Hello SQUID DAO!

Thank you to the community for spreading Web3 and DeFi news this past month. I believe Leviathan News is the strongest and best informed community-based media operation in existence, and it is all thanks to your hard work! We hope this allocation request correctly values your contributions.

Please note this proposal to the SQUID DAO is for 500K to cover allocations for news aggregation retroactively earned in the month of June. A separate vote of 500K covering allocations for livestreams and other content creation is set to follow.

The top 35 are shown in the screenshot above, the full spreadsheet is visible here.

Leviathan Internal Owner

CurveCap

Spending Ask

Each month the SQUID token is authorized to mint 1MM in new emissions to cover the prior month. Traditionally half of these emissions have been reserved for news operations. We uphold to this tradition and keep our request capped at 500K.

Rationale

The "News" allocation in fact includes many items beyond the scope of the news aggregation operations.

News (258K): Covers all points earned for posting, editing and approving headlines via the Telegram bot or the website

Antispam (10K): Covers moderation activity within the Squid Cave public Telegram channel

Dev (175K): Covers all ongoing development affecting the Telegram bot, the website, the Auction bot and related QA or bug reports

Auction (34K): Early users of our auctions have been instrumental in reporting feedback and bug reports, and we offer these users a token of gratitude.

DAO (23K): Coordinating Leviathan efforts via our new SQUID DAO has been a breakthrough in decentralization, thanks to our early DAO voters for inaugurating the and/or reporting issues in voting.

Which Leviathan metrics and goalposts are affected?

News Loop draft: 7/4/25

This budget directly addresses specific elements of our news loop including 1a, 2a, 4a, and 5.

What happens if we don’t do the spend?

We look forward to hearing community feedback and resubmitting the spend request based as needed.

If the request is approved in spite of errors brought up in the feedback process, we will work with affected parties to provide SQUID compensation, either from the author's pockets or in subsequent allocation requests.

Next Steps

We are aware it would be preferable to have a forum to discuss these allocations, but that the beleaguered devs don't project this to be ready before August. We therefore encourage you to utilize the comment section of the original SQUID DAO Substack post to serve as a comment forum for this proposal. As alternate channels, please feel free to message the author directly on 𝕏 or in the Squid Cave public Telegram channel.

We look forward to streamlining this process over the next several months. If you are interested in contributing to any aspect of these operations and earning $SQUID in next month's drop, please message in the aforementioned channels!