ParagonsDAO the story so far…….
12 months has blasted past, and it has been a wild ride so far, so let’s recap.
ParagonsDAO officially launched PDT in January, with the IBO (Initial Bond Offering) coupled with a LBP (Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool) on Balancer, successfully selling out of bonds within two days and the LBP finishing near launch price.
From there, our first major milestone came in March with our improved governance and council model to help with the decentralised operations of the DAO. We formed the Paragons Council and Treasury Council to ensure the community could share their voice by electing members, balancing that with providing the authority for elected members to make decisions during their tenure. This allowed us to move at speed without sacrificing token holder power.
This brought its challenges, and as with starting any new process, it takes time and discipline to stick to the process outlined to ensure that it becomes standard. We’ve just completed our third council elections, with the process now attracting far more nominations than there are spots on the councils, all organically found within our community. In 2023, we’ll continue to improve council operations and automate elements of the council onboarding, transition and election process.
Partnerships
Our partnerships have focused on quality over quantity. As we’ve evolved, we find ourselves more akin to an infrastructure layer that others can coordinate atop of. This means we are strategically aligned to anyone we partner with, let’s take a look:
This partnership is definitely the highlight of our 2022 and is a core part of the ParagonsDAO infrastructure layer. Stadium Protocol will help Paragons provide an environment for players and teams to thrive in the world of web3 and self ownership. A problem-solving tool for the esports industry today, Stadium will allow players and teams to own their future, make their own decisions and deals, and receive tournament and competition prize money without delay. Removing these barriers will encourage a new economy to grow within web3 and esports, helping players thrive.
Our two earliest partnership grants are still working towards their go-to-market strategy, and while this is not ideal to hear, we can give you an update:
Gradient appears to be nearly ready to launch two separate products around risk-hedging NFT loans as well as offering NFT option trading. We’ve recently seen their work and are happy with the progress they have made.
Guzzolene is still working towards their strategy with Abacus. Abacus is a new and novel pricing and lending protocol that uses Optimistic Proof of Liquidity to provide spot pricing pools and lending options for NFTs. Abacus is yet to launch their token and full tokenomics and has led to a delay in Guzzolene’s release, we hope to have an in-depth update for our holders in January 2023.
Ultimately both these products will extend to our vision of providing not only the resources for players to engage in games, but also to grow their holdings with the use of DeFi tools within the space.
We’ll soon be finalizing the vote on PDIP 12, our proposal to partner with The Priming to build a base camp for Web3 gaming (much like Zapper or DeBank for the broader Web3 ecosystem), think Steam meets decentralisation across multiple stakeholders.
As a partner to The Priming, ParagonsDAO could be one of the greatest beneficiaries of the data and analytics The Priming provides — the insights we need for our player management system, our asset investment strategies, and our DeFi tools.
And as an asset management and data aggregation tool with incredible potential to connect, onboard and help millions of users discover top Web3 games, The Priming provides a unique opportunity to expand our brand and further the reach of other related platforms, tools and protocols we support in the journey to move the Web3 gaming ecosystem forward.
Our Player Management System
The release of our whitepaper in mid-November was the culmination of the previous 3 months’ work around an idea I was toying with when thinking of a loyalty program for another protocol. The final design was a product that delivered our intentions back in January: to share gaming assets permissionless with players and teams. The “reputation as credit” design fulfils that and more, as both a tool for player management, and its own game on top of all the other games that ParagonsDAO integrates with. When you are a player with ParagonsDAO, we use your in-game statistics to give players credits, which can be used to rent assets, rank up for better benefits or spend them in the rewards pool for extra goodies.
This will be the first iteration of 3 different tools to support the ecosystem of guilds and players. Death to the Discord and Google Sheets Scholar model is here.
Ambassadors
The Ambassador Program rolled out in October with 3 Ambassadors selected to represent ParagonsDAO with our key gaming partners:
- Drak (Parallel)
- CryptoDetweiler (ARBO)
- MisterKangaroo (Frontier/The Watch)
The ambassadors act as our subject matter experts when it comes to each game respectively and allows ParagonsDAO to keep fully up to date with what is happening in each space. Drak has since taken over the ARBO ambassador role too, in addition to becoming our Community Manager.
People
Looking back to this time last year when it was just myself, InfoAddict, MrKvak and Obviously_Obvious the DAO has come a long way, and I’m particularly proud of our success in hiring within our community of people like:
- JCREW (Business Development, Partnerships and Growth)
- FlapJackson (Marketing and Communications Lead)
- Tea (Project and Engineering Lead)
- Milamber (Finance Lead)
All these hires came from being interested participants in Discord and getting to know the project — it turns out they also had some serious credentials in areas such as communications, marketing, accounting, treasury management and software project management.
We onboarded some more great talent from places such as Riot Games, Unity and GE to name a few:
- Rhagga (Operations Lead and P2E Lead)
- Drak (Community Manager and Ambassador)
- InfoAddict (Systems Management and Crisis Management)
- Strawman (Discord Security and Mod Lead)
- Grand Inferno (Lead Designer)
- CodeNinja (Full Stack Web 3 Developer)
- Swish (Smart Contract Developer)
- FireKeeper (Smart Contract Lead Developer)
- Alex Rrrrrr (Full Stack Web 3 Developer)
I also can’t forget our community mods that make each day fun in the discord;
- WarDiver
- CoinWizard
- Gakoza
- Nicoholo
- Uselesscrypto69
The DAO is only as strong as the people building within and we have been very fortunate to be in a position that Paragons is seen as a place best spent with their time. I personally feel grateful each day to have all these contributors working together and beside me to deliver this vision.
On that note I want to thank all our contributors for 2022 and look forward to the 2023 we have planned. It truly is an exciting time behind the scenes for us as we ramp up to releases of games and our own system.
Financials
The backbone to our success in onboarding high end talent is the Treasury and assets we hold. The DAO made a very conscious decision early that we:
- Are not traders, we are builders
- We believe ETH is the currency of Web3
- We are willing to take calculated, strategic investment risks aligned to our interests
- $PDT is the value-capture mechanism for our community
- Our community is to share in our game-based token rewards
Working in line with these values we have managed to keep our runway long, with 4 years of development runway based on current projections to support our growing ecosystem.
Bear markets are tough and only the strongest Treasuries survive, we raised in a bull market and used a conservative approach to see us through to the next bull market environment.
Milamber coming onboard will also bring a level of professionalism to our reporting, with public quarterly reports coming early next year.
Staking
All roads lead back to $DT ultimately for us, with the introduction of our staking contract and interface in September, have allowed any PDT holder to actively participate in the sharing of the returns.
This is really just the start with yet to be released revenue streams from both The Priming partnership and our formation of our media subDAO with the BLVKHVND team.
One of the key aspects we looked at when building this was to lock up versus to not lock up. We came to the conclusion that locking up played games with the circulating supply and in most cases caused inorganic supply shock during periods of high volatility. In our model a user needs to consider what they want to keep locked up rather than commit, then can unlock at any stage however this sacrifices their accumulated multiplier built in the staking pool for that gratification. This forces a user to make a reasonable financial decision up front with still having access to their capital as a last resort.
Founders
Finally the Founders of ParagonsDAO, firstly we wouldn’t be here without their initial help and support from back in August 2021 when we first thought this up. We appreciate those that worked with us to have the PDT tokens returned to the Treasury after review of the tokenomics was completed internally by a newly formed group.
Most have kept some of their tokens or bought back, which is just fantastic, and we will always welcome you here as an OG for life.
To the community I say fucking thank you for everything, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and all that bullshit and will see you for a massive 2023 early January.
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