June 2023
Prepared by アレクサンダー.eth, Gropper.eth
Ubiquity Research Ltd.
It has been a full and exciting year since we closed our seed round. Thank you to our capital partners for supporting Ubiquity. We truly value you and your support.
Q2 2023
You can click on each topic to expand and read more.
Optimizing Infrastructure - We have invested in optimizing on our internal infrastructure throughout the bear market to establish a robust foundation for our Dollar, and to streamline operations.
To enhance our operational efficiencies, we created the the UbiquiBot and the DevPool. Two systems that we believe can work together to push the needle forward in distributed organization operations.
UbiquiBot
Introducing our DAO task “operating system” the UbiquiBot. This handles most management-related tasks, including assisting with task pricing, follow ups, re-assignment on neglected tasks, soon to be contributor reputation management, automated payouts for task completion, and more.
- Any organization is free to add this to their repositories on GitHub. We would like to work with other research & development focused organizations to try our system, to receive feedback, and to one day to settle their payments for their internal operations in the Ubiquity Dollar.
- The source code of the bot (like all of our products) is publicly available here.
- The high level roadmap is available here.
DevPool Payment Claims Portal
Working in tandem with the UbiquiBot, we created a payment claims portal, pay.ubq.fi. This functions to allow for DAO contributors to easily claim their compensation for completing tasks. You can view with example claim data here.
Inside of the payments portal, we also built a payments audit tool to stay on top of operations related outflows https://pay.ubq.fi/audit
DevPool Task Directory
To collect all of the tasks we have to offer in one place, we also built a global bounty board, the DevPool Directory.
- Partners using our system can automatically add their repositories via a pull request, and their bounties will be synchronized every hour.
- This is useful for our global talent collective, currently referred to as the “DevPool” to contribute to all DAOs on our system in a standardized and streamlined way.
Ubiquity Repository Template
We built our repository template which includes custom functionality for continuous deployment on untrusted bounty hunter forks. This is essential for rapid testing and review of bounty hunters’ work.
All of these changes demonstrate our long term vision towards operating Ubiquity as a decentralized organization and our continued efforts for contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem.
Major milestones were accomplished since the last investor update on the Ubiquity Dollar. We want to highlight that we completed our Diamond Standard migration and the collateral module.
Diamond Standard
The Diamond Standard enables superior protocol upgrade flexibility. This allows us to continue to innovate and not worry about limitations around improving our core on-chain infrastructure. According to our extended research, this is the most robust standard when it comes to protocol upgradability.
Collateral Module
The collateral module enables the Dollar to support Liquity’s LUSD as collateral. It is designed to support other assets as well. However we will begin exclusively with LUSD.
Why LUSD?
There are many reasons why we believe that LUSD is a superior "store of value" but not exactly great as a stablecoin for transactions (namely that it perpetually floats above peg and has the most severe scaling limitations compared to the well known stablecoins.)
- We believe that it is the most censorship resistant stable-ish asset. The only backing is ETH, which is the most decentralized asset available on the Ethereum network.
- It has the smallest attack surface area due to it being a static protocol.
- There is no governance on the protocol.
- No contract upgrades or modifications are possible, as it is a static protocol.
Regarding Hacks & Attacks
Liquity has surpassed $4B TVL in the past and still have not been hacked. Lindy is stronger as time passes especially if there are no changes to the protocol (which is not possible.)
The only viable attack vector that we are aware of is if the US government forces Chainlink to freeze their oracle. Fortunately, Liquity thought about this and included a fallback Tellor oracle for a graceful system wind down.
Ubiquity Card & Vaults - We are working on launching a Ubiquity Card and consolidating our vaults program to be internal to our Dollar.
Ubiquity Card
We are actively conducting research on issuing debit cards in order to allow for easier off-ramping for our bounty hunters and DAO contributors, as well as increasing the utility for our Dollar. We are currently exploring protocol level integrations with the Ubiquity Dollar token and the debit card, where for example, a user’s personal on-chain wallet can be used as their own on-chain “checking account.”
A technical discussion is available on GitHub here.
Vaults
We are consolidating this initiative to be internal to the Dollar’s mechanics, very similar to FRAX “Collateral Investor” AMOs.
Treasury - Our treasury is sustaining at about $1.7M USD.
We are happy to announce that due to effective treasury and operations expenditure management, we have successfully balanced our daily expenses with our income, effectively reducing our net expenses to $0.
Current Status
- We have about $1.7M of the $2.0M USD raised on 1 May 2022, similar to the last update.
- Funds are held primarily in a 4/5 Gnosis Safe on Ethereum Mainnet.
- We have a runway of approximately 3.5 years (January 2028).
- Note that this conservative projection does not include any gains from treasury management strategies (e.g. LP yields) or profits from our upcoming products.
- The treasury management strategy at the moment is a simple buy-and-hold of some ETH.
- This was a direct response to the USDC depeg. We eliminated all USDC exposure prior to depeg and diversified into other stablecoins (USDT, sUSD, LUSD) and some ETH.
- We will opportunistically buy dips on ETH.
Series A, $100M to $200M - We are working towards our Series A fundraising round.
We are in the early stages of preparing for our next fundraising round. The purpose of this round is similar to our seed round, which is primarily to develop strategic partnerships. The financing is nice to have, but the main objective is to build relationships that will help us execute on our long term vision.
- The scheduled fundraising window is between March 2024 - September 2024. This is because we believe that this will be closer to the “top” of the market, which should allow us to command a higher valuation.
- We plan to aggressively engage in Curve bribes during the fundraising window to increase our Dollar’s liquidity and improve our valuation.
Target Valuation
The target valuation for Series A is between $100M-$200M USD for another 10% for tokens ($10M - $20M USD raise.)
Partnerships - We are actively working on developing partnerships with research & development focused organizations. For example we have applied for grants with GitHub/Web3 Foundation, Optimism & MakerDAO. We are currently exploring, reaching out to and applying for additional strategic partners and grants.
Optimism
We applied for a grant in the Optimism forums to settle payments for DevPool payment settlement on Optimism. Our architecture is friendly for builders, and we believe that projects looking to enhance the development efforts of the Optimism ecosystem could benefit from using our incentivized development tooling.
GitHub
We applied for Web3 Foundation grant in order to set up a formal relationship with GitHub.
MakerDAO
We are currently working on their governance forums proposing for the SubDAOs of MakerDAO to integrate the DevPool to enhance their internal operational efficiencies.
Gnosis
We have ongoing private communications with decision makers at Gnosis to leverage our integration of SAFE and payment settlement on Gnosis Chain (formerly known as xDAI Chain.)
Request for Introductions
A core component of our rapid growth will be your ongoing support. We believe you each have a unique set of contacts and resources which can help expedite our mission and maximize your return in the process.
As such, we are asking for your assistance in making introductions to top engineering teams as beta testing partners for our DevPool product. As you might recall we built UbiquiBot which is a distributed organization task management system. We have since integrated Ubiquibot so that it also helps financially incentivize and automate software development under the platform name: DevPool.
DevPool is like the Upwork in crypto.
We are looking to be the ultimate conduit for all projects, developers and the data in between them. To that end, we are looking for introductions to decision makers responsible for research & development at the following organizations:
Gnosis, Uniswap, Curve, Paradigm, MakerDAO, Synthetix, Optimism, Liquity, Aave, Compound, Lido, Yearn, Balancer, 0x, dYdX.
We believe that these teams would be great partners for beta testing and utilizing the DevPool due to their dedication to open source, innovation, and expertise in the industry.
See the DevPool video demo at https://dao.ubq.fi/devpool-flow.
DevPool, powered by UbiquiBot, is part of a larger initiative that aims to build functional tools and platforms where payments will be settled in Ubiquity Dollars.
Read more about DevPool at https://dao.ubq.fi/devpool.
We hope you can assist us with the aforementioned introductions as we unlock the next phase in our development! Again, thank you for your steadfast support.
The Ubiquity Team.