The Ranch, Issue 13
Updates on our work with Gitcoin & Radicle, Aave, and Llama's internal tools. Plus, a recap of recent events at MakerDAO & thoughts on how to value protocols and tokens.
Welcome to The Ranch, Llama’s Substack newsletter.
In this publication, we’ll share quick and easy to digest insights on:
Updates from Llama 🦙
Herd on the Street - interesting insights on DAOs
Opportunities - ways you can get involved with Llama
1. Updates from Llama 🦙
First, we’d like to take the chance to welcome two new llamas to the community.
Andrew Allen has a background in analytics, currently works as a protocol specialist at Coinbase, and is passionate about all things DeFi.
Gumfather comes from the world of management consulting, M&A and corporate strategy - he’s excited to apply this experience across a variety of Llama projects.
Both Andrew and Gumfather are digging into the exciting things going on over at Nouns DAO; we’re excited to share their learnings soon!
Llama 🦙
We want to make Llama the best DAO to contribute to. Along those lines, we’ve been working to upgrade our internal tools to better serve the Llama community, specifically to improve contributor income, productivity, and well-being.
Llama’s Community Platform - Llama has begun working on an internal community platform that will allow contributors to quickly get up to speed on Llama’s projects, see where they can contribute, track their payments received and outstanding, and receive recognition of their contributions to Llama.
Llama’s Data Infrastructure - On-chain financial statements are difficult, and existing data solutions often lack the flexibility needed to query the right data for our analysts. We’ve been prototyping a lightweight solution to address those shortcomings, which will allow us to continue to produce high-quality reports for our partners like Aave and Gitcoin.
Gitcoin / Radicle Public Goods Alliance
We’ve begun work on the smart contracts to execute our proposed Public Goods Alliance between Radicle and Gitcoin.
In the last two weeks, we’ve gathered feedback from the Gitcoin and Radicle communities, passed a Snapshot temperature check vote on Gitcoin’s Snapshot space, and are working on advancing the proposal through Radicle’s governance process.
Aave
In the last issue of The Ranch, we noted that we executed our proposal to list CVX, the governance token of Convex Finance, on Aave.
In the two weeks since the token was listed, demand for borrowing CVX has already generated $30k in revenue for Aave. Current borrow demand sits at $1.0m, with 730.5k CVX tokens (~$2.8m) supplied to the pool.
2. Herd on the Street
Insights and articles from the DAO world, curated by our herd.
Valkyrie: MakerDAO and Our Side of History - Luca Prosperi
Luca, a proponent of the proposed Lending Oversight Core Unit (LOVE), breaks down the recent events at Maker, including a hotly contested governance vote that saw the highest MKR participation in the history of the DAO.
Valuing Protocols and Tokens - Jordan Stastny & Sam Bronstein
Jordan and Sam draw on their TradFi experience and explain why it’s critical to understand token dilution in the context of valuing protocols and tokens.
3. Opportunities
We are looking for ideas to grow the Nouns DAO ecosystem.
Nouns DAO auctions a new Noun NFT every day, forever. Auction proceeds (in ETH) go to the Nouns' treasury. Winners of the auction receive a Noun NFT; one Noun equals one vote in the DAO. The main purpose of Nouns governance is to allocate the treasury to proliferate Nouns. Thanks to its thriving contributor community, growing treasury, and novel ways – such as Prop House – to allocate ETH from their treasury, Nouns is one of the most interesting DAOs operating today.
We are ramping up our Nouns working group and are looking to add contributors. If you’re interested in helping grow the ecosystem, we’d love to collaborate! Fill out our Typeform and we’ll get back to you!
P.S. - some llama fun with Dall•E
Have any fun llama Dall•E prompts? Reply or drop a comment with your prompt and we’ll feature a few of our favorites in the next issue of The Ranch!
Stay Up to Date on Llama 🦙
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