[NIP-022] - Protocol operations and treasury management

Summary

Ensure the continued safety of user funds by winding down the protocol by and dissolving the community Multisig. 


Background

This NIP seeks to ensure the continued safety of user funds by winding down the protocol and disbanding the community Multisig. If passed, NFT traders/holders are no longer advised to interact with NFTEarth frontends/contracts as the team will no longer be maintaining the project as of the end of February, 2024.

Motivation


The primary vision for NFTEarth has always been to be a community run and self sustaining protocol and DAO. There have been some significant positive steps towards realizing this vision, but in light of the multiple pivots made by the team already. and several unique community initiatives to persevere and grow, it has been largely realized this is an unattainable feat without receiving significant funding to grow the protocol and realistically compete with the large protocols now building on L2s as well as Mainnet. Additionally, the remaining core team wishes to pursue other endeavors. The core contributors with the help of the wider community have completed a lot in the past year and couple months to be proud of - NFTEarth was the only functioning and live NFT Exchange on multiple L2s for the entirety of 2023, was accepted in the Google Cloud for Web3 Startups program, launched a native token on OP Mainnet to Optimism NFT holders, launched the first Chainlink VRF game on L2 Arbitrum, expanded to Base and multiple other networks via the LayerZero OFT token extension, and enabled the token to be used as a currency on the marketplace. In light of this, volume and revenue still remains mostly stagnant on the exchange, from a pure PnL perspective they are still far off from being at levels required to continue and sustain opertations financially, and other revenue generating aspirations have not been realized. Additionally, the core contributors intend to step away from being actively involved by the end of February, 2024. The DAOs current outstanding liabilities remain in multiples of its assets and though this has been hoped to change with proper funding and support, the reality is that continuing to hold out for funding has gone on far too long already and the efforts that showed potential towards this end have been delayed and delayed and delayed, to finally reaching this point.

Conclusion

The community can decide to either:

• Continue operating the protocol and find the best way to do so
• Move forward with this proposal to wind down the protocol to ensure the continued safety of user funds

If the community decides to continue operating the protocol, it will be necessary to support the Multisig on various networks and additional operational tasks. That being said, we believe this will be extremely hard to coordinate and manage over the long term - as achieving entirely onchain community ran governance and DAO operations is something we have been striving for already internally for quite some time.