View From the Nest #4 + Monthly Review
Bumper edition this week, including a look back at November
Overview
Keeping up with the progress in a DAO can be hard work! This newsletter aims to share what we’ve been up to week by week in the Coop, highlighting progress across products, governance and the Index community as a whole.
For more information and to get involved please visit our:
Discord: https://discord.gg/8EMHtFndMN
Twitter: https://twitter.com/indexcoop
Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/IndexCOOP
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/indexcoop
Website: https://www.indexcoop.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/indexcoop
Monthly Summary
November Index Updates
Weekly Summary
Extend Liquidity Mining
Index Coop Expanded Vision
Speaking of Vision…
Assets under vault: $31.32m (-2.8%)
Across 1 product: $DPI: $97.78 (-7.6%)
Index token: $5.82 (-34.8%)
Figures correct as of 29th Nov, (7 day change shown in brackets)
November Index Updates
DPI
Index Coop Gets Principled
Coop members DarkForestCapital, Felix, and Kiba released a set of principles for the Coop to live by. They are broken down into categories of Business, Community, and Personal. These principles make a great addition to our community Code of Conduct as we build stronger foundations for who we want to be. This will help new members get acclimated to the Coop as we start ramping up our recruitment efforts and onboarding more community members.
Index Coop is one of the most engaged and long-term focused communities in DeFi right now and we want to make sure this culture holds strong as we continue expanding. If you think there are any principles that should be added, you can leave a comment on the original forum post and let us know.
DPI is DeFi
DPI has become the de facto market indicator for all of DeFi already being used by Bankeless and Bloomberg to track movements. Total Value Locked (TVL) is now a term of the past, DPI price is the metric to watch.
We are making progress to become a core component in the DeFi ecosystem with proposals to MakerDAO to add DPI as a collateral and Yearn.finance for a yDPI vault that leverages DPI CDPs on Maker. Both communities are receptive to the ideas with good engagement on both posts. OverAnalyser is presented to MakerDAO on 11/18 for the collateral onboarding discussing the merits and risks of DPI as a collateral asset for MakerDAO. The extensive smart contract audits of Set Protocol, lower price volatility than ETH, high liquidity on Uniswap, and large MakerDAO community support for DPI make it an ideal candidate. There is also a proposal to add DPI to Aave once v2 is launched.
Index Growth Programs
After our initial INDEX distribution programs including airdrops to DPI holders, liquidity mining, and community grants, the Coop is starting to brainstorm more ways to grow. Our main objective is to increase DPI supply and more ways to reward INDEX to Coop contributors.
Some initial ideas are:
Data analysis/visualization of onchain DPI and INDEX data
Developer programs (grants for integrations or hackathon awards)
DPI volume program similar to Synthetix’s volume program
Running art or meme competitions
Paying for educational videos about DPI and Index Coop
There are a lot of exciting conversations and discussions going on for all of them.
If you have any other ideas or solid plans to implement any of these come join us on the Index Coop Growth Program forum post.
CoinShares Index
After IIP-7 proposal was made last month to create the CoinShares Gold and Crypto Index (CGCI). On November 12th select members of the Index Coop sat down for an AMA with the CoinShares team. The CS team gave an in-depth explanation of how CS had come about this index methodology with the Imperial College London, why they want to join Index Coop, the technology behind their digital gold token DGLD, their go to market strategy with existing partners, liquidity provisioning for CGCI and DGLD, and any help they need from the Coop.
The next stages in the process are for CoinShares to roll out DGLD to the market, create a wrapped DGLD bridge from their Bitcoin sidechain to Ethereum, provision liquidity for wDGLD on Ethereum, and finalise the fee structure. Then the Coop will move to vote on the proposal
Meta-Governance
As part of IIP-8 the Set team is getting ready to deploy smart contracts that let Index Coop participate in DeFi DAOs using the tokens held in DPI in our voting portal. This is limited to tokens that can be delegated and don’t require staking - AAVE, UNI, COMP. We are already up on the Compound Leaderboard at #17. We voted on our first two meta-gov proposals for AAVE-1 and AAVE-2. Outside of Yearn with Curve, Index Coop is one of the first DeFi DAOs to engage in active ecosystem governance.
We are still trying to figure out a framework for how we decide to vote on issues as a Coop. Do we focus solely on what’s best for the other protocol as long as it doesn’t hurt the Coop? Do we only use our governance power to propose and vote on things that selfishly benefit us? If you have any suggestions please comment on the meta-governance forum post or join our #meta-governance channel on Discord.
New Governance Proposals
Count unclaimed INDEX farming rewards and INDEX/ETH Uniswap LPs in snapshot voting
Round 2 of Treasury Committee grants to reward community contributions
General Updates
Discussions on how to proceed with the index methodologist reward program
We’re almost at 7,000 followers on Twitter in under 2 months
Media Mentions
Figures
Going back to the start of DPI. AAVE swapped with LEND, UNI looks ugly (the 100 normalisation was done on the 25th to allow some price discovery.
At the end of December, I’ll probably just work with 1 month and 3 month figures…
https://explore.duneanalytics.com/dashboard/overanalysers-defi-dashboard
Extend Liquidity Mining
There has been much discussion in the forums on why and how liquidity mining programs should continue. The current ETH/DPI liquidity mining program comes to an end on the 6th December but fear not, there is an open vote on the forum to approve a continuation.
The $INDEX token rewards will reduce going forward with a plan to adjust them monthly, targeting an appropriate level of liquidity for swapping to DPI ($30M to provide $150k buys at 1% Slippage). According to the original Index Coop outlines, this would extend the beginning of the methodology rewards until liquidity mining for DPI ends.
Index Coop Expanded Vision
@Felix took to the forum this week to share some thoughts on what the future looks like for structured products and where Index Coop might fit within that. In summary, it’s a massive opportunity.
So far we’ve focused on launching and promoting $DPI as the first Index Coop product, a straight-up market cap weighted collection of DeFi tokens. What Felix laid out in his post is how that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Breaking down the top tradfi products reveals the opportunity to offer leverage/bond/volatility products as well. When this broad suite of products is offered alongside the current increase in liquidity as crypto enters another bull market, Index Coop stands to gain market share and capture tremendous amounts of value.
Speaking of Vision…
…check out these logo designs from Inje. Just an exploratory design at this stage but keep your eyes peeled for further iterations throughout December.
We always welcome new members to the community, if you like what you see come and join the discussion in our social channels. @darkforestcap