Sentiment check: veANT, ragequit

Disclaimer: This is purely my personal take. I’m not involved in the day to day of Aragon. I’m in the Aragon Association’s committee, and I plan to stay until most of the token sale proceeds have been safely transferred to the Aragon DAO. Not investment advise.

I really like veANT as a way to make sure holders are long-term aligned.
However, I understand that some might not be, and might want a way out. In that sense, ragequit/continuous buyback makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been trying to tie up both crypto primitives to see if there’s a way to reward those who bet in Aragon long-term, while still offering a way out for those who don’t.

I’m in the process of refining another proposal that attempts to do that. Currently in draft, hopefully will make it to something publishable. I just want to do a quick sentiment check/“user research” with the loud voices in this forum.

If you are an ANT holder, what would you do?

  • Lock 4 years to get veANT and govern the DAO
  • Ragequit at book value

0 voters

1 Like

aragon team some advice. offer refund to all these greedy players buying recently for extraction value. we can see the amount they paid on chain. give people the choice of lock 4 years to govern or full refund on what you buy your ANT for in dollar. that is what the legal courts would do. unwind the transaction if buying party is unhappy with the terms or misunderstands the contract and their rights.

if they want aragon to succed they will lock 4 years no problem. if they are lying about the intention then they can have a refund for their purchase to unwind the transaction they enter with misunderstandings of their rights. more resources is left that way for people who do lock. they should be happy about that if they are concerned about token holders and not their own agendas.

Hello ser

I think team thinks a lot of “newer” buyers (people that joined in the last 6 months) would just want to rage quit, but I believe there is an opportunity to convert them to long term holders with good tokenomics design

Aragon, unlike most projects, has a massive treasury and it’s often complained about in discord that there are not enough wANT holders participating in governance / caring about the token.

Combining these two things, with good veTokenomics could result in these recent buyers becoming long term aligned.

Right now only 6% of the FDV of ANT is wANT. If the treasury was to earn a 5% APR on $150M of assets and distribute the yields to wANT holders, that would be an 80% APR on ANT if it trades at 100% of book value. If ANT traded at half of book value as it often does, it would be a 160% APR in real yield. No token emissions needed.

This is an extremely attractive offer as it could go on forever, people may even pay above book value for access to a highly sought after, revenue generating, ANT token. The only issue I see is trust in the project is very low - much of the team sells their vests, long term holders have sold far below book value, new buyers want a rage quit, etc.

To fix this we should:

  1. Have a rage quit in the short term to let anyone that wants to go leave with fair value. Define this fair value as (non native token treasury value / user owned ANT supply). This will ensure the market trusts that Aragon sees the token as backed, and cares about its value for every user regardless of how the team judges them (“short term” “just wants a quick trade” etc. don’t matter. a holder is a holder and should be treated fairly). This contract should stay open until a rev share / veToken launches so the floor price of ANT stays healthy and the cycle doesn’t begin again.

  2. Now that those that don’t care about locking are out and trust is built, launch a soft onramp to long term locking. Going straight to 4y will be a difficult choice for many and we need to slowly ramp up trust and prove how valuable locking can be. The idea is to use tokenomics like convex or btrfly where there is a 6 week lock and yields are distributed every 2 weeks. At the end of your 6 week lock you can choose to lock again or use the rage quit and leave. After 2 cycles of this we can double the lock to 12 weeks, then to 1y, and then to full on 4y locking.

Traditional veTokenomics with bribes and emissions voting and whatnot are a bit much for aragon because there are no emissions and there really aren’t any revenues either.

11 Likes

Aragon has created real enterprise value that isn’t being recognized by the token price today.

The disconnect is that, as Luis has mentioned elsewhere, the market is pricing in the ANT token having no say in holding the development team accountable for continuing to grow that enterprise value. That can be fixed with additional transparency around KPIs and actions that reinforce the idea that the DAO truly does have accountability and oversight.

I would much prefer veANT (in theory book value + value of the Aragon product) over ragequitting at book value, assuming the DAO really can start to control governance.

aragon has so far created negative enterprise value.

1 Like

Completely agree, but I also understand @Orion’s point.

I’d say Aragon’s contribution to the DAO space and broader Ethereum space has been invaluable. Both in state of the art smart contract engineering, Ethereum’s first package manager, grants (Aragon ran one of the first grants program for Ethereum, only after the EF), learnings in how to decentralize (AGP process) and on and on.

Then it has also created massive value around product and distribution. Aragon still is the largest DAO platform securing billions of dollars in the double digits. Lido upgraded their system to v2 yesterday, powered by Aragon. Lido has $11bn AUM. And it’s only one example.

So there’s value in distribution, brand (e.g. Aragon has more than 100k followers on Twitter), strategic assets like DAO.eth. Specifically what the market is not valuing here, or rather valuing negatively, is the ability for the Aragon DAO to capitalize on such assets.

Hence I think Aragon needs to focus on three things:

  1. Give a way out for those who don’t believe in Aragon DAO’s ability to capitalize, via buybacks or ragequit (or other similar ways).
  2. Provide a way in for those who do, via long-term locking and incentives.
  3. Make sure everyone in the Aragon DAO gets the message: ANT cannot be an afterthought. It needs to be prioritized. Token sinks need to be created.
6 Likes

I agree with the 3 points you listed below!

I enjoyed @dcfgod 's proposal. I think it should be an option of both.

What do you think about a RQ/similar mech.

Then implement a veStrat that with comments seem to be quite attractive for people who may want to stay / may bring new entrants.

I’m sorry I get lost with the acronyms. Can you describe/link what you refer to?

more so referring to @dcfgod idea of having both aspects of your vote implemented - versus one or the other! Sorry that message was confusing

hey luis long time no see - would love to see you more active around here. As may was over 5 months ago and still nothing has been done to solve this issue - we would love to hear your opinion