To our Occam.fi family, we want to take this opportunity to provide an update on recent events that have taken place in our community and on our platform, provide a clear action plan on how we will solve them and in what time frame, and give a general update on some of the important discussions we have seen in our community channels over the last few days.
We will cover:
- Increased IDO Due Diligence,
- Increased IDO Communications and information,
- Recent issues with gas spending and failed transactions (ORE & Derived),
- YouClout IDO participation issue,
- OCC’s continued and clear utility in our ecosystem,
- Roll-out of the Occam Forum and Occam Improvement Proposals (OIPs).
We will also detail a new way that we are looking to gather your feedback and streamline discussions so that we can extract the most value from your suggestions to us — we want to hear your voices and implement your ideas as tangible changes to the Occam.fi ecosystem.
1. IDO Due Diligence,
After careful consideration, we are planning to vastly increase our due diligence requirements for all upcoming IDOs. In short, this means that only the very best IDO partners, who have been vouched for by Tier 1 funds, and projects which are wholly incubated through Occelerator (such as THEOS and CardWallet), will make it to OccamRazer.
The projects we bring to OccamRazer must fulfil criteria ranging from project scope, to team and advisors, and naturally financial strength. However, we want to step this up a notch. We have no power over a project’s secondary market trading performance, but we have seen a clear trend that the projects which we personally incubate or those that are backed by tier 1 funds generally perform better, and so we will take a renewed focus on these projects only.
Now that we have a pipeline of quality projects planned for OccamRazer, we can take extra time to vet projects before they launch with us, and pass this quality on to our users. This will renew our focus on becoming the premium and de facto launchpad for Cardano-based projects.
2. IDO Communications and information,
Working more closely with IDOs by increasing our due diligence and focusing on Occelerator projects will also enable us to give greater information transparency to our users. Information asymmetry — a delay in receiving needed data and information — always occurs to a certain extent when multiple project teams are collaborating.
However, we have discovered that it is much reduced in projects which we incubate, and in turn we can pass more detailed information on to our users weeks prior to IDO starts. This could be information such as vesting schedules, token unlocks and distribution, secondary market trading venues, token IDO price, CED rewards, and more.
In short, working with IDO partners that meet our new due diligence requirements will enable us to offer more information in the lead up to IDOs.
Likewise, our new UX and UI improvements will have much more information for each IDO on OccamRazer, and we will reveal these soon.
We are also increasing our marketing and communications abilities, with the recent addition of Cristina Stavila as Marketing and Social Media Manager. Naturally, we will also continue our OccamRazer TV episodes, and aim to have the above information included in each video description for ease.
3. Recent issues with gas spending and failed transactions (ORE & Derived),
We regret that some users had issues with failed transactions during recent IDOs and claim functions, and the resultant lost gas fees that some of you incurred. We have the on-chain data on which wallet addresses were affected and we will be refunding lost-gas in ETH (Edit — we originally planned to refund in OCC tokens, but like-for-like it is fairer to refund the original ETH).
It will take some time to identify and sort these addresses, however we hope to have a final resolution by the end of next month. We are aware this is not an acceptable or sustainable issue and we are taking extra measures alongside our IDO partners to ensure our claim functions are not affected in the future.
4. YouClout IDO participation issue,
We have now collected all responses from those affected by the issue with YouClout’s IDO. We are working through those affected, and discussing internally how best to rectify these issues on an individual basis.
We will provide a more detailed announcement on exactly what steps we are taking to ensure users are adequately compensated for this issue by the end of November. At present, for those who were whitelisted in tiers 3–5 but didn’t get into YouClout, we are considering guaranteed whitelisting for an upcoming IDO, or refund in distribution of OCX.
For those in tiers 1 and 2 who had guaranteed whitelisting but couldn’t participate, we are exploring other means of compensating this error. This is a more complex issue than the failed transactions and we appreciate your patience in this matter, please follow our announcements channel and look for an update there.
5. OCC’s continued and clear utility in our ecosystem,
Finally, we move to our most important point, and one which we are happy to address.
We have seen a lot of discussions recently about OCC’s continued use case and value in our ecosystem given the release of OCX; and it’s distribution through OCC staking, OCC liquidity provision, holding OCC-ADA, and delegating ADA to our stake pool. Firstly, we want to assure our community that staking OCC yields proportionally higher OCX than delegating ADA to our stake pool.
We offered OCX to ADA delegators for two reasons, firstly to grow our community and supporter base within the Cardano ecosystem, which is where our focus and mandate to build is. Secondly, we wanted a self-sustaining and long-term way to bring new value into our ecosystem for the benefit of Occelerator projects, which in turn means more quality IDOs for OccamRazer. OCC is still the principal way of accessing OCX distribution. We will have a dashboard for OCX distribution information, and this is being worked on as a matter of priority.
As we’ve discussed in previous articles, we issued OCX as staking incentives for the OccamX DEX would not easily align with staking incentives for OccamRazer, as participation in IDOs and the generation of CED rewards promotes a long-term staking economy, whereas OccamX will be more dynamic in its function.
OCC will continue to be the key to participating in IDOs on OccamRazer, and the only way to be eligible for CED and OccamRazer staking rewards. It will also play a key role in governance.
However, while we are sure that there will be plenty of long-term utility for OCC as we continue to bring in high-quality IDO projects through Occelerator, and make efforts towards laser-sharp due diligence as outlined above, we want to do more for our early OCC supporters and assure you that we have your best interests at heart.
As a result, we have listened to your feedback and decided to explore buying back and burning OCC using a fraction of the generated fees from liquidity providers on OccamX.
To kick this process off, we will do an initial burn of 500,000 OCC this week, ahead of the launch of OccamX. By doing this, we would increase the attractiveness of holding OCC, while also providing incentives for liquidity providers to hold OCC. Any proposed ongoing burn mechanism would take effect once OccamX has adequate TVL, and we’ll also be opening this up to community discussion through our newly created Occam forum (discussed below).
This is one of the first steps of our comprehensive plan to make OCC more attractive to both new users and existing holders, and linking it more closely to the OCX token and OccamX ecosystem.
Despite some challenging discussions and detailed feedback that we have collected from our community over the past few weeks, we will make it clear that we are committed to building a self-sustaining ecosystem across all of Occam’s products and services which rewards and empowers every ecosystem participant equally — and does not erode the trust you have placed in our team.
6. Roll-out of the Occam Forum and Occam Improvement Proposals (OIPs)
To do all this, we need you. Please head over to our newly created forums and make an account. The forum is based on Discourse, like the Cardano Forum, and is designed to allow structured discussions. This will help us in making all future decisions on product-level changes only after careful consultation with you, our community.
We have set this initiative up following our community discussions during the last couple of weeks, and we hope it shows our commitment to including our token holders in every decision we make going forward.
Anyone can now make an Occam Improvement Proposal, or OIP, using the instructions provided here. Please keep all OIPs orderly and write them according to the template here. An OIP requires 50 ‘upvotes’ or ‘likes’ to be considered for advancement to discussion by the team. Eventually, this process will be on-chain and require OCC to vote.
It is challenging for us to collect tangible and actionable feedback through Telegram and Twitter, and your participation in our forums will help us improve. Remember, this is also the first step towards our on-chain governance initiative, which will see these discussions transform into proposals that every OCC stakeholder can vote on. This will enable us to make decisions in the future after careful consideration for all participants based on their votes and activity within our ecosystem.
Thank you for your support over the past few weeks, and we look forward to the future!
