24 July 2021

Λ L Ξ X / アレクサンダー.eth

July Payroll Clarification

A clarification on the July payroll structure: there were three different currencies being used for compensation.

Used for conservative contributors who insist on receiving compensation in the safety of DAI liquidity. This is the most valuable for the DAO to pay in this stage. We are incentivized to pay in anything but DAI for now.

uCR (debt tokens)

This is what most contributors were okay with accepting as compensation, which are redeemable 1:1 for uAD when our TWAP is above 1.00. The more that the protocol needs to print to re-stabilize the price back to 1.00, the more uCR that is redeemable for uAD. These effectively became our credit system which double as a price stabilizing tool.
Small secondary markets exist to swap between uAD and uCR on Uniswap!

A contributor insisted on receiving compensation in uAD to act as a middle ground between DAI and uAR.

August Payroll

The payroll calculation will be completed closer to the end of the month, but we plan to also pay 1:1 dollar compensation in UBQ to incentivize contributors to stick around for the long run. For example, if a contributor receives $1000 in compensation, they will receive an additional bonus of 1000 UBQ tokens from the treasury. This ratio will be revised when UBQ enters price discovery on open markets.

Here you can preview our current August payroll spreadsheet.

August Fundraising

We are considering raising another small round ($50k - $100k) to bridge us to building our first revenue generating mechanism, the proxy yield farming system (scheduled for development in September and completion in October). If you are interested in directly participating, please reach out to me on Discord. I need to speak with Hristo, the lead economist, to confirm the transaction details, but we're looking to pay a 25% premium in non-expiring debts (uCR) which are redeemable when the TWAP goes up above 1.00. This will happen when we push more aggressively on marketing, and give more reasons for people to use uAD (build the ecosystem, partnerships, and integrations.)

At the time of writing we have 106,570.33 uAD of dry powder in the treasury. We are not incentivized to freely distribute these as compensation as the contributors are likely to sell the uAD for other stablecoins lowering our TWAP further. Although this is an emergency financing solution, we respect that the optics of keeping the TWAP at or above 1.00 is important for the community.

Commentary on the Current Marketing Efforts

We have some amazing contributors on the marketing operations side of Ubiquity. An interesting strategy that was brought to light was the direct targeted outreach to thousands of writers interested in writing about stablecoins.

The idea being to scrape all of the articles of a crypto publication, enrich the authors' contact information to grab the emails of the writers, do some keyword confidence scoring of the articles to determine the likelihood of them being a good fit for writing with us (e.g. "stable coins", "defi", "dao", "fairlaunch"). Afterwards, doing an automated email campaign while referencing specific articles to craft outstanding cold introductions.

We'll continue to do this until we have a nice cache of top writers to help craft the voice of the DAO. Poor communications from the core contributing team to the community is unacceptable in a decentralized future. Investing in our communications infrastructure is demonstrating Ubiquity's commitment to becoming a bonafide DAO.

[0094-UBQY] Coindesk Authors

docs.google.com

I also personally reached out to a couple of prominent writers in our community, such as yyctrader, former marketing lead at Basis Cash and writer at the Defiant.

I do think that reaching out directly to influencers and prominent members of Crypto Twitter will pay in spades, but in order for it to be organic we need to budget for several months of time to build authentic relationships.

Aside from that, we believe that an easy way to get all of Crypto Twitters' eyes on us will be to launch a DeFi summer (think Sushiswap) style yield farm with multiple incentivized markets. This is something I'm personally a bit reserved on doing as it will be the nuclear bullet in the chamber that we can use once to pretty much guarantee to get the attention of the community.

In order to maximize the ROI of this however, I want to make sure that we have sufficient infrastructure (e.g. the Proxy Yield farming program, as well as our Dollar protocol) readily apparent so as to not be written off as some other scam coin project.

We're still weighing the pros and cons of this internally but we prefer to do this from a position of strength, not desperation!

Final Thoughts

The bonding contract issue set us behind our development schedule and budget by a full month. I look at this as sort of a "one step back, two steps forward" type of situation. Fortunately with the first month of testing in production (which is how we discovered this issue) and the CertiK security assessment (scheduled to conclude in the middle of August) we have confidence in the Ubiquity Dollar protocol to serve as the foundation for everything else that we build in the future on top. Having a robust foundation to build upon will allow us to fully focus on the future without hesitation.

Let's Chat

For any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to me, Λ L Ξ X / アレクサンダー.eth, on our Discord!

Sine stabilitate nihil habemus.