Planning the Atellix Network DAO
Introduction to the Atellix Network:
The Atellix Network is a portfolio of services, powered by the Solana blockchain, that provides commerce capabilities for B2B and B2C applications. The Atellix Network is developing the following projects to enable on-chain commerce solutions:
AtellixPay.com — Instant Checkout & Recurring Payments solution. LIVE on mainnet!
Virtual USD (“USDV”) —Fully-reserved, US Dollar stablecoin. LIVE on mainnet!
The Atellix Catalog — E-commerce marketplace powered by decentralized search. (Launching soon!)
Atellix.Network — The main website for the project.
Why is the Atellix Network building a DAO?
We’re here for the degens, traders, NFT hoarders, Bitcoin maxis, flippers, for devs, and for the normies, too. The Atellix Network is an association of people who like building and using blockchain technology. We hope you’ll join our Discord channel: Atellix Network Discord!
We’re building solutions that take blockchain technology into the mainstream, a step-by-step process with a lot of technical challenges. We are building a DAO to harness the power of decentralization and the “Wisdom of the Crowds” to help us along the way.
By running our programs on Solana, we are able to generate a cryptographically verifiable consensus for the transactions we intend to effectuate. Leveraging the Solana blockchain allows for the construction of advanced marketplace applications.
If you subscribe to notions of the Adaptive Market Hypothesis (as we do), our marketplace will generate a competitive advantage versus other marketplaces by providing participants with a faster global marketplace for goods and services, powered by blockchain tech: The Atellix Catalog.
So, what about the DAO?
The DAO is a club of investors who utilize Solana dApps to help build Atellix Network product and services. We hope DAO members will help us promote the network while we create awesome experiences for end-users.
By structuring the project as a DAO, the holders of the Atellix Token (“ATX”) are able to leverage a smart contract to protect their investment, autonomously manage the liquidity for the ATX Token, and contribute to the project at their own pace.
To enable commerce powered by blockchain systems (as envisioned in the Bitcoin Whitepaper), we must construct processes that facilitate the establishment of enough trust between counter-parties on the network to successfully perform transactions, while simultaneously preventing malicious transactions from being accepted by the decentralized network.
Solana’s decentralized smart contract runtime provide a “trust-less” computing resource that ensures our commerce programs run securely. In its fully-functional form, the Atellix DAO will maintain the code of the Atellix Network smart contracts, which perform a variety of business functions. Check out our GitHub: (Atellix GitHub Repos)
Building the Atellix DAO:
Voting & Governance: We want the voting process to be as simple as possible. This problem we want to solve is how to spin up the DAO when most of the ATX Tokens are in the DAO’s treasury. For this the DAO can adjust the weight of each vote. For example, if the DAO has only issued 10% of the tokens, then only 5% of the 10,000,000 of the ATX Token would be needed for a successful majority vote.
ATX Token holders are able to delegate their votes so more active community members can provide this service for others who might prefer to take a more passive role.
Voting thresholds will be set so that community members are able to put forward proposals as appropriate but also to prevent abuse and gaming of the voting system to the detriment of the larger group of DAO members. We will disclose the exact parameters for our voting process on our website as we proceed with launching the DAO.
DAO User Tools: Instead of spending additional time and resources to develop new tools to manage the Atellix DAO, we decided to look at what tools already exist in the Solana ecosystem, and see if they are capable of meeting the requirements of the Atellix DAO.
After some experimentation, we determined that the Realms DAO tooling is viable for running the Atellix DAO. (https://twitter.com/Realms_DAOs)
This is great, because Realms provides a comprehensive user interface to propose transactions from the DAO treasury, and allows DAO members to vote on proposal, or delegate their vote as needed. Also, DAO members can view the treasury of the Atellix DAO, at any time, to verify the holdings of on-chain assets.
Managing Liquidity: One of the main advantages of the DAO structure versus traditional capital formation mechanisms is that a DAO provides more transparency to investors, and more liquidity for the investors, collectively. DAO members control how capital is allocated to the project, and they also autonomously control how and when ATX Tokens are issued.
The ATX Token can be issued by the DAO into various on-chain markets, such as liquidity pools of Automatic Market Makers (AMMs) and orderbook DEXs (CLOBs). By controlling its own tokens, and simultaneously creating a market for the token with liquidity controlled by the DAO smart contract, the DAO can minimize the risk of adverse scenarios that could crash the token price, while allowing investors to enter and exit the investment as desired.
The smart contract structure of the Atellix DAO is designed to ensure that insiders cannot “rug” the project, by dumping tokens into the AMM, for example, because the un-issued tokens and the “Mint Authority” of the token will all be controlled and owned by the DAO smart contract. This provides protections and opportunities for investors in ways that are simply not possible with TradFi.
Things we considered:
Vote Escrow Staking (veTokens & VSK) — Vote Escrow Staking is a process where voting power is adjusted over time based on parameters set in the vote escrow registry. We found this process was confusing. It’s a bit hard to understand without detailed analysis.
While veTokens have been used successfully for other projects, it adds a layer of complexity without many major benefits for the Atellix DAO’s tokenomics structure. Since the Atellix DAO can adjust the voting weight of the entire pool of issued tokens, and we are utilizing separate lock-boxes for vesting founder tokens, we can reach our governance thresholds to perform DAO activities without a complex vote weighting system.
The Atellix DAO does not use veTokens, and consequently our voting process is much easier to understand.
Squads Multisig — This is a multi-user wallet that is gaining popularity in the Solana ecosystem. This is a tool for small teams to manage a set of assets on-chain. While this looks to be a very powerful tool, and we may in fact use it for specific purposes, it doesn’t seem to be a framework for running a DAO that could potentially grow to a large number of users. Squads seems to be geared toward a small team. For us it makes more sense to use the Realms DAO to manage our treasury since Realms is designed to handle a large number of users that might be voting on any particular proposal.
https://twitter.com/SquadsProtocol
Things we’re looking forward to:
Cordelia — Cordelia is a wallet-style interface for creating DAO proposals. This looks really cool and quite useful. One requirement for the Atellix DAO is the ability for the DAO to add liquidity to various AMMs and CLOBs. For now, this will require custom transactions (written in code and uploaded as hexadecimal) to do this. This is not a huge problem, since we can publish the generator to GitHub for DAO members to review.
Having a program like Cordelia could reduce the overhead of creating custom transactions. The caveat is not to proceed too quickly and be sure there is enough transparency so the DAO can easily see what’s going on with each transaction.
https://twitter.com/CordeliaApp
Thanks & Shout-out:
Realms DAO — for building best-in-class DAO tooling with spiffy graphical user interfaces.
https://twitter.com/Realms_DAOs
DeanTheMachine & deanslist DAO — for hosting great Twitter spaces about Solana DAOs.
https://twitter.com/_Dean_Machine
https://twitter.com/deanslistDAO
Other Cool Solana DAOs:
https://twitter.com/OrangeDAOxyz
Avoiding DAO FUD:
We got some very helpful tips from the DAODAO (https://twitter.com/DA0_DA0). The DAODAO runs on the Cosmos blockchain. We also connected with the Junø Network DAO (https://twitter.com/JunoNetwork). They discussed several issues, based on their experience running DAOs, that we want to avoid as we build the Atellix DAO. We want to leverage decentralized tools and processes for successful results, but not get bogged down by them. We also want to avoid the pitfalls that have affected other DAOs.
Biggest concerns:
1. DINO: DAO-In-Name-Only (core group has too much control)
2. Too much voting: asking DAO members to vote on irrelevant minutiae (core group has too little control)
3. How/when/if to change tokenomics (Atellix DAO will never do this.)
4. Vote delegation (let more involved members take votes for others) — we do support this.
5. Alternative & more descriptive names: Teams, “D.O.’s” (lol)
6. How to get the community more involved and get engagement
7. VCs who want to dump on retail getting sweetheart deals
8. Problems that undermine investor confidence
9. DAO members taking adversarial financial decisions
10. Discussions behind closed doors
11. No boring corporate culture
We will take all of these concerns into consideration as we try to build one of the most robust and productive DAOs.
Will the Atellix DAO be decentralized?
Yes, and over time it will become more and more decentralized. We want the right balance to make the project a success. In the beginning, the Atellix DAO will have a council of core team members and major investors that can ensure the DAO is able to function properly. Decisions about managing the DAO’s liquidity and assets will be reserved for the DAO members (the ATX Token holders). Once the DAO member are able to effectively manage the DAO on their own, then the council will be decommissioned, and all responsibilities for the DAO will be controlled by voting of the ATX Token holders, or their delegates.
What is the tokenomics for the Atellix Token (“ATX”)?
The Atellix Token is going to be based on what we call “Warren Buffet Tokenomics,” which means that our token is not inflationary. (Note: we are in no way endorsed by, or associated with, Mr. Buffet.)
We want the value of our token to grow over time like shares of Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. There are exactly 10,000,000 ATX Tokens. The policy of the Atellix DAO will be to not issue any tokens which would have the effect of reducing the real value of any tokens held by Atellix DAO members.
The 10,000,000 ATX Tokens will be controlled and owned by the DAO, with a fully-disclosed amount allocated to time-locked token vaults for the core team of developers, designers, marketers, and initial investor/advisors. As the project completes various milestones to facilitate the construction of the network, the DAO will put the ATX tokens onto the market and allocate resource to the projects that are approved by the DAO’s governance process.
The ATX Tokens represent the Preferred Shares of Atellix, Inc. (a California C-Corp.). The assets of the DAO and the assets of the company are separate, with each entity autonomously in control of its own assets, operations, and liquidity. Any dividends paid by the Corporation are paid to the ATX Token holders. The purpose of the DAO will be to fund Atellix Network projects, and likewise, Atellix, Inc. will generate profits that will be paid out to DAO members (or re-invested for growth, as the case may be).
What’s the legal status of ATX Security Token?
Atellix Network is harmonized with the regulatory environment. Over time we may expand into other areas of blockchain services, such as asset tokenization using the Atellix AquaDEX Protocol.
We have a nuanced perspective on the regulatory space and how it impacts blockchain application service providers. There’s a few options that allow us to build the Atellix DAO using legal exemptions that allow us to capitalize the project without the time and expense of full SEC registration.
Crowdfunding — Reg. CF:
By joining one of the crowdfunding portals we can raise funds for the DAO from anyone in the generate public (with a few basic requirements). We are researching which crowdfunding portal the is most crypto-friendly and is able to ensure that people are able to easily receive their ATX tokens on the back-end.
Private Placement — Reg. D:
This exemption would allow us to market the investment offer publicly but only to accredited investors (people with high income, lots of assets, professional institutions, venture capitalists, etc…). If we go this route we will implement a service provider that is able to verify that accredited investor status.
Blockchain Experts:
The ATX Token is available right now on AquaDEX.com for the pre-sale price of $0.70 USDC per ATX Token.
We’re listed on Jupiter Exchange here: https://jup.ag/swap/USDC-ATX.
These tokens are offered under the SAFE Agreement, provided in the Atellix, Inc. Private Placement Memorandum, which can be found on the “Invest” page linked below. Please understand the risks of this investment described in the memo. The ATX Token is offered at this time to experts who want to build the Solana ecosystem and investing now constitutes an express request of waiver vis-à-vis accreditation status.
See our “Invest” page: https://atellix.network/invest/index.html