The Ranch, Issue 26

Updates on our work with Aave, MakerDAO, and NounsDAO.

Daniel Schlabach

Dec 29, 2022

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 🦙

Aave

We worked to compile a list of Aave’s current and expected costs and shared a runway analysis on Aave’s forum. The full report can be viewed here.

The DAO currently has $2.1 million in monthly vendor expenses at today’s AAVE prices. With this in mind, we looked at several different scenarios to evaulate the DAO’s runway. Wherever possible, we’ve erred on the side of being conservative. We’ve modeled a $200k monthly expense buffer for third party vendors, a liquidity mining expense of $209k/month in our base cases, and did not include additional revenue that is expected as a result of the launch of GHO or the integration of BPTs and other assets as collateral on the protocol.

Under existing conditions ($2.1m in monthly vendor spend at today’s market prices, $2.4m in Liquidity Mining and Staking expenses), we estimate that Aave has ~3.2 years of runway. An extreme bear scenario (market decline of 50%) would cut this runway down to 2.5 years. In contrast, a bull scenario (market increase of 50%) would extend this runway to 3.6 years.

Additionally, we considered Aave’s runway in USDC- and AAVE-denominated terms under various scenarios. Our full assumptions are detailed in the post on Aave’s forum.

We also progressed several proposals through the Snapshot phase:

We’ll be hosting our next Llama <> Aave Twitter Spaces on January 12th at 11am ET. We hope you’ll join us!

MakerDAO

After several months of contributing to Maker as part of the DAO’s recognized delegate platform, we’ve decided to pause our governance work to dedicate our efforts towards contributing directly to the DAO. We remain strong believers in the future of Maker and are eager to contribute directly to the protocol with our expertise on smart contract upgrades, DeFi strategies, and analytics.

NounsDAO

We completed our two months of governance with a delegated Noun as part of Nouns’ Prop House race. Over the course of two months, we participated in 33 votes (100% turnout). You can view our full voting history on Agora.

If you’re a Nouns holder and would like to delegate your Noun voting power to us, please use nouns.llamagov.eth.

Llama @llama

Llama has been delegated a Noun as part of the @nounsprophouse Agora Delegate Race! For 2 months we will have a delegated Noun enabling us to be more active in the Nouns ecosystem. Check out our delegate statement on @nounsagora:

Llama @llama

We're incredibly excited to become a Nouns delegate and start building our voting history on Agora Shoutout to @cryptoseneca, @eladmallel, @0xWiz_, @zhayitong and everyone else in the Nouns community who supported https://t.co/Jec72ycTBC

2. Herd on the Street

Lessons from a Governance Contributor - Fig, Flipside
Fig explores the ways that DAOs can alter their governance processes to attract high quality contributors and improve governance UX.

Approaches to MEV: Ethereum vs Cosmos - Myles O’Neil, Reverie
Myles breaks down the different ways in which Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems tackle the tricky problem of MEV.

3. Opportunities

We’re looking for someone with expertise in managing social media and communications. If you’re interested, please fill out this form and we’ll get back to you.

The Ranch by Llama