Working to create a little bit of history isn’t supposed to be easy, and, well, we’re finding that things are as they’re supposed to be!
Jeff Bezos, 1998 Letter to Amazon Shareholders
I’ve got some bad news. Marinade is internally developing a competing solution to the bribe platform. They’ve asked me not to divulge specifics, but I can say that I believe that their system would be as effective at rewarding users, if not more effective, than an LST bribe platform. So I no longer think that a bribe platform is the highest and best use of the Meta-DAO’s time. I’ve returned the 1,000 META to the treasury with this transaction.
I’ve also got some good news. Marinade wants us to help them build their system. We still need to narrow down the scope of work, but the deal would essentially be ‘Marinade pays the Meta-DAO to design their system, map out any edge cases, speak to validators about what they would prefer, et cetera.’ Durden and I would likely be the main ones executing on this.
There are other ways we could spend our time. I spoke briefly with Swen from Light Protocol, and there may be an opportunity to build a dark pool protocol in partnership with them. We could also do something by ourselves, like developing a yield aggregator, an on-chain ETF platform, or a Pendle-like product. But I think that supporting Marinade is the highest and best use of our time. The reason is time-to-legitimacy.
The Meta-DAO is not like most start-ups. We’re more like a venture studio in that we’ve assembled the initial group of people before we know what we’re going to build. Only unlike a venture studio, we have scarcely any money. We’ve accrued a little bit of social capital from the people that have joined the Meta-DAO and boosted it on Twitter, and this has led to people excited to invest their time and energy into the Meta-DAO. My goal is to convert that energy into valuable outputs before it dissipates. With those valuable outputs, we can accrue more legitimacy and raise money to do bigger things.
I want the Meta-DAO to complete its first rotation through this flywheel as quick as possible. In other words, I want to minimize time-to-legitimacy.
Of the options available to us, I believe that working with Marinade has the lowest time-to-legitimacy. Marinade’s mSOL product is the best-adopted in the Solana ecosystem, and working with them would be sure to boost our own legitimacy. And I think that, as a group of market nerds, we’re well setup to deliver a great system design for Marinade :)
In the coming days, I’ll raise a new proposal. Its gist will be similar to proposal 0, only instead of funding the creation of a bribe platform, the Meta-DAO would pay a portion of the value received by the grant in the form of META to those who help on the project.
Proph3t
