September 2021, a bunch of builders excited about the promise of the open metaverse, got together to form EnterDAO as a community effort. A whitepaper was published, highlighting two core products — LandWorks, a decentralized land-renting marketplace, and Metaportal — a Web3-powered desktop game client. In addition to the core products, the whitepaper laid out plans for a proper decentralized governance module and an NFT collection in tight integration with the two core products and the Web3 gaming ecosystem.
Since then, both products and surrounding infrastructure was delivered and then some! In fact, LandWorks quickly became the market leader in land NFT rentals, enabling Decentraland and Voxel land rentals in a decentralized manner. MetaPortal lagged behind in terms of adoption, but it was always dependent on the underlying Web3 games, many of which have not hit the market yet.
In fact, over those two years, both the Web3 gaming/metaverse space and the wider market took a turn for the worse as the industry underwent a cleanse. During this period, the DAO pretty much stopped generating new revenue from its products. While operating costs were brought down to a bare minimum to maximize runway, there still seems to be no clear path toward product-market fit or even a meaningful pivot in line with the initial thesis upon which the DAO was founded.
These circumstances require the exploration of a new direction for the community or perhaps, an end to the journey. Hence, after careful consideration, the EnterDAO core contributors have decided that the most adequate way forward is to propose a dissolution of the DAO by distributing the treasury back to the community.
A proposal to sunset EnterDAO
With this article, the core contributors group would like to propose a fair sunset of EnterDAO, enabling a distribution of the treasury to the community.
Why sunset?
- No visible path towards product-market fit for the products in their respective market niche
- No visible path towards a pivot that would move the DAO closer to sustainability
- A fair dissolution that allows the community and early supporters to move on and does NOT reward core contributors in any way seems to be the most appropriate way forward
The mechanism for the proposed dissolution will be outlined below but before we do that, it’s important to align on the principles of this proposal. In order to work, the dissolution should:
- Distribute the treasury to the community and early supporters in the fairest way possible
- Close the DAO governance
- Not reward core contributors that are pushing this proposal, thus leaving all allocations to the community
- Maintain the products operational for at least a few months as a grace period to withdraw all assets
Dissolution Mechanism
The following paragraphs outline the proposed mechanism we envision for the dissolution of EnterDAO shared as part of governance proposal PID-6 as well.
EnterDAO would sunset, distributing its 437 ETH treasury among the community and early supporters. This distribution will be executed by burning ENTR tokens, based on a snapshot of balances taken on February 6, 2024. The snapshot includes:
- ENTR balance in wallet
- tokens staked in the DAO
- tokens in liquidity pools
- tokens from LW rewards
- vesting contracts
There would be an additional boost for Sharded Minds NFT holders — a boost of 5% for 1 to 10 NFTs in the same wallet, boost of 10% for 11 to 20 NFTs and a boost of 15% for more than 20 NFTs in the same wallet.
All ENTR holders at this time will qualify for a share of the treasury at a fixed rate of 0.00001133 ETH per ENTR.
The fixed rate of ENTR is derived based on the treasury and the total supply of ENTR after excluding the holdings of all core contributors and holdings of the DAO. None of the core contributors behind this proposal will get any portion of the treasury. We believe this is the fairest approach to the allocation of the treasury.
You can find the list of addresses that would be eligible here.
The dissolution mechanism is also outlined in governance proposal PID-6. PID-6 proposes two steps:
- Transfer the assets from the DAO treasury to a smart contract which will distribute them to the holders with a snapshot taken on February 6th 2024 23:59 UTC (blocknumber = 19172614). The redeem period will last until February 22nd 2025 at 00:00 UTC. Each holder would only be able to claim once. After that the remaining ETH will be sent to theprotocolguild.eth to further support the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Set the
setWarmUpDuration(uint256)function of the DAO contract to the uint256 max value which will make any further proposal with a wait time of several billion years resulting a practical dissolvement of the DAO.
In order to not overcomplicate the sunset and support the Ethereum community which made EnterDAO possible, unclaimed funds would be donated to Protocol Guild at theprotocolguild.eth. Protocol Guild is a collective of Ethereum contributors that has helped shape the Ethereum protocol as we know it. None of the EnterDAO contributors has any affiliation with Protocol Guild.
Liquidity Pools and Staking
The funds which are deposited in EnterDAO’s liquidity pools will be available for withdraws. We are aware that the liquidity pools get stuck due to inactivity and once this happens they request a disproportionate amount of gas. We will outline how this can be fixed in a separate article.
The staked ENTR tokens can also be withdrawn from the DAO. All staked ENTR tokens are taken into account for the snapshot.
How to withdraw funds from EnterDAO liquidity pools
What happens to the Products?
Several actions will be taken to ensure all assets remain claimable and no further actions are executed on both LandWorks and MetaPortal
LandWorks
LandWorks is a set of smart contracts that lives immutably on the Ethereum blockchain. Upon dissolution of the DAO, the contracts will still be operational on the blockchain. We propose to keep the frontend up for 6–12 months. Even if the frontend is taken down, the contract (0x678D837fA15eba2B59f6CD5F9F4C580AC2Dfc269) could still be interacted with through Etherscan.
How to withdraw Land NFTs from LandWorks
MetaPortal
Upon dissolution of the DAO, no further updates to the MetaPortal app should be made. Users can export their wallets and use them through another wallet interface, such as Metamask, Rabby etc.
Conclusion
EnterDAO had an ambitious thesis upon its founding. Due to market conditions and slower than expected adoption of both Web3 gaming and metaverse technologies, the vision didn’t live up to the expectations. We made a commendable attempt even though there were clearly mistakes along the way, mainly in the areas of finding product-market fit and even token economics.
Nevertheless we are happy that we launched the first ERC721 rental protocol (EIP4400), facilitated more than 300 rents, assisted multiple people and businesses in their journey through the metaverse, gave out more than $50K in grants to creators, launched a revenue share model and an innovative advertisement feature, promoted more than 100 games and launched our very own.
Regardless of whether this proposal goes through, we are grateful for the community support along the way and hope to be able to build alongside all of you again.
