DAOrayaki Reserach |BanklessDAO: The revolution will not be banked

DAOrayaki

13 min readSep 17, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount： 220 USD

Category: BanklessDAO, Bankless, Bankless LLC, media, culture, DeFi products, Newsletter, Podcast, Youtube

Contributor：Jones, Julie @Daorayaki

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/banklessdao/

Brief Overview About BanklessDAO

Bankless DAO is a decentralized community to coordinate and propagate bankless media, culture, and education. It’s goal is to drive adoption and awareness of truly bankless money systems like Ethereum, DeFi, and Bitcoin.

Bankless DAO goal or let’s just say Bankless is to help the world go bankless, and for that it achieves this goal through the collective participation of its community

Projet Summary

The Bankless media team has always seen ourselves as a catalyst and steward (along with many others) of the bankless mission. It has grown the movement through memes and media, including a popular newsletter and podcast. Bankless LLC is now a fully operational media studio with revenue, expenses, and employees. But the bankless movement is larger than a media studio. The bankless message is a global banner, and the Bankless DAO is the organization that can coordinate people under this banner. Only an internet-native organization is capable of growing an internet-scaled revolution, and thus we need a Bankless DAO to take the reins of the bankless revolution. Though both share the mission, the Bankless DAO will be independent of Bankless LLC. Bankless LLC plans to continue to grow the bankless movement, but now as one of many participants in the larger Bankless DAO. The Bankless DAO will act as a coordination mechanism for a collection of participating media nodes. Participants can range from individuals acting on their own behalf, or larger entities with employees and resources. Bankless DAO will coordinate them all in order to achieve its mission.

From the other hand, Bankless LLC is a core meia node for the Bankless movement led by Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman. In addition to founding the bankless meme it has grown several valuable media properties including:

Bankless Newsletter — 40k subscribers: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/.
Bankless Podcast — 400k monthly downloads: https://shows.banklesshq.com/.
Bankless Youtube — 46k subscribers: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAl9Ld79qaZxp9JzEOwd3aA.

Bankless LLC is a profitable company with revenue, expenses, employees, and contractors.

Token Economics

BANK on Etherscan: https://etherscan.io/token/0x2d94aa3e47d9d5024503ca8491fce9a2fb4da198
Token Contract Address: 0x2d94aa3e47d9d5024503ca8491fce9a2fb4da198
Name: Bankless Token
Ticker: BANK
Decimals: 18

BANK is the DAO’s native governance token which coordinates activity and gets distributed to community members for active participation in this movement .

Bankless wants to reach 1 billion people, so there will be 1 billion BANK at genesis. “1 billion people. 1 billion BANK”.

Design Philosophy

BANK has no financial value. It is a valueless token that simply represents participation in the bankless community. In addition, No sale, No investors. The Bankless LLC media entity does not own any BANK.

This is by design. BANK is a fair launch distribution. The only recipients of BANK at genesis are individual community participants. The only way to get BANK is to participate in the bankless community. And the Bankless DAO will determine what qualifies as participation through token vote. And with this being said, all participants who play a role in the bankless revolution are considered as the seeds of this revolution.

Distribution of BANK Token at Genesis

A retroactive allocation of BANK will go to those that have already participated in the bankless community. The rest will go to the Bankless DAO treasury. According to the team, the BANK genesis distribution is as follows:

30% Retroactive distribution (liquid)
30% Treasury distribution (liquid)
40% vesting Treasury distribution (vested linearly over 3-years)

At launch the bankless community will have 100% ownership over the DAO. Bankless LLC will own 0 BANK. “The community chooses its destiny”.

Immediately after the formation of Bankless DAO, Bankless LLC will be submitting a Genesis Proposal, which we will speak about later. Bankless LLC believes it has been a good steward of the Bankless revolution, and we would like to continue doing so alongside the Bankless DAO. The Genesis Proposal is a request to the community to distribute 25% of BANK supply to Bankless LLC and Genesis Team under a three year vesting period with a six-month cliff.

Now, according to BanklessDAO if the Genesis Vote passes, the community treasury will be left with 5% of the total supply plus the first month’s vesting distribution in liquid BANK. This fund should act as an initial bootstrapping mechanism for the dAO while the remaining 40% allocation unlocks over the next 3 years.

Retroactive Distribution

The retroactive allocation will distribute 30% of the total BANK supply to Bankless community participants largely via verifiable on-chain actions. The snapshot for all eligible addresses was taken on May 4th, 2021 at 12am EST.

This includes:

2020 Badge Holders — Fixed distribution for all 2020 badge holders.
2021 Badge Holders — Fixed distribution for all 2021 badge holders.
Gitcoin Grants — Anyone who has donated $0.95 or more to the Bankless Gitcoin Grants distributed pro-rata based on the amount donated.
BAPs — Early adopters of rare Bankless merch (BAP0’s)
Premium Members (off-chain) — Snapshot of Bankless Substack premium subscribers. This allocation will be distributed pro-rata based on “unique emails seen” as calculated by Substack on May 1st. The distribution will occur after 30 days of ETH address collecting.

Recipients of the retroactive distribution will be able to claim their BANK for 90 days after the Genesis distribution. Furthermore, at the end of the 90 days, any unclaimed distribution will be returned to the community treasury.

Bankless DAO Genesis Proposal

Now, let’s dive deeper into the first held Bankless DAO proposal. As we said before by design, Bankless LLC has 0 BANK, and that is because BANK is a fair launch distribution. The only recipients of BANK at genesis are individual community participants. Despite the effort put into founding this movement and future plans to participate, neither Bankless LLC nor the Genesis team have a BANK allocation. Both LLC and the Genesis team believes the community to change that, they believe that the Bankless DAO should allocate a portion of BANK supply to Bankless LLC and the Genesis team who launched this DAO, the reason for this is the value that could potentially be added by both to move forward under the right alignment. In brief words, it’s up to the community to decide whether Bankless LLC and the genesis team can be added as an active participant in the Bankless DAO.

Motivation

The motivation given from the founders to the Bankless community is quite straightforward.

Growth

First, both the DAO and the movement need growth, the bankless movement decided this year:

Grow Bankless Newsletter reach to 100k readers.
Grow Bankless YouTube to 100k subscribers.
Grow Bankless Podcast to 1m monthly downloads.

Bankless LLC can act as a funnel for new participants in the DAO.

Products

Second, the Bankless DAO needs products. Such as scaling new crypto media products quickly. For example, Metaversal the Bankless NFT newsletter was launched back in January — it now has 25k subscribers. In addition, Bankless is also expanding into culture products. For example, a recent stealth partnership with the apparel DAO Metafactory to propagate bankless culture to scarce physical items. These culture products can be scaled and expanded with the Bankless DAO.

Lastly, the ability to collaborate with DeFi protocols to create new offerings for the bankless community. Will protocols give groups discounts to the Bankless community? Is it possible to create new financial products like the BED index? Can the Bankless DAO build its own DeFI tools?

Execution

Third, the Bankless DAO needs execution.

Vision without execution is hallucination. When DAO’s fizzle out it’s not due to lack of vision, it’s due to lack of execution. Look at the successful one — Aave, Synthetix, Uniswap, Sushi, Yearn. What’s the thing they have in common?

They deliver. They ship. They execute.

Bankless LLC executes.

Bankless LLC built up the bankless narrative and created one of the most successful crypto media studios in the span of 18 months.

People

The fourth reason is, People. Aligning human capital to the goal and governance of the DAO is critical.

The genesis proposal proposed by Bankless aligned the following talents to Bankless DAO:

Ryan Sean Adams — Media Producer (Genesis team)
David Hoffman — Media Producer (Genesis team)
Lucas Campbell — Writer & Analyst (Genesis team)
Michael Wong — Memelord (Genesis team)
Luke Whitten — Media Operations (Genesis team)
Mariano Conti — Solidity Lead (Genesis team)
James Montgomery — Front-end Developer (Genesis team)
David Mihal — Developer (Genesis team)
Nate Welch — Developer (Genesis team)
Reuben Bramanathan — Regulatory & Governance (Genesis team)
Logan Craig — Web Designer
William Peaster — Writer & NFT Analyst

These are — the Genesis team members and Bankless LLC contributors. Additionally, Bankless LLC will use a portion of its allocation to allow future talent and employees to participate in the DAO.

Partnerships

The fifth reason is Partnerships. Bankless believes DAO-to-DAO partnerships are the future of the DeFi industry, maybe the future of every industry. Here are some DAO’s Bankless LLC has already worked with:

Aave
Balancer
Index Coop
MetaFactory
Kyber
Synthetix DAO
YFI (via yearn contributor)

Additionally, Bankless partnered with a number of non-DAO ecosystem companies including Argent, Gemini, Ledger, Metamask, Zapper, and Zerion.

In the first 30 days when the proposal went online, Bankless LLC planned to accomplish the following goals:

Provide the Genesis team members a vesting BANK allocation for getting Bankless DAO off the ground
Provide operational staffing to collect ETH Addresses from Premium Subscribers in order to complete the Premium Member Retrospective airdrop
Stand-up next versions of DAO infrastructure including: DAO Discord, DAO Snapshot, and DAO website
Participate in governance proposals to accomplish key objectives for the DAO (including Season 1 design)
Organize and recruit early community talent and participants

Specification

Bankless LLC requested a one time minority grant of 250,000,000 BANK (25% of the total supply) vesting over 3 years with a 6 month cliff, in order to participate as one of the core media nodes of the Bankless DAO.

This allocation was granted out of the DAO’s genesis treasury and sent to a Bankless LLC controller multi-sig. If passed the community treasury will be left with 50,000,000 BANK liquid plus an additional 400,000,000 BANK vesting linearly over 3 years starting at genesis.

Bankless LLC will follow the DAO community treasury’s linear vesting schedule of 3 years but also add an initial 6 month cliff to it’s allocation. During this cliff, Bankless LLC will receive no vesting distributions for the first 6 months. After the cliff has completed, Bankless LLC’s allocation will be distributed evenly over the remaining 30 months. According to Bankless DAO, if the genesis proposal passes, 75% of BANK will still be owned and controlled by non-Bankless LLC community members via the retroactive distribution and community treasury, which is already mentioned above. However, if the proposal fails to pass, the total BANK distribution would remain as before.

In plain words, the genesis proposal aligns Bankless LLC to the DAO as a media node and rewards the Genesis team for its role in launching the DAO. THe allocation is a minority stake and vesting over 3 years. If the proposal passed by BANK token hodlers, Bankless LLC will provide foundational support for the dAO during its earliest phases and will remain long-term aligned as Bankless DAO pursues its objectives.

Results

According to Snapshot, the genesis proposal started in May 5, 2021, 3:00AM and ended in May 8, 2021, 3:00AM (4 months ago), with a Single choice voting system, the results showed a strong acceptance of the proposal with a 99.22% YES votes against only 0.78% No votes, where the total number of votes reached 1240 vote, which clearly confirms the Bankless community acceptance.

For more information you can visit: https://snapshot.org/#/banklessvault.eth/proposal/QmdoixPMMT76vSt6ewkE87JZJywS1piYsGC3nJJpcrPXKS

Future BANK Issuance

BANK will include an on/off issuance switch of 2% per year of the total supply governed by BANK holders as an optional growth stimulus. All tokens from issuance will accrue to the community treasury. In addition, BANK holders gain control over the issuance switch after all token vesting schedules have been completed 36 months following the genesis distribution. The annual BANK issuance will be mintable by the multisig on May 4th every year starting in May 2024.

Issuance will be off at default.

Community Treasury

Official Address: Banklessvault.eth

The community treasury is responsible for allocating BANK to anything that aligns with the Bankless DAO goal and passes an on-chain vote by BANK holders.

The goal of the DAO is to drive adoption and awareness to bankless money systems. This could include allocating BANK to distribution campaigns called “Seasons”, giving out grants to other media nodes, and more. The treasury will initially be controlled by a 4 of 7 multisig composed of community members and launch team members. Here are the list of signers and their respective addresses according to Bankless.

Ryan Sean Adams: 0xeD7820deFdFFd1ec5Ac922a0DB721308FDaf509C
David Hoffman: 0x25468E86ED8eC296de39FcB798C7f212924443AB
Lucas Campbell: 0x35EA12472d6fb21A9dB24B397AA2775D332C14B7
Nate Welch: 0xec3281124d4c2fca8a88e3076c1e7749cfecb7f2
David Mihal: 0x8f73be66ca8c79382f72139be03746343bf5faa0
Anthony Sassano: 0x648aA14e4424e0825A5cE739C8C68610e143FB79
Andrew Hong: 0x2ae8c972fb2e6c00dded8986e2dc672ed190da06

For Bankless DAO, this is intended to be a short term solution. In the future, the DAO can explore future treasury management solutions that decentralizes control over the multi-sig. High level options include: SafeSnap, Yam’s DAO House, and others.

BANK Seasons

BANK will operate in 1–3 month distribution campaigns called “seasons” with the goal of driving participation and functionality to the Bankless community.

Bankless Genesis

At genesis, the BANK token will provide:

Access to the Bankless DAO Discord channel (35,000 BANK required)
Ability to vote on Bankless governance proposals

The Bankless DAO Discord is the foundational communication and coordination hub for the community. At launch, access will be permissioned only to wallets that hold 35,000BANK. Furthermore, All governance votes will occur on SnapShot.

Bankless Seasons 0

Season 0 will start at Genesis and serve as a 1 month bootstrap period.

This seasons will include:

Voting for the Genesis Proposal
Discord access for the community
Retroactive airdrop to Premium Members

The goal of this season is for the community to form in DIscord and formulate the initial distribution campaigns and token functionality for future seasons.

Bankless Season 1 and Beyond

Ideas for future seasons will come from the Bankless community, starter ideas from the Genesis Team include:

Legend’s League. BANK distributed to content producers for media and culture deliverables. Producers could include writers, filmers, and artists. (Media)
Rabbithole campaign. Collaborate with Rabbithole to create seasonal campaigns to level up in crypto and DeFi. (Education)
Discord contribution. BANK distributed to Bankless discord contributors pro-rata based on SourceCred scores. (Culture).

Will the Bankless community get involved in protocol politics?

Will it produce culture NFTs?

Will it launch new media outlets?

Will it manage other DeFi communities?

Ultimately it is up to the DAO to determine Season 1 and future seasons initiatives through community discussion and token vote. All future seasons discussions will occur in the #governance section of the Bankless Discord channel!