DAO proposals & Marketing update

We’d like to start by thanking everyone for their patience and support while we were preparing the initial DAO proposals.

During this time we have been busy putting pen to paper, fleshing out our ideas to engage in productive discussions with potential partners for integrations and support in the development and implementation of said proposals. We’re proud to say we’ve reached an agreement with an absolutely monolithic (soon to be announced) partner.

As you know, Dapp development and security will be partially handled by Hacken, however some Dapps will have the need for other 3rd party services which Hacken does not specialise in. These services will be provided by our Foundation partners, the first of which soon to be disclosed.

Without further ado, here’s our first proposal:

Proposal #1: Using Colony as a Foundation outsourcing tool

Our community is one of the best within the crypto space when it comes to proactivity and commitment. For months we have been receiving numerous offers from community members to help out with a variety of aspects regarding Meridian, namely marketing, development, social engagement, even copy writing, among others. We are humbled and proud to see all of your constructive feedback, proposals, and engagement.

We thought to give everyone a chance at contributing towards Meridian’s goal of developing a fleshed-out DAO ecosystem while being compensated for your support and work. We believe Colony is well suited to provide the interface required for this to happen. This is a good proposal to get our DAO going.

If this proposal passes, some of the work and tasks from future proposals such as development, marketing, etc will be posted on Colony, along with their respective reward in LOCK. Community members will be able to submit their work to the Foundation after picking up a task, and be rewarded in-kind.

This would be done through Meridian’s section on Colony.

Onto our second proposal.

Proposal #2: PreSaga: Meridian’s game theory based prediction-market

With the advent of DeFi, crypto enthusiasts found themselves in an ever-growing sea of possible decisions, as new projects and concepts seem to pop up every few minutes! This flood gave rise to new information outlets and an increased crypto-holder awareness. This means that information isn’t the only thing that correlates to successful trading, but also how soon you get access to that information.

We sought out to create a system where LOCK holders would be able to bet on their predictive abilities in areas relating and beyond crypto. For this Dapp to be successful, it is essential that we leverage community knowledge about crypto, sports, financial markets, world events, and more! We envision LOCK to be a platform that will bring new people into this space.

LOCK holders would stake their LOCK as “bets” on almost anything. Bets would be double choice only, essentially “Yes” or “No”. When a holder submits his bet, the amount is added to the respective side of the bet, modifying the current bet reward pool. There will be two pools, a “Yes” and a “No” pool. At the expiration date (the date when the bet is settled) the winning side would collect the entirety of both side’s funds, allocated proportionally to each winner’s individual bet.

As an example, say someone wishes to short the S&P 500. A bet could be made regarding the index value for a specific time in the future, and on the expiration date, an oracle would pull the necessary information for bet settlement and the winners would be proportionally awarded their share of the winnings.

(Example)

• Jeff creates a bet on whether Bitcoin will be worth over 11,000 $ at a certain date and time in the future. He proceeds to bet 1000 LOCK on “Yes” as he believes it will be over 11,000 $.
• Jack believes the opposite, that Bitcoin will be worth less than 11,000 $ at that same date and time. Therefore, he decides to bet 2000 LOCK on “No”.
• (For illustration purposes, let’s pretend no one else joins this bet) At the time of expiration, there are 2 possible outcomes:
  1) Bitcoin is over 11,000 $ and Jeff collects 3000 LOCK ( his initial 1000 plus Jack’s 2000 )
  2) Bitcoin is under 11,000 $ and Jack collects 3000 LOCK ( his initial 2000 plus Jeff’s 1000 )

“That’s not fair for Jack as his potential reward is lower than Jeff’s reward” — correct indeed. However, this will not be a problem, for the same reason Balancer pools always end up with a balanced out coin ratio — game theory.

Instead of having the traditional odd-based betting system where each bet is individually analysed prior to disclosing its odds, arbitrageurs and betters will take that role and ensure the fairness and balance between bets.

Given any bet (such as the one from the example above) the side with the least amount of waged LOCK has larger potential gains. However, being part of the side with the least amount of waged LOCK also means you’re against the popular opinion, “betting against the general consensus” if you will. It’s only logical that your reward should be bigger should you end up on the winning side of that bet.

Generating revenue for the Meridian Founding will offset future dapp development costs, so a modest 2% fee will be placed on each bet, to be charged at the expiration date of the proposed bet in regards to the total LOCK waged on both sides. This fee will then be transferred to the Foundation’s wallet address. We are leveraging our experience in business to provide a sustainable future in blockchain for our stakeholders.

Should our proposed Dapp be community approved, we will release further details, specifications, and interface previews as time goes by. This Dapp will be hosted on a separate website, while featured on Meridian Network’s website.

Further details:

• PreSaga will require an oracle to pull bet results. We’re considering our options in regards to developing an in-house oracle or using a third party one. Once we settle on this we will release an announcement.
• As stated, we have also been discussing a potential partnership with an escrow provider for smart contract integration and escrow provision, who happens to be a well-known crypto-project. We will be announcing this partnership soon.
• The estimated deadline we’re setting for completion is Q1 2021, this is a safe estimate although it will probably take considerably less.
• At release date, we will release an expense report detailing all expenses incurred towards the Dapp’s completion.

So, how does the vote system for these proposals work?

As you likely already know, Meridian’s voting process has two stages.

The first stage is through Colony where both LOCK holders and non-holders can submit and upvote proposal suggestions.

Once the Foundation is ready to pick up another proposal, of which we’ll only handle 2 at a time, we will pick up the one with the most upvotes on Colony and submit a DAO vote to LOCK holders through the Aragon governing interface. If the vote on Aragon passes, we will proceed to develop/implement the proposal.

For these 2 initial proposals, we have skipped the first stage and moved straight to the Aragon voting stage as to kickstart the DAO.

Aragon voting process

For each proposal, specific voting tokens will be minted and airdropped to LOCK holders. These tokens will only serve for voting on that one proposal.

The way the process works is, when accessing Meridian’s Aragon page, holders will connect their Metamask wallet. By doing so, Aragon will recognise the tokens specific to that current vote and allow the user to submit an amount of “Yes” or “No” votes proportional to the amount of voting tokens they hold in that wallet.

As soon as voting tokens are airdropped, holders will be able to submit their votes, having until the end of the deadline to do so.

Voting deadlines

We will start with the Colony app vote.

This vote will start on Friday September 11th at 8pm UTC time, and close exactly three days later, on Monday September 14th at 8pm UTC time.

After 24 hours, we will then start PreSaga’s vote.

This vote will start on Tuesday September 15th at 8pm UTC time, and close exactly three days later, on Friday September 18th at 8pm UTC time.

Important note:

LOCK holders must hold the minimum amount of 2000 LOCK for the duration of the first voting day.

MARKETING UPDATE

We have heard you loud and clear. You want a marketing update. Here it is:

First, this week, barring another fall in market sentiment, we will be starting our biggest outreach campaign so far, targeting the largest number of groups we’ve ever dealt with. We believe this will help bring awareness and an increased number of supporters to our community.

Second, we have engaged in discussions with news outlets who have expressed an interest in Meridian and are willing to feature us. Some of these are pretty big names and we hope you’ll see the first one published within the next week or two.

Next, our influencer campaign is in motion, with the partnering of several crypto personalities who will help us expand the Meridian brand through several venues, such as Youtube, Twitter, and others.

All of this will be revealed in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned.

Until next time,

The Meridian Foundation

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