ContinuumDAO Forum

@Raini-Ng Crowdfunding is an option, though we need assistance from someone who has experience in organising this. The real funding issue is that we need money for the code audit and listing on a CEX before we can go to mainnet and this could be a substantial amount, even if we limit the code we audit to MPC code, C3Caller, veCTM. Unfortunately this is not cheap and is why Jerry mentioned the figure of 1 million. Let's see how our new deck and RWA focus goes down with VCs.

@avgCrypto Completely agree with you about creating manageable goals. Thank you!

To be clear - we won't get VC funding unless we present a UNIQUE and INNOVATIVE proposition for funding. They are interested in backing the next unicorn, not another cross-chain interoperability protocol. We may get some backing from other sources such as DAOs, crowd funding and private funding, but I'm not sure we will get 1 million USD.

Regarding performance across market cycles, let's not forget that stable coin based RWA strategies are favoured in bear markets.

Regarding whether we should explore other avenues than VCs for funding, I think that we need to now, since our funds are so low. This could include a private sale, or crowdfunding through another DAO or company. Let's explore this.

Continuum was founded as a DAO for very good reasons (we all know about what happened to Multichain). Being a DAO and having exclusively open source code is the only alternative to a centralised company led project and for me this is non-negotiable.

But having spoken to a large number of VCs over the last few months, I do not think that this is the issue at all. In fact if a VC is looking for a preferential token allocation on different terms from early investors (i.e. a 4 year lock of veCTM with voting rights), then this for me is a huge red flag. They likely want to do a quick 10x from Seed to Series A and dump on retail as exit liquidity. If a VC believes in our long term vision, then this would not be an issue. But like I said - I think that other factors are in play

Typically this is how the conversations with VCs have gone in the past - I emphasise that we are building a public good for web3, with no central control and as a trusted base layer for cross-chain dApps. This does not get a strong reaction (neither hostile or positive). Sometimes they will point out that there are other solutions (L0, Axelar etc.). They simply don't care that we are Autonomous and have no central control. I then point out the security advantages of MPC, but again this does not bring a strong reaction. Usually they simply don't know what MPC is and I do not have enough time with them to explain it. I say that we are integrating non-EVMs (TON, NEAR, Solana, SUI). This is more interesting to them, since we are entering unploughed ground here, but not enough. I say that we have incubated an open source router, but some say to me that the profit margins are not very good anymore and that there is a lot of competition in this sector. The feeling I get is that this was the last bull run's narrative.

So I don't particularly agree with your analysis @Insomniac The main issue is that we need to align our goals with TODAY's narratives.

Recently I attended ETHCC in Brussels. I went to many side events. By far the most exciting one was the RWA event. There were many new RWA protocols, VCs and tradFi representatives there (e.g. Stripe, VISA). The packed audience were voting on how long it would take the next 1 trillion USD of tokenized RWAs to arrive. The consensus was 18 months. There was much discussion about how tradFi could increase their profit margins by a few percent by cutting out middle men using DeFi. Also there was agreement that RWA was much more immune to bear/bull market cycles, since investors typically use USD stable coins. Several panellists said that almost all alt coins would die, that retail would only hold stable coins and that mass adoption of blockchain would not come from the 'casino' of trading alt coins, but only through more sober investing though useful investments such as :

• SME loans
• Invoice financing
• Fractional tokenised assets such as real estate, rental properties, commodities (including gold)
• Bonds
• Securities (e.g. equity)

Interestingly (and this is where i think that our opportunity lies), some panel contributors talked about how early block chain was in this field and how the solutions still do not exist in DeFi, leading to prohibitive costs for participants, poor access to liquidity, regulatory challenges, poor user experience with wallets and more.

When I got back from ETHCC, we started to develop a deck that re-focused Continuum towards RWA. Here is the link to it and I would value your views on it : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-5FEB905Ff54cDkKnkauCilbT8OQdWU0Rn2u29JVYbE/edit#slide=id.p

We have sent this new deck to some VCs and I would say that the feedback is quite good, but it is early and as Insomniac points out, it takes time for the discussions to bear any fruit. I think it is fair to say that not all contributors believe that we should pivot 100% to this new narrative, rather than maintaining that we should address ALL sectors (e.g. GameFi, AI, liquidity aggregation etc.). I think that we should pivot with COMMITMENT now and focus exclusively on bringing RWA products to RETAIL investors by creating cross-chain solutions to cheaper faster blockchains like TON, Solana, NEAR and SUI - playing to our strengths. What do you think? Please read the Deck and comment here. Some feedback we have got is that this is aspirational and that we do not have our new RWA Toolkit yet. We are in the same boat as Axelar and Wormhole here - no one has developed solutions yet, so it is a race. This tells me that we are in the right direction though. We need working Proof of Concepts for things like fractionalised cross-chain NFTs for assets and the ability to access RWA vaults on Ethereum from non-EVMs etc.

@Arafat Thanks! It is complicated but fair. We gave this a lot of thought

Funding proposal vote was passed 13 million votes to 0 against. Congratulations everbody!

https://snapshot.org/#/continuumdao.eth/proposal/0x019c5383e36eca103d1bf163df6645e0b4766d497266b65676d8ca7a8ea40d20

@chookz The forthcoming proposal will be for a VC seed round only. That is what we will be voting on. We had an airdrop for early supporters already, based on anticipated community effort (a lot of people did nothing however) and there will be a further airdrop to MultiDAO based on veMULTI holdings. The only way right now for anyone to get more veCTM is by actually contributing to our development through the Guilds, by coding, marketing etc. You have to work to get veCTM.

One of the reasons for offering at a low valuation to VCs in the seed round is that we don't only need their money. We also expect to leverage their network and their marketing reach to help us grow. Frankly, we don't get that with small retail investors. We also have to conduct KYC, which at this time is simply a burden to us. I'm not in favour of a retail offering at this point. There is a way for the community to get veCTM now though and that is to contribute.

@toast I strongly disagree with this. I can accept that we need to offer our seed round at a low valuation to attract investors, but if we gave future offerings with a shorter unlock period, then these people could dump on early investors, the existing community and future retail holders. Our veCTM voting escrow contract has a 4 year lock, BUT it allows liquidation with a 50% penalty at the beginning, decreasing linearly to 0 after 4 years. So anyone can either sell their veCTM as an NFT, or liquidate at any time. Meanwhile they have voting rights and their veCTM gives them a share of the profits. This is very fair to anyone.

We need to attract investors who hold our long term vision, even if it means losing some potential investors, who would probably not be the right fit for us anyway. I will vote against any proposal to offer a shorter unlock period for investors.

@0xCTMC Point taken. Let's re-evaluate

@John-CTM We should only sell as many tokens as we need to at this lower valuation to fund ourselves until we can offer a seriously attractive series 'A'. The figure in the table is for 2.5%, with gradually increasing valuation. Note that the suggestion has the sale of the final part spread over 3 months, approaching the mainnet launch. Another objective of this seed round is to attract early stage VCs, who would be able to guide us through the series 'A', as well as other communities (e.g. investment DAOs), who could dramatically increase our community.

The numbers in the example table were arrived at after discussions with some VCs. My own feeling is that we offer CTMDAOVOTE tokens as soon as an investment is made and that these would be convertible 1 CTMDAOVOTE == 1 CTM vested in a veCTM for 4 years, with full voting rights with our TGE. We should not make sales to any person of USA citizenship or residency, any US business, or any person or business in any other proscribed or sanctioned country in line with other recent crypto funding initiatives. I see our series 'A' Fully Diluted valuation at about 400 mm USD at a stage when we have ~100 blockchains connected, several hundred MPC nodes, audited contracts and code, mainnet launched and healthy initial traffic and revenues. We could offer 10% of the Total Supply at this valuation, but that is the subject of another DAO proposal when the time comes. We could launch our token along with the series 'A', together with CEX listings and DEX liquidity.

@Apxymous I think that this is too hard to do at the smart contract level. It involves further cross-chain transactions and oracles to calculate the CTM or THEIA/USDT rate. These would all be attack vectors. I get what you mean though, just don't know how to do it safely

We have been discussing about how to implement fees in Theia. The next iteration of Theia will include liquidity pools for some assets (in addition to mint/burn tokens that are already there). In line with the original Theia proposal, there is a fixed fee payable until a user wants to use more than 80% of the liquidity pool and then the fee increases parabolicly up to a maximum of 20x to use all of the pool. So if the fixed fee is 5 USDT, the max is 100 USDT. The fee is paid on the SOURCE chain. The way we have implemented this is as follows. In the frontend, after the user has input the amount they wish to transfer, the fee is calculated by calling a function on the destination chain. This is an OFF-CHAIN calculation made by checking the size of the liquidity pool. For instance the user might be told to include a fee of 8 USDT, payable just before their transfer initiates. This is a suggestion only and they can pay more of less, but why pay more than you need to? Because that will be the correct fee ONLY IF NO ONE ELSE uses the liquidity pool on the destination chain before their tx arrives there. If someone else beats the user to it, they could use some of the pool and the user's transaction fee will no longer be sufficient. Their transaction arrives on the destination chain and the contract checks what fee is payable. It is now, say, 8.5 USDT, so their transaction fails, their funds are returned on the source chain, but they lose their 8 USDT fee. They could have avoided this by paying a higher fee to ensure success (e.g. 9 USDT).

The question now is how to handle gas fees? This is what we are discussing now. My own feeling is to do it this way :

(1) Between most chains, the gas fee is small, so we could swallow it and pay it from the fixed fee that the user already will be paying (e.g. 5 USDT).
(2) When the destination chain is Ethereum, or perhaps BNB chain, we need a mechanism to charge a higher fee when the gas price is higher.
(3) We should charge the destination chain gas fee in the same currency as the liquidity fee, e.g. USDT, but for the sake of having a simple and easily understood fee structure, which will be a big marketing plus for us, we could have CHARGE BANDS which change depending on the gas price.
(4) Using Ethereum as an example of the destination chain, the frontend would call a function on Ethereum that calculates the gas price and which returns one of LOW, NORMAL, HIGH, VERY HIGH. This would require the user to pay an extra fee of 0, 10, 20, 50 USDT (values could be changed through on-chain governance). Again this is only a suggestion to the user, who could select a different value (e.g. the front end says to pay a NORMAL fee, but the user pays a HIGH fee to ensure success). The transaction proceeds and when it arrives on the destination chain (Ethereum in this case), the gas fee function is again called and the fee paid is checked against the actual fee and if not enough was paid, then the transaction reverts. The revert would happen if the user was unlucky and there was a gas price spike.

The MPC actually pays the gas fee in the native coin on the destination chain (e.g. in ETH). The user pays the gas fee on the source chain for their transaction (e.g. in FTM, BNB etc.) separately from the USDT fee. How to top up the gas in the MPC in a decentralized way? We don't want to have to rely on a 'team' to do this. I suggest that we create a function on each chain that ANYONE can call to add gas to this wallet address. Normally this would be done via the monthly Governance vote though, making sure that there was always enough gas to perform transfers for the next month. In an emergency though, if gas ran out, then some kind soul could top it up and be compensated later via governance.

Please give us your input here on these topics. It's your chance to influence how the router works

These DAO members are elected to the Committee - congratulations : JohnCTM, Apxymous, Jerry, Apex, Chookz, 0xClaire and myself.

Thank you everyone. The vote for the new Committee has concluded and the results are here https://snapshot.org/#/continuumdao.eth/proposal/0xf4dde5c205a225ba1365e75959ce9bef837efa23a5925c8355e20e7619716bb3

If I am accepted for a Committee position, I will work hard to ensure that we are 100% decentralized. I will promote Continuum and its DAO tirelessly and I will try my best to increase our community, especially those who want to build with us and those who believe in our vision and Constitution.

@sanderrrrr Well done Sander. You are an OG and I for one would welcome you