[GIP-18] DAO Round Part 2 - Community Proposal

This proposal is aimed at getting DAO approval for Part 2 of the DAO round.

See this (long) forum discussion for details

Also see the discussion of part 1 of the DAO round for further context.

The idea behind part 2 of the DAO round was to find a way to allow community members (and in particular, contributors to Gearbox) to participate on the same terms as the awesome VCs who supported Gearbox in part 1 of the round. Gearbox is a DAO after all, so more community and contributor involvement is always a good thing.

On the other hand, doing this kind of community round also presents some challenges, the most difficult of which are regulatory. The VCs in part 1 are all known entities, so this wasn’t a problem.

In part 2, how do we maintain the spirit of openness and community participation whilst not running afoul of KYC/AML/Security regulation. Regardless of what your thoughts are on the validity of these regulations, they are a reality and to fully ignore them puts Gearbox as a whole at risk, which would ultimately be bad for everyone. Another point of contention is how we protect people who are anon/semi-anon (like myself), and allow them to participate without doxing to the whole DAO, or indeed the whole world.

Luckily, after much debate and discussion (this has been a topic on the forum since June!!), Sergey from Aurum Law Firm suggested a solution.

See this post for his full suggestions

The TLDR of this post from Sergey is that for a fee, Aurum will do KYC on all of those who are interested in participating, will keep the information private and secure, and will write a report on which addresses/users have passed the KYC. Aurum stated that they would do this for a flat fee of $10k.

In order to try to keep the total number of participants under 20 people, at first a 100k minimum contribution was suggested. After further discussion, we settled on a minimum of 50k.

FrankTheTank and 0xBeckoningCat, who have been leading the charge on this community initiative, have collected a list of names. The final list is as follows:

If it turns out there are those who (for whatever reason) do not pass these checks, Aurum will not disclose any personal data, information about rejected profiles and reasons for rejection.

Part 2 will occur with the same terms as those in Part 1:

$150M FDV with 1 year cliff lockup, and 1 year linear vesting after that. To harmonize the process for this part 2, let’s choose September 15 as the cliff start.

TOTAL Contribution Size: $2,205,000.

We expect that some participants fall out during the KYC process, which is totally acceptable and will then result in a lower contribution size. The total number of tokens will be adjusted then accordingly.

GEAR total: 147,000,000 GEAR representing 1.47% of total supply.

This proposal aims to put in place a strict timeline for this round to work, that is:

• On Thursday, September 15: emails, addresses, and amounts - are to be communicated to Aurum at the time of the proposal reaching quorum (if the proposal gets approved).
• By Tuesday, September 27: Aurum is to get in touch with the participants via email addresses provided, and proceed with all their checks. Participants are expected to monitor all emails and provide all the documents & necessary information to Aurum.
• By Wednesday, September 28: Aurum is to communicate to the DAO in the same corresponding topic - all those who have passed KYC AML, and specify their: (1) wallet address which will fund with USDC and which is to receive GEAR, which must be the same wallet for this process; (2) USDC contribution amounts (so that devs can count the number of tokens required for vesting contracts). All those that did not pass KYC can be disregarded.
• By Wednesday, October 5: all USDC amounts should be in the DAO multisig wallet 0x7b065Fcb0760dF0CEA8CFd144e08554F3CeA73D1 on Ethereum. Anyone who is late - is automatically not taken into consideration. Anybody who was not on the communicated list by Aurum yet tries to send their USDC - will essentially lose their funds, so don’t try it.
• An x1 voting multiplier is to be used both for Part 1 and Part 2 of the DAO round.
• In the days or weeks to come after the process, DAO-appointed devs are to deploy vesting contracts with the correct amounts, and connect to Snapshot. It should be noted that this might take into November, as all current devs will be busy with V2 testing & deployments.

Vote YES to approve this proposed part 2 of the DAO round, including the $10,000 fee to Aurum and the suggested KYC processes.

Vote NO to reject this proposal.