1/ @MetaDAOProject's value prop is simple: self-enforced tokenholder rights.
The current ICO landscape navigates a tradeoff between high adverse selection (bad founders) & capital formation maturity (high valuations).
Breaking down why MetaDAO could realize the ICM vision:
2/ Let's start with bonding curves like Believe: high adverse selection, early capital formation stage.
Believe tokens are essentially structured as memecoins, with no financial upside or equity in the business to tokenholders.
This creates a situation where founders on Believe are likely adversely selected, and they are launching there because they couldn’t be funded traditionally.
3/ Platforms like Sonar, Metaplex Genesis, and CoinList are the opposite: lower adverse selection, more mature capital formation stage.
These products mitigate the adverse selection issue since founders can conduct sales in a compliant manner and on their own terms, but ICOs are predisposed to take place post-raise & at higher valuations.
4/ Neither bonding curves nor direct token sale platforms address the most important problem with the industry today: tokens are broken.
- Unclear how value is split between token & equity
- Low float high FDV
- No tokenholder rights
Quality teams like @pumpdotfun, @HyperliquidX, and @RaydiumProtocol allocate 100% of revenues to buy back their token, not because it is the most optimal use of capital (it is not), but because it has turned into the only credible signal for teams to tell the market: "we care about the token".
5/ MetaDAO solves this problem with unruggable ICOs:
1. Mechanistic protection against treasury rugs: Instead of funds going directly to the team, they’re stored in an onchain treasury with futarchy oversight.
2. Legal protection against revenue rugs: The founder assigns the IP of the project (domain names, software, social media accounts, etc.) to a legal entity that recognizes the futarchy governance mechanism as the ultimate decider.
6/ Let's take mtnCapital as an example.
Investors contributed to the MTN ICO under the premise that the mtndao team would manage it to invest in mtndao hackathon projects. However, the team pivoted early on and decided they weren't going to work on it full time. After every investment-related proposal was rejected, tokenholders became frustrated and collectively said "give us back our money."
While mtnCapital failed to allocate capital to value-accretive opportunities, it was the first real-world example of futarchy protecting tokenholder rights by enabling them to redeem their MTN holdings for USDC in the treasury. In the regular crypto fundraising paradigm, investors would have had no recourse.
7/ Enforcing tokenholder rights also benefits founders:
- They can send a credible signal to markets that they are here to build.
- They can get their first 100 power users.
- Tokens are designed from first principles. At launch, funds raised = market cap of the token, and tokens are mintable via futarchy proposals to fund value-accretive opportunities.
For instance, @rakka_sol founded @omnipair, a protocol that combines constant product liquidity pools with isolated lending logic to enable permissionless trading of long tail assets on Solana.
He sought a minimum raise of $300k and was able to raise $1.1M in the ICO. The team now has a spendable monthly rate of $10k per month to build the protocol, which is fully owned & governed by tokenholders via futarchy.
8/ Pseudonymous founders, founders in emerging regions, those who for some reason or another could not be funded traditionally can now raise on the Internet, and in turn investors can take higher risk on unknowns since they can enforce their tokenholder rights.
Read our full report on @blockworksres, where we also dive into conditional markets data, future ICOs and a forward-looking valuation for META.
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