Neptune DAO: A DAO for Liquidity

The LAO has incubated a new DAO focused on providing DeFi and other blockchain projects with needed liquidity. Neptune is the second DAO incubated and formulated by The LAO members and its surrounding community, and a continuation of The LAO’s quest to build an entirely digital Silicon Valley.

In 2021, Ethereum has gone mainstream. DeFi protocols are rapidly maturing and mass NFT adoption is on the horizon. An emerging generational shift has demonstrated that people are seeking alternative means to value accrual and financial access 一 a shift that has been accelerated by the digital-first consequence of Covid-19. People have discovered that they don’t need intermediaries to interact with a financial product or intermediaries to lend, buy, or sell assets 一 they simply need Ethereum. A comparable paradigm shift is occurring for creators; artists, musicians, and other creative workers are now able to sell their work directly to their audiences, bypassing layers of middlemen through the use of NFTs, social tokens, and decentralized protocols.

DAOs are natural fits to support the emerging and growing ecosystems of both DeFi and NFTs. DAOs rely on a “hive mind,” a group of interested members who provide their own capital and work together to sift through, evaluate, and highlight key trends and investment opportunities. They do not rely on an antiquated funding model dependent on a handful of “experts” who are given complete latitude to make investment decisions.

What’s more, because DAO members operate at arm’s length, they have a compounding investment and community impact effect. Members are not only able to support a project through a DAO, but also through their own direct, independent investments. In many ways, DAOs resemble better-organized versions of Wall Street Bets, giving members the ability to coordinate, learn, and act together 一 while at the same time preserving the ability of members to make their own independent investment decisions.

The Internet is changing the way we live, work, and do business, including the way people make investment decisions. The native structure of the Internet is a swarm, and DAOs are its logical endpoint. Swarms form on Twitter to influence politics. Swarms form on Wall Street Bets to short-squeeze major hedge funds. Our bet is that DAOs will increasingly channel this hivemind energy by creating loosely affiliated groups that rely on smart contracts and transparent, hard-to-modify rules to structure and enhance group decision making.

🔱 Introducing Neptune DAO

The LAO launched less than a year ago and has supported over 40 projects with early-stage funding, including a number of leading DeFi projects. Our most recent DAO, Flamingo, has emerged as a leading investment, thought leadership, and coordination community for NFTs. Over the next year, the LAO ecosystem will continue to grow, creating a loosely affiliated and independently-run network of DAOs.

Today, we are introducing Neptune DAO as a natural extension of The LAO’s DAO ecosystem. Neptune supports blockchain-based projects with needed liquidity. The LAO and FlamingoDAO are filled with members who have been involved in Ethereum since its start. Neptune leverages the knowledge, expertise, and backgrounds of its DAO members to ensure DeFi protocols get the support they need.

Neptune identifies and provides the opportunity for liquidity pools and liquidity providers, but does so with a human-centric approach. Members of Neptune pool their capital and identify which projects to support and what investment strategies to engage in. All of these decisions will be mediated through Neptune’s dapp, and coordinated through Discord channels and weekly calls.

Liquidity and investment strategies can be proposed by any member of Neptune. If voted on by the rest of the DAO members, the strategy will be executed by Sam Cassatt, the former Chief Strategy Officer of ConsenSys, and his newly formed engine Aligned Capital. Strategies will also be supported by OpenLaw for dapp development and more.

There will be no manager or general partner of Neptune. Members have complete control over all of the DAO’s operation and investment strategies through democratic voting mechanisms. To understand more about Neptune’s structure, including fees, please reference our docs here.

Through Neptune, members are better able to:

• Vet and identify emerging opportunities in the DeFi space,
• Mutualize gas costs, and
• Save time when it comes to staking, claiming, and re-staking assets.

At the same time, Neptune will emerge as a go-to resource for projects seeking to bootstrap their DeFi networks with liquidity originating from people with aligned, transparent incentives.

🚀 Launching Neptune

Neptune will launch publicly on April 2, 2021 at 12:00 pm EST and will stay open until 70 members join. Members of The LAO and Flamingo will have the opportunity to make contributions before the public launch.

Neptune membership will be on a first-come, first-serve basis. Each member will have the opportunity to contribute 60 ether to receive 100,000 units in Neptune, up to 900,000 units or 540 ether per member. Any right to profits or losses from Neptune will be based on members’ respective ownership at the time of any distribution.

After contributing ether, there is a 7 day processing period to finish the approval of the application and fully execute the transaction. This is due to the nature of the Moloch v2 smart contracts, which have a default seven-day voting period and grace period to allow existing members to “rage quit” if they disagree with your membership. Over this period, the members, arriving on a first-come, first-serve basis, will be onboarded to a Discord and weekly call.

If you are interested in becoming a member of Neptune, fill out the accreditation form here. Once approved, you will have an opportunity to contribute and become a member.

🌕 Neptune’s Moons

The trajectory of Neptune will be determined by its members. We anticipate, however, that Neptune will not be the last DAO to provide liquidity support for various protocols. Once Neptune gets off the ground, the goal is to create additional liquidity-focused DAOs, independently operated but adjacent to Neptune. Neptune and its “moons” will focus on providing liquidity and will give its members the ability to loosely share information about various liquidity opportunities and strategies.

DeFi has taken many members of the Ethereum ecosystem to new stratospheres, but the quest to rebuild the commercial world is just beginning.

🛰 Put on your Space Boots

Reach out to learn more about Neptune at hello@neptunedao.xyz and continue the conversation on our Telegram and follow us on our Twitter.