Strategy & Finance Squad

by 0x11cbb078596e5100f4cbb999c5c9b69ca2ff6477 (Bronstein)

Should the following Tier 5: up to $120,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Community category be approved?

Abstract

Alastor wrapped up our initial grant preparing revenue, expense, and treasury exhibits for the community. You can find that grant and our report here https://forum.decentraland.org/t/dao-qmursmt-preparing-detailed-financial-statements-budget-and-long-range-forecast/12514

Following our work, we propose the creation of a Strategy & Finance Squad, led by Alastor to take ownership and drive forward a number of important key strategic initiatives for the DAO, including treasury diversification, additional data and analytics transparency, monitoring of MANA valuation, and expense reporting and management. This engagement will last for six months starting in September with the plan to put up a new proposal to extend the engagement next February.

Grant size

120,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x11cbB078596E5100F4cbB999c5C9b69cA2FF6477

Email address

sam@alastor.ooo

Description

Our first priority over the course of the next 1-2 months will be to lead a treasury diversification for Decentraland to ensure that the DAO has adequate stables in its treasury to continue to fund operations in the event of a material decrease in MANA price. This will include: third-party/counterparty reachout, ROI analysis on various options, fleshing out necessary hurdles/details (DAO legal entity organization, etc.), and providing a final recommendation to the community on the right path forward.

Our focus for Q4 will be around improving Decentraland investor relations, beginning by working with the Decentraland team (or engaging a data engineer, if necessary) to make platform performance data more readily available publicly.

We will also provide two quarterly reports (Q3 2022, released in October and Q4 2022 released in January) on Decentraland’s financial performance, including platform statistics, treasury performance, and expense details.

In addition to the specific projects above, Alastor will plan to be fully involved in the community as Decentraland’s internal strategic finance team. These ongoing functions and responsibilities will include:

-Working cross functionally with the Decentraland team and community to inform the set up and maintenance of accounting and data retention processes to inform community transparency and reporting (this inform the quarterly reports mentioned above) -Maintaining and evaluating and updating a living business operating model and financial projections to inform and drive strategic decision-making such as expense management, treasury diversification, partnerships, M&A, token swaps, and organic growth initiatives -Leading conversations and negotiations in all strategic and financial transactions that the DAO may engage in (M&A, strategic fundraises, token swaps, etc.) -Monitoring token valuation, particularly in the context of MANA spend, including regular analysis of token trading against comparable protocols as well as intrinsic valuation exercises to determine proper scale and ROI of contributor, rewards, and grants spend as well as any other token-related transactions -Leading efforts and being the team liaison with the Decentraland community regarding treasury management including yield decision-making, diversification efforts, and risk management -Perform ad-hoc analysis at the request of the Decentraland team and community to assist in all financial and strategic decision-making

Alastor will plan to provide all resources necessary to accomplish the above tasks, including necessary data subscriptions (Dune, Nansen, Kaiko, etc.) and any third-party contracting

Specification

All of our work will be done using a combination of on-chain data analytics tools (Dune, Nansen, Etherscane, etc.) and Microsoft Office. To the extent we require additional third-party data engineering we will plan to engage them ourselves and pay for any work out of the Alastor budget.

Personnel

Sam Bronstein: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-bronstein-683b1350/ Jordan Stastny: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-stastny-78160461/

Alastor was founded at the beginning of 2022 to provide strategic and financial services to DAOs. Alastor has done grant work for Uniswap, Lido, Gitcoin, and others and also serves as a core contributor to Llama.

Prior to founding Alastor, Sam & Jordan were M&A advisors at Qatalyst, where they advised leading technology companies on M&A and strategy across more than $150Bn of M&A transactions, including the sales of Slack, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, Glassdoor, and others. In this capacity, the Alastor team has significant experience working with CFOs and finance teams of large, publicly traded companies on their financial reporting, budgeting, and forecasting.

See here for a sample of past grant work that Alastor has performed for DAOs: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1B4w93-j1O5-2JtqSSdMYB6UJ_jzOMiMN

Roadmap and milestones

We envision four distinct milestones for this engagement, each described in more detail above:

Milestone #1 - Decentraland diversification initiative (exact timing TBD) Milestone #2 - Q3 Decentraland Performance Report (October 2022) Milestone #3 - Platform data dashboard creation (December 2022) Milestone #4 - Q3 Decentraland Performance Report (January (2022)

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO