DAO Launch and NFT Purchase Proposal
Last updated
Last updated
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice.
“The Universe of Star Atlas is expansive. It is a lonely, challenging journey tackling the countless perils alone. Players are encouraged to create factions, combine resources, and compete collectively to outsmart other players.” - Star Atlas whitepaper
Star Atlas, a “next-gen gaming metaverse” currently under production, is launching a series of NFTs as part of their ReBirth genesis event. A total of 13 meta-posters will be released each week, starting April 24th, and a 14th bonus poster will be available for those who own the total collection. These NFTs, while collectibles in their own right, are also expected to provide additional in-game benefits such as loot crates and other unique items.
The sale value of each weekly series will increase in price, with the cumulative total for all 13 posters to be $524,224. This is obviously beyond the reach of most retail investors.
This document proposes a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) so that interested parties can pool resources to purchase this entire NFT set, reap the rewards and determine how they are put to use. It is built with a primary aim toward trustlessness to mitigate the possibility of a scam or rugpull.
The proposed setup utilizes two components: a Gnosis Safe, used to manage digital assets, and a DaoHaus instance, which will allow members to raise and coordinate funds.
The Gnosis Safe is a multi-signature (multisig) smart contract wallet that “requires a minimum number of people to approve a transaction before it can occur (M-of-N)”. Any number of owners can be assigned to a vault, and the required number of signatures needed before a transaction can be sent is configurable as well. The most typical schemes fall into something like a three-of-five or five-of-seven. Even more complex decentralization schemes, utilizing multiple multisigs, are possible as well, but this is beyond the scope of this proposal.
The main use of the Gnosis Safe will be for the custody of Rebirth NFTs. Multisig “owners'' will purchase the NFTs directly on the OpenSea website using Gnosis’s SafeWallet integration. SafeWallet will also allow owners to perform additional dapp operations (as determined by the dao,) once the sale is complete, such as tokenizing the collection or sending assets across the Solana wormhole bridge to be used in-game. (Solana operational details are being researched, see next steps.)
For most participants, primary deposits and voting interactions will be performed via DaoHaus, a smart contract system that allows members to submit and vote on proposals. The bank, or treasury, is the core inventory module of the dao and can hold a variety of ERC-20 tokens. “All members share direct ownership of the bank based on their Shares and/or Loot in relation to one another... Shares grant voting power as well as exit value. Loot grants exit value, but not voting power. The basic workflow of DaoHaus is this: users deposit funds as part of a membership proposal in return for shares. These shares are then used to vote on governance proposals to direct the actions of the dao. At any point in time (outside of open voting proposals) a user may ragequit and take their share of the bank with them.
As Star Atlas may be the first introduction to blockchain for many gamers, and even crypto-savvy individuals might not be familiar with daos or sidechain networks, care must be taken to help onboard as many participants as possible and make it as easy to participate as possible. To make sure that SAIA Dao has a fair launch, we will provide the following incentive:
For 48 hours prior to launch, the first 200 individuals to setup a wallet on the xDAI network and provide their ethereum address to the dao summoner with proof of work (a screenshot,) will receive 1DAI token (for voting), and will have their address added as co-summoners, or founding members, with one voting share when the dao is launched.
The SAIADao will be “summoned” on xDAI, an Ethereum-compatible sidechain. Investing members will need to use the xDAI bridge to send DAI from Ethereum mainnet, then submit a proposal offering an amount of wxDAI tokens as tribute and specifying a corresponding number of shares in a 1:1 ratio.
The way that proposals work is important to understand, as it will be the primary mechanism under which the dao’s activities are coordinated. There are a variety of proposal types, but two primary ones that are relevant here are membership and funding proposals. Both will go through the same stages.
Once a proposal is submitted, an existing member must sponsor the proposal, paying a small deposit in the process (to prevent spam). Sponsored proposals go into a queue, and then into a voting period. Share holding members must submit a signed transaction on the network to vote. If the proposal passes by simple majority, then the sponsor’s deposit is unlocked and a grace period follows, allowing current members to ragequit before the proposal is enacted. Ragequitting allows participants to take their share of loot and leave the dao. Once the grace period has ended, a member has to enact it, via another on-chain transaction, and earns a reward. The proposer receives their deposit back, and may be the same person as the enactor. Proposals will be limited to a certain number (velocity) per day.
Proposed settings (once set, cannot be changed without a dao upgrade/migration):
Primary token: wxDAI Proposal velocity: 24 per day Voting period: 5 days Grace period: 2 days Proposal deposit: 1 wxDAI Proposal reward: .01 wxDAI
Due to the cost of converting and bridging DAI to the xDAI network, some interested parties may find it economically difficult to get funds into the dao, and may potentially be priced out of participating. This may be alleviated via over the counter or peer to peer pooling with other individuals in a non-trustless way. For example, participants with less than 100 DAI available may need to find a trusted member of the dao that would be willing to do a swap between mainnet and xDAI networks for them.
Additionally, to prevent the possibility of a hostile takeover, we recommend that initial voting shares be capped at 10,000 per account. Additional, non-voting loot shares can be provided to match a member’s full financial stake on ragequit. This limit is necessary to prevent a situation in which a voting member may hold more than 51% of the voting shares and pass proposals that may negatively impact other members. This cap, as well as possible incentives for early investors may be proposed and voted on by the community at large.
There has been a good deal of discussion and some hesitancy about any proposal that commits to purchasing NFTs before more details are made available. It appears that it might be several weeks before concrete details are released by the team, and it’s likely that many of the rewards will remain a surprise, making a risk/reward analysis difficult for investors.
On the other hand, there may be a tactical advantage to having first mover status, especially if other groups form with the purpose of buying the NFTs. Anyone who has been in crypto for some time understands the advantage of being early. It’s likely that collecting the complete NFT sets will confer at least some return on investment in the way of in-game assets or bonuses, not to mention the potential resale value of the NFTs as works of art themselves. It is the personal opinion of the author that having a large monetary stake available in the pool from the start of the NFT sale will garner publicity and have a snowball effect, giving us a significant chance of successfully raising, or over-raising funds.
Not everyone shares this view, so in order to move forward with dao creation and work out important details, this proposal mandates that no dao funds will be spent on NFTs until week eight. The cumulative cost of the rewards up to this point is $1948, which is actually very close to the average interest shown by survey recipients.These weeks will give the dao time before committing to phase three after more information should become available from the Atlas Co. team.
Once a purchasing proposal is made, members should either prepare for the long-haul or rage quit if they are not prepared to hold their position for the next six to eighteen months. There is likely no turning back from here. Again, barring details from the Atlas Co. team, it is very hard to determine what sort of economic incentives we will have available for members who wish to cash out their chips and leave in a hurry. Buyout proposals are possible, but not guaranteed, and there will no doubt be much discussion and many proposals put forward and voted on between the time that the NFTs are purchased to a period in time in which we are able to return investment. Please note that a user may ragequit and take their share of loot in the dao bank, but there it is likely that funds will move one-way out of the bank into a multi-signature vault controlled outside of direct dao control. More on this below. While the exact details will be worked out in the coming weeks, here is one possible scenario that may be performed. These details are to be determined by the community, and are not meant as binding:
A proposal is made to purchase the Tier 3 reward posters (weeks 8, 9, and 10), for a total of 14,336 DAI. In this case the recipient address is a Gnosis Safe on xDAI, controlled by a 5 of 7 multisig. The multisig owners are members with a large financial stake, community leaders, or any selection that the dao approves.
The xDAI Gnosis safe sends xDAI across the xDAI bridge to Ethereum mainnet.
DAI tokens are swapped for USDC.
NTFs are purchased on Opensea and withdrawn to the mainnet Gnosis safe.
Again, the technical details are being worked out. We are exploring ways to use on-chain Solana tools at this time, (see footnotes), but the infrastructure is not quite built out and battle tested for us to propose using it at this time. We will make every attempt to communicate with Atlas Co. and Solana teams to make sure that the final implementation details are in the best interest of dao members. We cannot provide any timelines as to how or when the NFTs will be bridged to the Solana blockchain at this time. Every effort to minimize gas costs will be taken, but not at the expense of the safety of invested funds and assets.
The technical team will be working out details and performing dry runs to work out any kinks during weeks 1-8 to make sure that any kinks are worked out ahead of time. The week 13 sale will only last three hours, and will likely require coordination with all of the multisig owners in real-time.
Note: In order to make sure the dao has a complete collection, a proposal(s) to swap shares for the week 1-8 NFTs can be made to one or more members.
Once the NFT sales are complete, dao stakeholders can make additional proposals on how to manage the assets. We’ll refrain from making any concrete predictions at this time, since anything we write now is likely to be wrong by July, when the mini-game and GAO sale begins.
Assuming that we have additional funds left over after the NFT sale, additional proposals to purchase or LP mine ATLAS/POLIS tokens can be made. Airdrops will need to be distributed, and there will be many, many details left to work out over possible SAIA tokens and what the general organizational structure of the team will look like.
Personally, I am really looking forward to bridging the in-game metaverse and real world through Star Atlas, and am really excited to see how this proposal works out. I believe that these efforts will be a success, and that IA will be the premier guild when SA launches. I am personally looking forward to learning development on Solana that we might bring SAIA Dao into the Atlassian universe as a full-fledged Decentralized Autonomous Corporation:
Through the implementation of Decentralized Autonomous Corporations(DAC), entire space-cities can be constructed, and the micro-economy managed by those in charge. Careful strategic cooperation enables players to dominate regions, and the resources available therein. The POLIS token will serve a pivotal role in these cities, permitting the owners of political clout to impose taxes, fees, fines, rules, and laws on those outside the DAC wishing to gain access to these entirely independently owned cities.
Please fill out this SAIADao pre-registration Google Form to help us determine interest. It will be used to estimate potential fund availability.
Update 4/22/21: Initial form responses and interviews with responders indicate an actual open interest of at least $266,700.
New users will need instruction materials on how to install and create Metamask wallets, protect their seed phrases, connect to xDAI and sign transactions. These docs will have to be created to allow 48 hour period for signups before Phase 1.
Mainnet operations are expensive. Gas costs to summon a dao on mainnet are currently around $350 (@250 gwei), and proposal and voting costs would likely price out most casual players who want to participate. Using xDAI will allow us to subsidize participation through our Phase 0 proposal, and socialize the mainnet gas costs to operate the Gnosis Vault.
XDai bridge fees: One transaction approval and a token send, around $30 on mainnet.
DauHaus gas fees (Kovan testing):
Operation
Gas
Gas Fee (100 gwei)
Cost in USD ($2500 ETH)
Summon DAO
630259
0.063026
$157
Membership proposal
513459
0.051321
$128
Sponsor approval
37737
0.003774
$9.45
Sync bank
135895
0.013589
$34
Gnosis Safe gas fees (Rinkleby testing):
Operation
Gas
Gas Fee (100 gwei)
Cost in USD ($2500 ETH)
Safe creation (2 of 3)
658004
0.0658
164.5
Remove owner
60876
0.006087
Add owner
77775
0.007775
Bid on OpenSea
Gnosis transactions require signing by a number of owners. The signatures themselves do not use gas, however Gnosis transactions has an additional gas parameters on top of the standard Ethereum gas limit and gas price called safeTxGas. We will need further testing to determine the overhead.
How to transfer collectibles from OpenSea to Gnosis.
Create new Safe
Specify name (only viewable locally)
Add owners and number of owners required for transaction confirmation.
Get vault address and publish to community.
Note: Deposits can be made to the vault directly, allowing small dollar donors a way to stake in without paying the gas fee to swap or bridge. TBD.
DaoHaus: Use hard mode during deployment and set the proposed options, providing list of "co-summoners" and share amounts.
As DaoHaus members, we get a subgroup in the DauHaus Discourse server. This can be used to break out discussion from Discord to get feedback before actual commitment proposal is made.
Multisig wallets: https://docs.solana.com/offline-signing#offline-signing-over-multiple-sessions
Governance module (in progress): https://github.com/bhgames/solana-program-library/tree/feat/consensus-instruction-runner/governance/program
