Pixel DAO 2022 — Our thesis, vision, missions, and values

Thesis

2021 kickstarted the P2E/Metaverse hype. But 2022 will be the year when the sector starts to mature. Pixel DAO’s core team members want to position ourselves for 2022 onward, and get involved in the P2E/Metaverse sector (Referred to as ‘Metaplay’ henceforth) not only as investors, but also creators.

By utilising the Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL) model pioneered by Olympus DAO, Pixel DAO bootstrapped our treasury with FRAX + have built a community of talented developers, artists, policy makers, investment consultants, security experts, united by the same vision: To succeed in web3 and Metaplay.

Most people referred to Pixel DAO as an “OHM Fork on Harmony with P2E treasury assets”. Understandably. However, our vision is different, and If we dare say, much greater than that.

We realise that although the POL model is great in bootstrapping a treasury + building a community around the same vision, there can only be one decentralised reserve currency, and that’s Olympus DAO.

Without a vision, a product, or a productive treasury, most vanilla OHM Forks will die off due to a lack of vision/leadership. And we definitely have no plan on doing that.

Hence, in this medium article, the Pixel DAO core team would like to walk you through our thought processes behind building Pixel DAO. Majority of topics to discuss in this article would be a high-level overview of our plan for 2022: Thesis, Vision, Missions, Values.

For execution plans and specific details, please refer to our evolving GitBook or other medium articles.

Vision

PixelDAO is a web3 Metaverse/Play-to-Earn incubator, and a cross-chain accelerator. We utilise the POL model to bootstrap our treasury with FRAX, then deploy our capital to incubate and invest into new and promising Metaplay projects (including our own).

We believe in 2022, projects with the best communities will prevail over projects with amazing techs but little community building. That’s why Pixel is setting up our DAO treasury with enough funds to pay & retain our top talents, whether they might be software-engineers, artists, or community managers.

The goal here is to onboard talents to work full-time for Pixel in an web3 environment, where they feel heard, respected, rewarded for their contributions, and with enough financial incentives to allow them to be 100% focused and onboard.

Regarding concrete milestones, in 2022, PixelDAO aims to:

1. Launch our own P2E: “Project Mata” as a collaboration with X-Consoles

2. Raise enough fund/human resources to either a) build a decentralized game development team, or b) acquire an existing game studio through M&A

We understand that from “OHM Fork” to “Acquiring a game studio” might seem like a bit of a leap at the first glance, thus we’ll be deep diving into our five phases of developments in the next section: Missions

Missions

To accomplish our two goals in 2022, Pixel DAO will be developing our product and building our community in five phases:

1. Bootstrapping
2. Setting foundations
3. Investing
4. Building
5. Acquisition

Phase 1: Bootstrapping (Dec 2021 — Jan 2022)

From the initial treasury fund, to the operational team, Pixel Core Team has made made the decision to bootstrap everything from our community. The rationale behind this philosophy is very simple: We want to maximise the long-term potential benefits for our community members, contributors, and investors.

There have been multiple instances when our community members have been asking: “Why does your Twitter/Discord have so few followers?”. And that is because instead of wasting our precious tokens by handing them out to influencers + paying for marketing/partnerships, we aimed for an organically driven growth strategy.

Pixel is a 100% community-bootstrapped project with:

• 0 VCs
• 0 Seed round
• 0 free team allocation.
• 100% of our tokens are paid for

We bootstrapped liquidity from the core team, early contributors, and community members who have believed in the project since its inception. For a deeper understanding of our pre-launch tokenomics, please refer to this article

Pixel DAO aims to begin our community token distribution followed by a market driven price discovery period before 15 Jan, and launch with all of our functions live in Jan 2022.

Phase 2: Foundation setting (Jan — Feb 2022)

After our public launch, the team will be transitioning from “planning” towards being “functional”, so a period of housekeeping is crucial in ensuring that the foundation of PixelDAO is solid before we start making treasury decisions.

In terms of setting our foundation, there are 2 main areas we want to pay extra attention towards:

• 1. The protocol, and
• 2. The DAO

1. Pixel Protocol

“Pixel Protocol” will be referring to our DeFi branch, and while doing housekeeping for Pixel Protocol, we will be monitoring:

i. Our bond and treasury policies

ii. Our technical infrastructure

iii. Our cross-chain strategy

Without getting into too many details since this article is supposed to be dealing with a high-level thesis, these are our priorities right after launch. Having researched, and learned from the mistakes of many failed OHM Fork launches, we are aware that launching our own POL is not an easy task, and managing it is even harder.

Hence, post-launch, without getting ahead of ourselves, we would aim to make sure our system is operating smoothly to instil confidence in our DAO members regarding the core team’s competency and decision-making process.

2. Pixel DAO

“Pixel DAO” will be constituted by the governance, policy, and funding side of our project.

I. Funding our top talents

One of the first initiatives we want to do post-launch is applying for Harmony’s DAO grant (Up to $1mn). The DAO grant would allow us to compensate & retain our talents, with a minimum salary of $75/h.

During the bootstrapping phase of Pixel DAO, we have identified several artists, analysts, and community managers who have been with us since the beginning of the project, and have contributed tremendously to our progress.

We strongly believe that bringing them onboard as full-time DAO members will not only generate +EV for our project, but also align our decision-making process with inputs and participation of our community as well as our grand vision of onboarding the best talent onboard for web3 development.

Ii. Onboarding P2E grinders

The term “grinder” might bear negative connotations, but the author decided to use it since it carries the most succinct meaning. During our inception, one of our goals was obtaining loanable NFT assets with our treasury, and lending it out to DAO members to “grind”, thus increasing our treasury yield, while also providing jobs.

However, with PixelDAO being more of an investment DAO, focusing on high r/r seed investments, we simply would not have the scale/logistics of a gaming guild to onboard players at the beginning.

However, the author still decided to allude to this point here, because we might want to revisit this idea down the road, and mentioning it here opens the topic for future discussion.

iii. Process of decentralisation

One of many reasons why this article (now straight up an essay) has been written was to help align the PixelDAO community members and readers to our vision. Understanding the core team’s vision will then allow the community members to understand the rationale behind our decision making process, and thus unite us as a DAO.

The operation of Pixel DAO so far has been kept centralised to optimise for speed of delivery, and minimise friction. However, we will be optimising for growth post-launch. And to do that, we need a more “open-sourced” community building:

• Flow of information will have to be much more accessible
• Hierarchical structure will have to be much more flat

Depending on our pool of candidates post-launch, we will either be appointing Governors or hosting elections for our first term candidates. The appointed/elected Governors and councillors will then guide our DAO members to participate in decision making through voting with their sPXLs, while the core team members will be slowly off-boarded to take on a more advisory role.

However, we are aware that the plan we just discussed was an idealistic scenario. In a more realistic scenario, the core team might have to stay at helm much longer, to make decisions until the DAO can fully function without them

Phase 3: Looking for investment opportunities

The thesis for deploying our capital begins with our desire to build a more sustainable treasury based on the POL model. Good investments grow our treasury by passively appreciating in value over time + available for farming/staking.

This initiative will aid the growth of our treasury in the medium to long term. Looking for investment opportunities involves a 3 step procedure:

1. Research/Outreach

Research should be a team effort from our Gaming Council. We will decentralise our research efforts by rewarding accepted proposals with allocations/tokens, to incentivise members to be proactive in finding new potential investments and create a sustainable deal flow.

Additionally, we are working on an onboarding process that helps early stage Metaplay ventures pitch us.

2. Due diligence

Once potential projects have been proposed, we will crowdsource our research/analysis to the community too, with more active participation earning higher tiers of rewards.

3. Voting

DAO members would then be presented with all information, and to decide on the deployment of treasury funds for investments.

PixelDAO will launch on Harmony and start growing our treasury by accumulating Jewel. But immediately after, we will go cross-chain to accumulate/invest in other projects. AVAX is the first cross-chain option we have in mind at the moment, but nothing has not been set in stone yet.

There are 2 main reasons for going with AVAX:

1. With DFK’s going cross-chain going to AVAX, and our first Metaplay asset of choice being Jewel, it makes sense in more than one way
2. With low-cost, high liquidity, high volume, and fast txn speed, AVAX is primed to be the Metaplay chain in 2022, PixelDAO would want to position ourselves accordingly

The core team forecast 2 types of challenges which might arise from our strategy: Technical, and deal-flow as follows:

1. Possible technical challenges

Our main challenges lie in bridging our treasury cross-chain for fund deployments. A recent Zodiac module update will allow us to bridge our Gnosis Safe Fund cross-chain more conveniently to other EVM chains and acquire the best of Metaplay assets across chains

However, bridging over Rust based blockchains would still remain an issue. So for now, we will direct our focus onto EVM-compatible chains.

2. Deal flows challenges

In a good, healthy market, deal flows will be ample and opportunities to invest would be plenty. However, during a bear market, we will see a reduction in growth from investments, mainly due to lack of demand from investors and market participation declining.

We tackle this issue by having our own P2E in our pipeline ready.

Phase 4: Building (Feb 2022 onwards)

As a web3 incubator, building our own P2E is both a natural step in our vertical integration process, and a complete necessity for a few reasons:

1. Successfully incubating our own product grants us proof-of-concept and credibility to incubate other projects
2. Putting our own capital knowledge in use (Research -> Invest -> Build)
3. Creating an independent revenue stream (Protocol owned liquidity -> Protocol owned product)
4. Testing our hypothesis/capacity to decide whether it would make more sense to 1) build a decentralised game development team, or 2) acquire a game studio
5. Strengthening our community’s identity and sense of belonging by having a tangible product

Our first product, codenamed “Project Mata” will be a collaboration between PixelDAO and our strategic partner X-Consoles. Specific details about the project will be kept within an extremely small circle.

We can not 100% guarantee Project Mata will be a success. But if we do, we will build the future of P2E E-Sport.

Phase 5: Acquisition (June 2022 — Dec 2022)

Acquisition is the last phase of Pixel DAO’s 2022 saga. Everything we do in 2022 will be leading to this. By our estimation, acquiring a capable game studio and supporting product development will cost approximately $40–100 mn. So we will need the treasury fund, and the right people to help.

Another path we can explore is to build a decentralised game development team, so building Project Mata during Phase 4 would grant us more insights on which would be the right direction.

We do not wish to get too much into details about Phase 5, because that is far in the future, and there will be lots of things to figure out. However, that will be Pixel Dao’s first big milestone.

Values

The author decided here that an entire session titled “Values” sounded too web2 and wouldn’t align with the spirit of Pixel DAO. Hence, he would instead like to tell the readers a joke:

“According to the Stock-to-flow model, BTC will reach at least 100k by Q4 2021.”

Thanks for reading. We hope that by now, you would have a better understanding about Pixel DAO, what we stand for, and what we want to achieve with our vision.

LFG