DAOrayaki Research |DAOMaker：A Tokenized Startup Incubator and Fundraising Platform

DAOrayaki

15 min readJun 8, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount：200 USDC

Category: DAOMaker, dTeams, Venture Bond (VB), Dynamic Coin Offering (DYCO), Strong Holder Offering (SHO)

Contributor：Jones ,朱莉白, DAOctor@Daorayaki

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/daomaker-dai-bi-hua-de-chuang-ye-fu-hua-qi-he-mu-zi-ping-tai/

Financing:

DAOMaker initial price: 1 DAO = 0.1USD

DAOMaker current price: $4,81USD

Initial fundraising goal: $300,000USD

Total USD Raised: DAOMaker held a series of Dynamic Coin Offerings since late 2020, raising over $8MUSD.

DAOMaker current volume: $172,02MUSD

Launch date: The DAOMaker project has been founded in 2015, and introduced for the first time in 2017 to be eventually officially launched in November 2019.

Token name: DAOMaker token is known under the name “DAO”.

Token type: DAO is issued under the standard protocol ERC-20.

What does DAOMaker provide?

DAO Maker (DAO) is a tokenized startup incubator and fundraising platform with the goal of helping decentralized application (dApp) developers leverage the power of Social Mining and omnipresent exposure to build a community, gain shareholders and convert its community of users to value-adding and value-assessing members of a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). DAO Maker helps token startups build a funding framework by offering investors venture bonds to establish cash flow, while providing expert insight to build smart contract tokenomic infrastructure, including protocol-driven burns, buybacks, staking incentives, dump penalties and other mechanisms within the dApp. Investors can stake ERC-20 DAO token to gain access to exclusive SHOs (Strong Holder Offering).

1. Background

DAOMaker has its origins with current CEO Christoph Zaknun. After a profitable run in with Bitcoin Cash, he began to focus his efforts on building his own blockchain development, resulting in the launch of ICO Dog. After having success with the platform, he met with Giorgio Marciano who together with Christoph co-founded DAOMaker.

Prior to this, Christoph was a medical student, having previously studied mechatronics. Meanwhile, Giorgio has over 16 years in software and development behind him. Today, the team consist of more than 20 members.

2. Team, Affiliates & Partners

DAOMaker teams up various roles to build an efficient team that can work under any circumstances, below we list the main parts of the DAOMaker project:

a. Executive Team:

·Christoph Zaknun, CEO:

Chris Keeps the company glued together. He manages the company’s risk profile, be it capital allocation or project expansions, while ensuring the entire team maintains proper communication.

l Created one of the first ICO brands in 2017.

l Supported $100M in ICO funding prior to DAOMaker.

l Austrian Army sergeant for Atomic, Biological, and Chemical defense force.

·Giorgio Marciano, CTO:

Gio leads the company’s technology expansion for client products, while ensuring that internal departments have the required tools to overtake operations with tech-enablement. He oversees the company’s developers and sets internal technology architecture. He is the calm-keeper at DAO Maker in hectic moments due to his experience.

l 15 years of technology development experience.

l Led development of Sky Italy interface, used by millions.

l Coordinated technology development of an EU-funded €15M multi-national project.

·Hatu Sheikh, CMO:

Hatu pushes the company to its next products. He seeks new opportunities for growth in the industry to strategize products that would fit the need, and then manages the company’s marketing assets to popularize the company’s newest developments. Hatu oversees the company’s content and design team members.

l Co-managed a $3M annual county budget in NY.

l Previously supported the marketing strategy of various tokens, blockchain products, and exchanges.

l Facilitated 65M+ in ICO funding before DAOMaker.

b. Tech Team:

·Partic O Sullivan, Full Stack Developer:

Patric has been developing web applications for 14 years. Before DAO Maker, he was working at two cryptocurrency-focused companies. Currently he is the lead developer of the DAO Maker investment platform.

·Gianni DI Noia, Dev Ops (SaaS):

Gianny has over 10 years of experience in python, angular and Django, He streamlines onboarding of clients to our SaaS solutions.

·Karel Novak, Full Stack Developer:

Senior developer, with years of experience with blockchain developments, working on DAOMaker investment platform.

·Vitalli Mokrotovarov, Full Stack Developer:

Vitalli has over 20 years of experience in leading IT positions and is a specialist for enterprise cloud solutions, At DAOMaker, he’s building blockchain-agnostic tools for the full analysis and monitoring of nodes in networks.

3. DAOMaker Governance and Incentive mechanisms:

The DAOMaker token enables its token holders to access governance benefits, reward distributions (for active participation in the DAO Maker ecosystem / DAOMaker Platform) and loyalty in the DAOMaker Ecosystem. The token and its desirability play a key part in user acquisition and retention for all current and future products developed by DAO Maker.

a. dTeams:

dTeams is a SaaS solution that helps tokenized startups with everyday needs. dTeams provides the infrastructure to prevent corruption, while providing facilities for governance, staking, and safe liquidity mining, all managed through a battle-tested cPanel with a built-in CRM. It even provides job and career opportunities to people who provide services to tokenized startups and are willing to accept specific cryptocurrencies. dTeams is a freemium permissionless product with additional premium services that can be accessed and paid via DAO Token, along with an additional fee that is a percentage of the volume generated on the platform.

b. Structured Funding:

DAO Maker has raised over $35M** for tokenized startups, and these supported startups now have a collective market cap of over $300M. The DAOMaker platform is a place for both token and equity ventures to raise funds, with the powerful facility of supporting various forms of refundable and risk-apped offerings. Such fundraising structures will mandate that startups provide a large portion of their raise as escrow, maintained in an insured custody. These escrowed funds ensure DAO Maker users can claim refunds within their designated time period, if requested.

c. Refundable Strong Holder Offering (rSHO):

Most startups use public sales as a means to boost their initial marketing and grow their own community. However, most public sale formats fail to achieve this. Thus, The Strong Holder Offering (SHO) is designed to build a community that actively provides awareness for the company, while also inspiring confidence via a strict refund policy in some cases. In case SHO is conducted in refundable manner, a percentage of non-refunded capital will reward active DAO token holders for helping tokenized startups in the DAO Maker ecosystem achieve Success (via their active participation in the DAO Maker community of active participants by assessing and rating the most successful tokenized startup projects).

d. Dynamic Coin Offering (DYCO):

DYCO is a new service and framework for money-backed token offerings, which is accomplished by maintaining 100% of the token circulating supply backed by a significant portion of the funds raised during the token sale. DAO Maker escrows these funds through an insured custodian. DAO Maker platform users can voluntarily claim refunds within the specified time period. Further, if the project achieves success via the DYCO, a percent of the non-refunded money is used to reward the ecosystem, as these funds are added to the DAO stakers’ distribution pool, in order to remunerate the entire ecosystem for their active participation in the acceleration and community building of the new company.

e. Product Introduction:

A percentage of startup funding is claimed by the platform to further the progress of the DAO Token, thereby incentivizing platform growth and

user loyalty. Startups can opt for premium access to additional platform

services for payment in DAO tokens, in particular:

l Access to the DAOMaker Business Network Ecosystem.

l Access to DAOMaker software solutions.

l Access to DAOMaker Premium Research Reports.

l Access to DAOMaker Community Leaders.

f. DAO Token Utilities:

f.1. Governance and Reward Pool

Token holders have the opportunity to stake DAO tokens and gain governance power through proposals and rating of on launched proposals. Participation in governance allows stakers to receive payments sourced from platform fees. Staked DAO tokens are locked for a period of time to ensure only participants with a long-term vision can join this process. Every company that will utilize one or several DAOMaker products will bring its own community to the DAO ecosystem. Active staking users will be able to elect a coin (via rating of the most successful projects), which will be supported by the DAO reward vault each month.

f.2.Premium Access

Token stakers also receive benefits in allocation priority and incentives. When the platform hosts high-demand offerings, stakers will receive priority access to these startups. In case sales are oversubscribed on the DAO platform DAO Token stakers are given priority as they have proven on chain reputability by providing liquidity on Automated Market Makers and off chain proof through participation in social mining. Users offered the possibility to fast track into sales via DAO Premium accounts that are paid in DAO tokens. Most DAOMaker offerings face massive demand, and we expect an increase in this trend as we shift to a system that provides even greater security to retail venture investors. The launch of the decentralized acceleration programs will likely add further fuel to demand. DAOMaker has been an innovator in the token-enabled governance space since 2018, as the Social Mining product was cored around this. The product has been available long before governance attracted hype during the 2020 DeFi explosion.

f.3. Incentivizing Long-Term Staking

For token holders to participate in governance, tokens have to be staked in order to ensure only people that have a long-term vision and are able to participate in the assessment and rating process. Elected projects will receive help and services from the DAO and community. Therefore, users stake their tokens in order to ensure that they have an incentive to analyse and rate projects that are in the best interest of the DAO. In case they continuously engage in harmful projects their stake will be negatively affected. The DAO token staking program differs from most in that staked tokens undergo a time lock. Users governing the DAO ecosystem should have a long-term, vested interest and will avoid any harmful behaviour. The lockup and vesting of staked tokens ensure only users interested in a lasting commitment to the ecosystem participate in proposals and ratings.

f.3.1 Stake Activation Period

After initiating a stake, holders have to wait 14 days for the stake to become active. During the 14-day period, holders are unable to participate in governance, nor do they receive rewards.

f.3.2 Stake Unlock Period

The token unlock will have 5-day cooldown period. Tokens can be withdrawn from governance after 5 days. Stakers who want want urgent exit will be able to do so, for a fee. An express unstaking fee (in DAO tokens) will be charged, starting at 1% of staked tokens for an instant unlock. The fee will reduce by 0.2% every 24 hours. After 5 days, the fee will reach 0. Any tokens claimed from express unstaking will be burned.

This system is designed to encourage governance participation by only those interested in the project’s longevity. It also ensures people do not bounce in and out of staking during price volatility, an act that only furthers volatility. Thus, the staking system is designed to build commitment within the community and ecosystem participants.

f.3.3 Incentives and Remunerations

Platform fees build up the governance reward vault used for incentives and remunerating active engagement on the platform such as social mining. 0.5% of the vault value will be used for such incentives and remunerations every day. Given the example of a new reward added to the distribution vault, the first half of the new reward will be distributed quickly (approximately 5 months). The second half, though, will take be distributed over a long period of time. This ensures the distribution Vault has adequate reward liquidity, regardless of market cycles.

The reward vault is designed to incentivize the DAO community to participate in the acceleration of new projects coming into the ecosystem. Tokens are distributed to all members to pull them into the new projects as a form of awareness campaign. They can use these tokens to participate in the governance and automated incubation process on dTeams and social mining, without the need to buy these new tokens on the exchange. This facilitates the acceleration DAO program.

The reward distribution curve is calculated as

g. Strong Holder Offering:

DAO Maker Platform will offer fundraising through traditional offerings, rSHO, DYCO. These structured fundraising systems will be available to both equity crowdsales and token sales. The rSHO will be an exception, as it will be just for tokens. The rSHO lets projects use the DAO Maker fundraising platform to operate a compliant public sale, with access to massive exposure and the opportunity to seed a powerful community. The key attraction point is that the rSHO incentivizes the DAO Maker community to support the projects that use this system. This opportunity is be available to projects that offer 80% of the raised funds for potential refunds for participants in case people are not satisfied with the progress in the first 6 months from TGE. In order to create a positive incentive model, DAO token stakers will receive additional rewards in the form of tokens that join via rSHOs. However, the distribution of rSHOs will not be even.

g.1 The Distribution

The projects using the SHO will offer refunds within a 6-month period from the point of TGE in case the SHO is conducted in a refundable manner. The projects have 6 months time to prove their legitimacy to the open market. In case the project does not fall below 20% of the initial purchasing price. Less than 10% of all token sale maintain this value after 6 months. In case the project does achieve this, funds that were kept in DAO custody to protect investors are sent to the company for further development a percentage of the funds raised by token buyers is then used to buy the SHO coin from the open market and distributed to participants in the acceleration DAO. These rewards are a success fee designed to incentivize all participants in the DAO Maker community to help the project to become part of the 10%. In case the project is not successful the custodied funds are returned to the original token buyers.

A percent of non-refunded funds will be used to buy back the project’s tokens on the secondary market. Then these “success fee” tokens will be used as a Vault for incentives and remuneration to active participants on the platform DAO Maker. So, if a project runs a SHO, it is bound to give refunds if buyers of that project’s token seek them. At the same time, if it does well, buyers will not want refunds, an incentive (success fee) will be applied. The success fee will be used to buy the project’s tokens, and then paid to DAO stakers as a means for both incentive and their remuneration for active participation in the ecosystem. This incentivizes DAO stakers to have a reason to facilitate the success of ecosystem projects. Hence, this operation is titled “decentralized acceleration.”

h. Platform Fee Distribution:

A portion of platform fees from Social Mining and dTeams will be used to buy tokens of projects that join the DAO Maker ecosystem. Secondary market buys powered by DAO Maker platform fees will pose great opportunity for token action surrounding small caps. It will also be a powerful exposure opportunity for both large and small caps. This system incentivizes projects to join the DAO Maker ecosystem to avail two benefits:

l Get exposure to the DAOMaker community.

l Benefit from the price action and volume generated by the buy back.

Creators of DAOMaker wants to incentivize projects to use the various DAOMaker products by creating a supporting event for liquidity and exposure, DAOMaker essentially shows loyalty to projects that become a part of its ecosystem. Thus, DAOMaker increases the conversion rate of new users to purchase DAO Tokens and become more active in the DAO community. These users then activate as holders, that are eligible to cast regular votes, determining which project’s token should be purchased. As token holders will be rewarded, it will be in their interest to offer support to selected projects, as the success of those tokens will benefit them. This will provide incredible community support to selected projects, further growing the value of joining the DAO Maker ecosystem. This reward vault listing will be analyzed by platform participants and rated each month, with rating power being derived from the amount of tokens staked (as an assurance to guarantee proper and good faith behaviour in such analysis and rating process).

i. Loyalti Perks:

Holders of DAO tokens will benefit from loyalty benefits ranging from cashbacks on investments to priority in allocations.

i.1 Cashback

Based on a user’s stake, they will receive a tiered cashback on the fee that is otherwise charged to the project. For example, suppose a person is staking 500,000 DAO tokens. He/she would qualify in tier 2 (T2) of the loyalty program, which gives 65% discount on the platform fee.

Now suppose this person participates in a crowd equity offering with a $10,000 purchase, and the platform fee to the project (raising funds) is 7%. The person would not only purchase $10,000 of equity, but also receive a discount in the height of 65% of the 7% fee. That’s 10,000 * 65% * 7%, which is $455. The person gets $10,000 of the equity purchased, and an additional $455 in cashback as a loyalty bonus for staking. If the person is not staking and is just holding tokens, the loyalty reward is reduced by 75% on all tiers.

The cashback system will be initiated once finalized, for which the timeline is not defined yet. The numbers and variables shown above are only meant as examples and may vary from the cashback system implemented in the future.

1.2 Allocation Priority

DAOMaker’s DYCO and SHO offerings have seen great demand, especially in the small public rounds. For oversubscribed offerings DAO Token stakers are given priority as they have proven reputability. Additionally, users can pre fund and auto allocate into offerings via premium accounts paid in DAO tokens. Meaning users are able to pre allocated funding prior to any listing. These funds will then be auto allocated without the need of the users to be there on time (auto allocation fast-track service). Furthermore, The DAO token will give its holders priority in DAOMaker offerings. case sales are oversubscribed on the DAO platform a lottery will take place. DAO token holders will receive more lottery tickets. Winning tickets will be allowed to participate in the sale. Tokens in the SHO ecosystem will continue to play a role in allocation priority, but the larger portion of allocation will be based on holding/staking status of DAO tokens.

j. DAO Token Details:

The DAO token will be sold utilizing a 65%-refund Dynamic Coin Offering

(DYCO). The token will also be vesting using a toll bridge. While the standard distribution is 20% at TGE and then 20% per quarter for 4 quarters, DYCO participants will have the opportunity to claim all tokens in advance by paying a toll.

j.1 DYCO Refunds

The DAO token was initially priced at $0.1. The refund milestones were set at 4,7, and 12 months from TGE.

l 30% of sold tokens will be refundable after 4 months at $0.065.

l 40% of sold tokens will be refundable after 7 months at $0.065.

l 30% of sold tokens will be refundable after 12 months at $0.065.

Collectively, the three refund rounds add up to all tokens sold under the DYCO.

j.2 Vesting and Toll Bridge

The Toll Bridge is enacted by the smart contract that distributes the tokens to buyers. The smart contract manages the distribution per three calculations: quarterly distribution, toll bridge burns, and toll bridge claims.

1.1. Vesting sold Tokens

l Public Sale Tokens: Fully unlocked at TGE.

l Short Term Round: 20% unlocked at TGE followed by quarterly vesting of 20% + Toll Bridge.

l Long Term Round: 1 year lock followed by quarterly vesting.

Toll Bridge Claim = 100 = [(100 — x) * (0.75 * (360 — z)/360)) + 10*(z/360)]

x = vesting schedule. z = days since TGE.

1.2. Total Token Distribution

l Team: 1.5-year lock, followed by 12.5% equal quarterly vesting.

l Advisors: 1.5-year lock, followed by 12.5% equal quarterly vesting.

l Foundation: 2-year lock, followed by 14.28% quarterly unlocks.

l Mergers & Acquisitions: 5% unlock after 5-quarter lock, then 10% after 6 months, followed by 28.3% biannual unlock.

l Customer Incentives: 3-month lock followed by unlocks only per platform usage.

l DAO-Managed Foundation: 3% unlock after 12 months, then 4 quarters of 5% release, then 4 quarters of 8% release, and then 5 quarters of 9% release.