JADE’s War Path to a $1,000 Price Floor

Jade Protocol

Dec 31, 2021·15 min read

Our Utility Roadmap Has Arrived.

How low will $JADE go?

Wouldn’t it be great if we knew the answer to that question?

What if there was a precise dollar amount it couldn’t fall below, and what if that number was publicly known?

Here’s the thing — at one point, we had the “backed price” of $JADE on our homepage.

News alert: that number was bullshit.

And it’s bullshit for all OHM forks.

Here’s proof:

What do you think happens when the price of OHM hits that price?

The answer: nothing.

Most people don’t know this — most think that the protocol initiates a “buyback” to maintain that price. But that’s false.

Straight from OlympusDAO’s GitBook:

The buyback price of Olympus-style DAOs is 1 DAI ($1).

This begs the question: why would OHM trade at ~350x above the backed price? Why would $TIME trade at ~3,650x the backed price?

Because people (falsely) believe that the backed price is the lowest the coin can go.

So, we did an experiment — we removed the “backed price” information from the JADE website and the price quickly dipped below it.

It was fascinating to watch. Psychologically, just seeing a ‘backed price’ on the homepage increased the odds of the token trading above it — even though the backed price doesn’t actually mean anything.

The masses that invested in protocols like $TIME and $OHM are in for a rude awakening once this information becomes common knowledge.

What if there was a mechanism where the backed price increased over time and it actually meant the token could not fall below it?

And how would we do it with a “Decentralized VC Fund” that rewards its users without the legal risk of $JADE being labeled a security — thus alienating entire countries from participating?

No one has figured out how to do this. Until now.

Introducing: The Rising Floor

This is what Real Utility looks like.

Through a series of strategic bets, the JADE treasury will increase in value, thus increasing the backed price.

The goal: a war path to a $1,000 Price Floor for $JADE.

This will be done through JADE’s Decentralized VC Fund.

And unlike other projects — this backed price will *actually* be maintained via buybacks through our intelligent algorithmic BuyBot (full, in-depth details in the 2nd half of this mega-post).

For reference, let’s look at some data points of successful funds:

Lowercase Capital had a 213x return over 3.5 years.

Multicoin Capital’s hedge fund assets have soared 20,287% over 3.5 years.

The list goes on.

Note: The success of a VC fund is measured over extended time horizons. 3.5 years is actually short — most funds track success over a decade. Being part of JADE’s decentralized VC fund means making a bet for a long-term play.

JADE’s $70m+ treasury is the starting capital of the fund. As strategic bets are placed and come to fruition, the treasury could easily 100x+. Which, in turn, would increase the Floor Price of JADE — by orders of magnitude.

The Rising Floor mechanism means that the “Floor Price” of $JADE cannot ever go down. Over time, it can only go one direction: up.

Full details of how this works in a bit.

Now here’s how the JADE price could suddenly 10x, 100x, or higher:

JADE’s 1000x opportunity.

Every VC Fund has a small team of experts that are on the hunt for “unicorns.” A unicorn is an investment that has the potential to see a massive multiple in returns.

In the startup world, a ‘unicorn’ refers to a company that passes the 1 billion dollar valuation mark. It happens so rarely, and it’s so special, that investing in one is like finding a mythical unicorn.

These small teams spend every waking moment scouring and filtering for unicorns. The fund is bottlenecked by the capability and talent of their in-house, unicorn-hunting team.

What if there was a fund that could crowdsource the hunting and filtering of unicorn investments? What if a fund wasn’t limited to a small, in-house team, but instead could leverage the collective brainpower of over a hundred thousand people?

In other words: how are we going to reach a Floor Price of $1,000 or more for each $JADE token?

Yes, we’ll have our own in-house expert analyst team that hunts for unicorn investment opportunities.

But, we’re also going to cheat.

Introducing… The Alpha Army.

We are mobilizing our community to find 1000x, unicorn investments.

How? By creating a Unicorn Filter.

$100,000 will be awarded to community members that find, research, and present opportunities to JADE that result in a treasury investment.

Submit your proposals here.

Our team of world-class fund managers will go through submissions daily, and filter the highest-quality briefs (Part 2 of our Roadmap will talk about the critical hires we’ve made to manage the fund).

Here’s what the 3-phase process looks like:

1. Our community (the Alpha Army) will submit thousands of proposals for investment opportunities (both in and outside of crypto)
2. Our team will go through every single proposal, and filter the highest quality briefs
3. The top crowdsourced proposals will be presented to the community as a vote. The winning proposal(s) will receive an investment from JADE, and the person(s) who created the proposal(s) will be rewarded $100,000

Welcome to the hive-mind VC fund.

We’re the only VC fund in existence that figured out how to scale our analyst team.

Incentive alignment is a beautiful thing.

Discovering 1000x returns requires legwork; it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. And it all starts with filtering through a heaping pile of counter-intuitive, contrarian plays.

Now, a question:

Why would a new project want to give our community a pre-sale allocation of their token?

This is where it gets epic.

All new projects want 2 things:

1. Money (initial capital to fund the team)
2. Users (human beings that will actually use the protocol/product and become evangelists)

There’s no VC fund that can provide both of these things. Centralized VC funds just provide the money.

Guess what? JADE has both — and we’re the only VC fund in the world that can say that.

This has never been done before and if you don’t instantly see why it’s exciting, then think through this:

• Tons of projects are going to want our money ($70m+ treasury and growing) and our community (150,000+ members).
• Because of the above, our treasury will get preferential economics + allocations from projects that we invest in. Why?
• …because the potential for a project to 100–1000x+ is significantly higher once it’s exposed to our massive community that will act as evangelists.
• As a result of investments mooning, JADE’s backed price can increase exponentially due to the “Rising Floor.”

I have to repeat this because it’s so important to understand:

There has never been a fund with a user base. We have over 150,000 people that can be mobilized as the initial evangelists of a project.

The JADE treasury and community is every early-stage project’s wet dream.

Pre-sale allocations are reserved for private VC funds. These private funds receive “preferential economics” which often means they get a token price that will be 10x or higher once it hits retail.

Why would a project pick a centralized VC fund like A16z for an allocation, when they could give it to JADE and also bootstrap a massive community at the same time?

Projects seeking investment solve their 2 biggest problems (users + money) by giving the JADE Army a fat pre-sale allocation.

It’s a no-brainer for every project in existence.

And holding $JADE gives you a seat at the VC table — typically a door open only for elites.

Our world-class VC fund managers will then deploy intelligent management strategies — these profits will be put into the Backing Treasury, thus dramatically increasing the Floor Price.

We believe that JADE will trade well above the backed price because explosive growth can’t be timed.

Imagine selling $JADE, going to sleep, and waking up to a $JADE price that has double or tripled because one of the treasury investments exploded in value overnight.

For example, if JADE invested $500k into Axie during its pre-launch, then that $500k would have turned into $750 million today. A multiple of over 1000x.

This would result in the Floor Price of $JADE blasting through $1,000 as profits are added to the Backing Treasury.

And that’s just from one bet.

This kind of parabolic growth from one of JADE’s bets cannot be charted or analyzed, which is why markets tend to price in potential long before one of these bets pays out.

Exiting $JADE could mean missing out on many multiples in value — it’s the equivalent of taking money out of a VC Fund before one of its bets went to the moon.

Think of it like this:

The value of $JADE = the cumulative potential of all of JADE’s ongoing investments + the value of the treasury.

Doing fundamental price analysis on $JADE is impossible because of the ‘unknown’ component of our Unicorn Investments.

Will we be able to deploy 100% of the treasury immediately? Of course not. This is why capital that is sitting idle will be yield-farmed (more info on this in Part 2 of the roadmap).

The yield farming of idle assets will begin within 72 hours.

All available treasury funds will be used in some way to accrue value to increase the Backing Treasury, thus increasing the Floor Price of $JADE.

Monthly Fund Reports

On the 1st of each month (starting February 1, 2022), we will publish a detailed report that recaps JADE’s VC Fund progress thus far, and also what’s on the horizon for the coming month(s).

We’re calling these updates “The $1,000 War Path.”

Let’s do a quick recap.

How do we plan to reach a Floor Price of at least $1,000 per $JADE?

1. Our Venture Capital arm that filters through 1000x+ opportunities on a daily basis
2. Community voting on which vetted projects to invest in through the Alpha Army and our in-house team of analysts, and getting preferential pre-sale economics (a $500k investment has the potential to turn into $750m+)
3. The launch of our own trading desk — our alpha hunting staff that uses big data analysis to vet investment opportunities
4. Yield farming with idle capital
5. Aggressively curbing the circulating supply of $JADE (more info on this below)

Saying that we’re excited would be an understatement.

Everything above is the high-level explanation of JADE’s Roadmap.

Now it’s time to do a deep-dive into our strategy of reaching a Floor Price of $1,000 per $JADE via the “Rising Floor.”

The Rising Floor Explained in Detail

Let’s crack into the Rising Floor mechanism and how it will create an “up only” Floor Price of $JADE.

First, we need to understand the difference between a “backing” and a “Floor Price.”

Like I mentioned earlier, the “backing” doesn’t mean anything. Why? Because nothing automatically happens at this price. There isn’t a “buyback” mechanism that gets triggered.

There is absolutely no guarantee that the price won’t go below its backing.

On the other hand, our Floor Price is a guarantee. If the token value of $JADE dips below the floor, a buyback is initiated to “defend” that price.

In order to make this guarantee, a portion of the treasury needs to be set aside for buybacks to defend the Floor Price.

This means we’ll have 2 separate treasuries:

1. Investment Treasury
2. Backing Treasury

Think of the Backing Treasury as a savings account and the Investment Treasury as an investment account.

The job of the Backing Treasury is to defend the Floor Price of $JADE through an algorithmic trading bot we developed.

Meet, BuyBot.

BuyBot is a hyper-intelligent trading bot that we’ve been quietly testing for months. After running BuyBot through over 72,000 transactions, it works flawlessly.

BuyBot will automatically trigger if $JADE ever falls below the Floor Price.

How do we determine the Floor Price?

Let’s run through a hypothetical example.

1. JADE devotes $20M of the treasury to “back” 1M tokens
2. Price attempts to dip below $20
3. Our Algorithmic BuyBot absorbs all selling below $20, then burns all newly purchased tokens
4. Floor Price = successfully defended

The more money in the Backing Treasury, the higher the Floor Price.

Hence, the “Rising Floor.”

The Floor Price of $JADE can go “up only” for 3 reasons:

1. Money can only be added to the Backing Treasury. It can only be removed in the event of a buyback to defend the Floor Price.
2. If BuyBot is triggered, all purchased $JADE will be immediately burned — thus removing it from the circulating supply permanently. This burn mechanism will offset the fact that the Backing Treasury goes down in value during a Buyback (see the Floor Price equation above).
3. The Backing Treasury will only hold stablecoins, thus preventing price fluctuations associated with non-stablecoins.

Because of these 3 rules, the Rising Floor Price can only go one direction over time: up.

If a user happens to be lucky enough to buy $JADE near the Floor Price, it’s a no-brainer to take advantage since the future Floor Price is guaranteed to be higher.

*For the first week of January, we will be adding funds to the Backing Treasury at random intervals, pushing up the Floor Price consistently for 7-days straight.

This means that no one knows what the Floor Price will actually be on January 7th once the total initial floor amount has been deployed.

Use this information wisely.

Over time, profits from JADE’s VC Fund investments, yield farming, trading desk, and bonding will be deposited into the Backing Treasury, growing it. Every time this happens, the Floor Price of $JADE increases.

Let’s refer back to the earlier example of Axie.

If JADE had made that investment into Axie, and deposited $150M of the profits into the Backing Treasury, that would effectively increase the Floor Price of $JADE by 7.5x overnight. $300m of the profits deposited would result in a 15x, and so on.

Now imagine what would happen if several of the VC fund’s bets started paying off back-to-back (plus yield farming profits and bonding assets consistently deposited into the Backing Treasury).

We’ve established a Rising Floor Price, but why will $JADE trade significantly higher?

Rising Floor vs. Fair Market Value (FMV)

There will be 2 unique prices displayed on jadeprotocol.io:

1. “Floor Price” — The Rising Floor Price that BuyBot defends, as discussed above.
2. “Fair Market Value” — A pseudo-floor price that considers the fact that staked $JADE is, at the moment, off the market.

Remember, $OHM and $TIME trade at 350x and 1,650x their true backed prices, respectively.

So, what’s $JADE’s Fair Market Value?

We expect the Fair Market Value (FMV) to be, conservatively, 5 times higher than the Floor Price. How did we come up with this multiple?

Let’s dive deeper into FMV and how it’s calculated.

Really look at this formula, because this is very important to understand.

Notice that Fair Market Value is calculated based on the supply of UNSTAKED $JADE.

Why? Because staking $JADE effectively removes it from the trade-able circulating supply.

Through game-theory mechanics, we are incentivizing our entire community to remove as much of the $JADE supply from the market as possible through staking.

The incentive to stake is very high because of one key metric:

Every time someone stakes $JADE (thus increasing the percentage of staked $JADE), the Fair Market Value goes up.

Because remember, FMV is calculated by taking the total treasury value and dividing it by the *unstaked* supply.

In turn, $JADE’s price will also go up simply by the community-driven effort of staking.

Staking = good for price.

Unstaking = bad for price.

The Fair Market Value will always be higher than the Floor Price — how much higher depends on the community’s Staking Rate.

The Meta Game of Staking

If APY is set at 0%, then why Stake? There are 2 main reasons:

1. Boost FMV (Fair Market Value) — Every $JADE staked is a vote of confidence that increases the price while also removing $JADE from the tradeable supply (we want to squeeze the market dry of sellable $JADE).
2. Governance — only sJADE holders (stakers) can directly vote on JADE’s VC investment decisions.

Preferential Bonding Events

Bonding increases the circulating supply of $JADE because every time a bond is initiated, the protocol mints a new $JADE token. Increasing the supply has a direct impact on the Price Floor.

In the simplest terms:

Bonding at a net price that is lower than the Price Floor = a declining Floor. Not good.

Therefore, bonding will only be available when the price of $JADE is significantly higher than the Price Floor.

Exact figures will not be revealed publicly to avoid users gaming the system.

When bonding is enabled, it will only be up for an unspecified (short) period of time — and it will be disabled without warning.

Be sure to keep an eye on JadeProtocol.io and enable Twitter notifications so you don’t miss out when a Preferential Bonding Event is taking place.

Now that you understand all the new mechanisms, here’s what is happening next:

1. Total circulating supply has dropped significantly. Yesterday, it was hovering above 2 million $JADE, today it’s at ~1.1 million. Nearly a 50% reduction. $JADE is now considerably more scarce.
2. Emissions are completely disabled. Supply can only increase through bonding, and bonding will happen rarely.
3. The Backing Treasury has been loaded with $16 million BUSD, creating a Price Floor of ~$15 — welcome to “Up Only” mode (reminder: for the first week of January, we will be adding funds to the Backing Treasury at random intervals, pushing up the Floor Price consistently for 7-days straight. What will the Floor Price be on January 7? Time will tell.).
4. We’ve allocated a majority of our main treasury for capital deployment— through yield farming, trading, and VC investments. The profits of which will be added to the Backing Treasury, pushing up the Floor Price.

Welcome to JADE’s transition to Real Fuckin’ Utility.

Our wild ride up until this point has just been the bootstrapping phase.

A rabid community and a $70m+ treasury were built by our team without any utility. What do you think is going to happen now that our Utility Roadmap is in place?

The JADE team has already been executing many of the ideas outlined in this post.

Here’s a teaser of what’s been happening behind-the-scenes:

• We’ve received over 300 applications from projects that want JADE to invest in them. This happened before we had an official application process. All applications are being reviewed by our in-house, expert analysts (our in-house analyst team will receive their own introduction in an upcoming update).
• Last week we onboarded a genius-level DeFi expert, and one of the most profitable “yield farmers” in the world (yes, that’s now an occupation). More details on this hire in Part 2 of the Roadmap, but capital will start being farmed within the next few days.
• Our hiring spree is in full effect. We’ve expanded our Web3 dev team and are placing a few more as we speak.

Strap in folks, because 2022 will go down as the year JADE changed the game.

Phew. That was a lot and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

[Part 2 coming in two weeks]

For those that want a quick recap, I created a Table of Contents and TLDR summary below.

TLDR Summary:

If you want a TLDR, find a different project.

Einstein | Co-Founder of JADE

P.S. You better believe we’re doing a $15,000 BUSD giveaway for this monster roadmap.

Take the quiz below and receive a 100% score to throw your hat into the ring. The top 5 most impressive and well-thought-out quiz submissions will split $15,000. Winners will be announced via Twitter on January 2nd, at 3:33pm PST.

P.P.S. Here’s a sneak peek at Part 2 of our Roadmap, coming out in two weeks:

• The total redesign of JadeProtocol.io — we’ve hired some absolute gangsters and pointed their creative genius at improving our design & UI/UX
• The Avalanche launch timeline — JADE will be cross-chain. Avalanche is our first step towards that. We’ll present a timeline for when this will happen and details of the multi-chain bridge.
• SMRTr swap details — we’ve figured out a solution that solves the “dilution” problem of $JADE. Details in the next post.
• A detailed report of our latest epic hires. We’ve poached some of the top players from the world’s most successful VC funds. We’ve hired talented web3 developers to help us move even faster.