Community Led Decisions:

We are putting forth a vote to give the community a chance to signal what directions our priorities should be focused on.

This isn't meant to be an on-chain-binding agreement, but rather a simple signal of interest from the community to influence our choices as contributors.

This vote is a weighted multiple choice. That means you can distribute your vote weight between as many options as you want! So think of it as resource allocation percentages. It is also quadratic, which means final vote weighting will balance out RVRS bag sizes should a few large bags lean heavily towards one direction with the majority of their votes while many others focus elsewhere with smaller, more distributed vote weights. The goal of this isn’t to minimize anyone’s vote significance, but rather to maximize everyone’s individual voice while still recognizing to some degree the significant stake some have compared to others.

I think of it as a heat-map of general community sentiment that indicates the intensity of focal areas.

Please review the following summaries (or view this google doc) to help you understand the perspective of the core contributors that have been working on moving the project forward in these respective directions. They are listed in no particular order:

Fee Generating Product:

Passive Growth Opportunities-

The main appeal of building some kind of Index or Fund is that regardless of how the market performs, we make profits on fees. This is a solid strategy and a good path forward, as we have the know-how to achieve this with mostly in-house resources at this time. It shouldn’t be that costly to get a minimum viable product established.

In theory this is simple, but the entire idea hinges on people actually using the product in the end. Everyone is playing this game right now, so competition here is the highest. In order to stand out and gain attention in the market we will need to have something unique to offer and the ability to market that product to a wide enough audience. Marketing is something we will need to really focus on improving, once we figure out all the steps of how and what to build.

First Steps-

Define Target Market:

1. Easy access for Newcomers?
   • Hinges on market turning or something motivating new incoming investors, as there is little money coming in at the moment.
   • Need to build a valid narrative around why people should be buying our product right now, as investors are very cautious and scrutiny is much higher for projects trying to ship a new product.
2. Simple product for experienced investors with limited time?
   • Need to build out all the trimmings of a trustworthy product:
     • Polished Website (more in line with our revamp that’s in the works)
     • Thorough Documentation
     • Something to trust. An established narrative of lessons learned and improvements made in the past cycle.
3. A system for managing what is in the ETF’s or Index
   • We can just spray and pray on this or put in the work gathering and analyzing data to build more than just a few hipshot attempts that hopefully hit.
   • The more active our community of contributors are the better these kinds of products can get. Most likely we start out with something simple and low-risk and grow from there.

Upside

The main upside of going this direction first is that it has direct income generation potential with minimal regular maintenance once it is up and running. We have most everything we need to build this kind of product already, so it is very achievable on a technical level.

Downside

The two main drawbacks of focusing on this right now is that it’s one of the highest competition markets to tap into, and we are lacking in the marketability department at the moment. This means we will need to work to improve our onboarding experience and presentation value in order to sell the product, once we get over all of the surmountable hurdles of actually building the product.

Consultancy/Incubator:

Service as a Service

One of the greatest strengths of the Reverse Community is all the highly intelligent and talented contributors that have helped us get to where we are today. A way to leverage that strength would be to form a sort of Consulting Agency within our group of contributors to market our skills to other projects that need assistance with a particular area, sort of like an incubator.

This is the simplest and easiest thing to start, and also something that can easily happen in tandem with other things. In fact, we can work in this direction no matter what we do, if we want to. For it to make sense, however, there needs to be some work put in defining how and why we’re doing it.

Solutions as a Service

• Compensation is a critical component
  • Contributors paid directly for work performed
  • Reverse receives cut for the Reverseum (likely native project tokens)
• Keeps our contributors busy and well-paid supporting the ecosystems we operate in.
• Grows the brand of RVRS to increase interest in investing in our other products.

Upside

Primary upside with this idea is that it requires almost no overhead to get a minimum viable product going. We already have people in the project that are consulting with other projects. It’s simply a matter of formalizing it.

Downside

Biggest downside to focusing on this direction is that it might not bring much direct income into the project, up front. Other than partnerships and a little exposure, it is a net-nothing for the protocol and potentially a net-negative as it could pull contributors away from working on Reverse. Plus, exposure isn’t always good if all ppl see is a disorganized group not really going anywhere, even if the advice they’re getting sounds good. So this direction needs to be supported by other activity in the protocol that is attractive to outside communities to build our qualifications. Doing pro-bono work also will help this cause.

Treasury:

Bull Case-

The market is starting to solidify. We may be in for another drop, but it is likely that things will stay leveled out for awhile regardless. This means we will be entering a stage of price-discovery and volatility for all the projects that are still building and everyone is still watching with excitement. There’s not going to be a mad-rush of incoming capital for awhile, likely, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t numerous opportunities out there. And I’d argue that right now is the most crucial time for our treasury to be building a plan for how to capitalize on the coming year.

Once we have a valid treasury plan in place, we can also have bonding sessions to bring in new capital. If we are successfully executing a valid treasury risk profile, we have something viable to market and sell so people will want to participate. It could grow our treasury considerably if we do it right!

In order to appeal to the current market, as well as have the robustness to scale upwards, there are several key issues that need to be addressed before we can market our treasury plan to outside investors without repeating our past failures.

Issues to Address-

• We need to define our Risk Profile before trying to grow our treasury. We cannot ask for more funds to bond into our treasury if we don’t have at least an explicit risk management strategy, and not just gut-feel reactions.
• We have to transition to all Treasury funds being managed by smart contracts controlled by some form of governance. It is too risky and unsafe to try to scale our treasury up while still relying on multisig wallets managed by a couple of executors— personal safety becomes an issue at a certain treasury value if too few ppl hold the keys.
  • This also means we need to have a bullet-proof system in place for managing the ownership of these smart contracts. It will have to be something more complex than simply all RVRS token holders own the keys.
  • This is an opportunity to innovate in the area of Community Owned Treasuries. DAO’s have largely all failed this past run, and part of that was due to an inability to effectively manage a community owned treasury. Innovation here will make us really stand out in the next wave.
  • This in itself could become a marketable product, if we build it out the right way.
• To make good investments, we will need to source much more high quality research and analysis on investments. We have the tools to do this, we just need to commit to incentivizing it so that we can attract high quality contributors.
• We will also need to incentivize ongoing market analysis. This could mean paying ppl to provide TA services, Macro Econ Analysis, specific market/product analysis, etc. We should have contributors on the core team that are part of various investing alpha groups and providing regular updates to the community as a whole.
  • This is the original value proposition of RVRS. Bond with RVRS and get instant access to a curated and managed portfolio of assets utilizing the niche expertise of many individuals combined together into a cohesive risk management strategy. It’s still a valid value prop, IF we put in the work actually building the risk management strategy.

Upside

Obvious upside to working in this direction is that there is a lot of volatility in crypto, and that means lots of opportunity. Sitting on the sidelines with our treasury isn’t going to make it grow. Limitless growth potential if we can provide an attractive treasury to bond funds into. Also, this is our OG purpose and what brought us all together originally.

Downside

Also obvious downside to playing with our treasury is that we could lose it. On a similar note, it can tie up funds that could be utilized elsewhere; like building a revenue generating product. Other downsides are that we need to do a lot of work to really be able to make a marketable claim that we are managing a treasury in such a way as to trust one’s funds for safe-keeping. We need to open bonding to grow our treasury eventually, otherwise there’s little point in trying to invest it vs using it as funds for building profit generating tools. But we shouldn’t be opening bonding for funding an investment treasury without a functioning investment plan.

In short: this is a long road that needs lots of work before we can safely grow the treasury.

Community:

Foundation to Scale-

I feel that the Community is and always has been the key building block of the protocol. In order to have the foundation necessary to scale whatever we build as a protocol, we will need a robust system of Governance within our community structure. Without any kind of core team sponsoring the project, but rather just community volunteers, we have to step up to the next level and pave the way for community operated organizations. This is going to be a part of the next wave of onboarding users. It’ll feature NFTs, POAPs, Badges, soulbound tokens, etc.

To have a chance at a seat at the table we need to innovate in this area, or at least keep up with the innovation already happening around us. We used to have an edge in this arena, but many groups have caught up and continued on with momentum while we are stalled and revisiting our core values.

For our Community to move on with the next generation of DAO’s, there are some key areas that need to be built out internally.

Areas to Improve-

• Governance Tokens have taken a beating, and the idea of governance controlled protocols is currently not making many waves. This is an opportunity to rethink how we use RVRS to control the protocol, and how to build a ‘community owned protocol’ that isn’t solely relying on a tradable token for vote weight.
• In order to have a vibrant and active community of contributors, they need to be incentivized and recognized for their participation. Whether on-chain or off, reputation based reward structures will motivate high-quality talent to participate in the community.
• With better structures for participating, we can generate more interest in contributors putting effort into marketing materials and improving our social media capacity, so when we have marketable products we have a network to distribute through.

Upside

Here are almost limitless upsides. I don’t think experimenting with community governance will ever be a waste of time. Not that it always bears fruit, but it is the only path forward for DAO’s, as right now DAO’s aren’t working and people are losing interest. Unique innovation here could draw more attention from high quality contributors now that the signal-noise ratio is thinning out and the low-effort mercenary contributors are moving on.

Building out the community framework serves as a foundation for all the other experiments we attempt. It’s about being able to market ourselves, onboard new participants, and secure ourselves against sybil/social vulnerabilities.

Downside

The most significant reason to not go this direction is that it is totally uncharted waters and we could wander around aimlessly for a long time trying to be clever, when instead we could just be building tools that make money and solving community issues as they come up. Innovating in this area is only valuable if we as a community value focusing on it. It won’t directly make the protocol any money.

Other:

Please communicate in Discord as to what your other ideas are!