overall, we’ve seen our rate of growth rise. Members are arriving in droves and our onboarding process is doing well to get them involved. However, member retention may decrease if we do not focus on “Back of House” coordination and organization. We need a way to deal with the chaos new membership brings while maintaining our BanklessDAO culture.

In this respect, we’ve likely overextended ourselves with respect to new membership. Many L2s are feeling the growing pains of this explosion, and we should be mindful of growing in a sustainable manner. In Frogmonkee’s recent forum post “Brain Dump #6”, he emphasizes the importance of refocusing on inward-facing initiatives for the time being.

This includes two main components: Membership Perks and Back of House initiatives.

Back of House initiatives include prioritizing greater alignment within the DAO and between guilds, onboarding new members with a “BanklessDAO” ethos, and coordinating all these efforts using tokenomic design.

Frogmonkee notes some “Back of House” priorities:

Governance and Strategy to improve DAO-wide coordination and cohesion.
Tokenomics to improve the utility of BANK.
Onboarding (First Quest) to initiate new members with BanklessDAO values and workflows.
Inter-Guild Coordination to smooth out inter-guild operations, gather best practices (with respect to onboarding, governance, and coordination), and improve intra-guild workflows.

Membership perks are a more nuanced topic. We don’t want to make the DAO work, we want to make it fun and promote culture. Remember, the base layer is not the blockchain, but the community. Layer 0 is the people who build and interact within the community. It’s about growing BanklessDAO in the way we want. We joined the DAO not to work for another corporation, but to make changes in the world that make it a better place and have fun while doing it.

Frogmonkee outlines two priorities for membership perks:

Priority #1: Host fun and/or valuable events that foster a playful social environment in the DAO.
Priority #2: Inadvertently create incentives for people to buy and earn their way to a Level 1 membership.

We can increase membership organically and retain members via our culture, sustaining our membership growth and serving to reverse the trends in new member activity seen in the metrics above.

Overall, we’re still in the early stages of BanklessDAO and these growing pains are a good thing. Let’s refocus on making BanklessDAO a fun place to be and a community that people want to be a part of!

🏛 Governance

Proposals in Discussion

⛽️ Gas Reimbursements

We at the DAO enjoy many of the benefits of being in the Ethereum ecosystem. However, we are also painfully aware of the the cost of those perks and security. Members of the bDAO constantly have to pay gas to approve the many transactions the DAO goes through in a given season. This proposal further discusses this issue by voting for what the preferred payment would be in any given reimbursement. ETH or BANK?

🏦 OHM Implementation

Along with the previous proposal, this one also involves Olympus. The bDAO met with OlympusDAO on how to implement OlympusPRO, and discussed different possibilities. They came up with a plan that outlines a strategic plan to capture volume and fees. This would also serve to maximize visibility and awareness of the long-term tokenomics strategies active inside the DAO. Familiarize yourself and take part in the growth of BANK and bDAO

👨‍🏫 BanklessDAO Consultancy

Bankless Consulting, proposes to be a mechanism aimed at project delivery for entities other than the bDAO Grants Committee and Guilds. The main goals of Bankless Consulting will focus on DAO-to-DAO (D2D), DAO-to-Business (D2B), and Product Incubation They set out to formalize the people and processes behind a DAO Consultancy to present a professional outward brand and reputation to deliver on projects. This is yet another way the DAO is growing and integrating with the outside world!

🛠 Proposal for a new NFT Tool

The bDAO is always looking for revenue streams. One way could be through a bigger exposure in the NFT market. Flipper Tool is a bDAO-created NFT tool that could provide revenue streams for the DAO by providing a professional tool to all NFT collectors. Some features in development are an ideal sell price calculator (signature feature), early metadata pulls, rarity calculator based on metadata, WETH mass offers and OpenSea API integration for quick buys and quick sells. With a great discussion happening in the chats, head over and inform yourself to what could be an amazing toolkit for us NFT junkies!

👯‍♂️ BanklessDAO X Pallet Talent Collective

The bDAO uses Pallet to host our job board and has a new initiative for bDAO called The Talent Collective. In this proposal, L2 members would submit their profile to the Bankless x Pallet Talent Collective via an application. They would then be matched with teams across the industry that are hiring. Similar to recruiters, the DAO would have the ability to earn and add to the treasury when members find a role they love. Think of it as a list of all people the Bankless Nation would vouch for as professionals. This is a very powerful tool if used to its full potential. Go give it a read and jump in!

Action Items

🐣 Follow: The Rug News: The most credible news source in crypto that will take your money, seriously.

❤️ DAOversity Survey: Take the DAOversity by Design survey to enable bDAO to better understand how we can lead the way in diversity and inclusion in DAO life.

🏃‍♀️ Catch up: Review this week's community call notes or listen to the recording.

🙏Thanks to our sponsor

UMA

UMA helps DAOs build products to diversify their treasury. Most DAO treasuries are imbalanced, holding too many native-governance tokens. By using UMA’s success tokens and KPI options, DAOs can fortify their treasury, preparing for any market while building loyalty.