SingularityDAO Community Post-GGE Review & Next Steps

In this blogpost, we would like to review the SingularityDAO Community Governance Generation Event and some issues we ran into.

We are offering a compensatory airdrop as compensation for those affected by these problems.

We hope that this gesture goes some way to repairing the frustration you may have experienced during the event, and that it helps restore the confidence you have expressed in us and in our vision of the AI-powered future of DeFi.

On May 6th, we launched the Community Governance Generation Event on MANTRA DAO, with the plan of allowing anyone who met the whitelisting requirements to participate. We took the unique action of offering the tokens at the same valuation as we offered in our private round, rather than the standard practice in the cryptosphere of offering a discount to private backers, and we are airdropping 5% of the DAO to all eligible AGI token holders as described in this blogpost.

Unfortunately, as the questions poured in, it became apparent that not everything was going smoothly. We have spent the past few days engaged in a forensic investigation of what went wrong, looking at blockchain and database data to try to understand the extent and causes of this issue.

In these efforts, we were greatly helped by @HannesP, a member of our Telegram community to whom we want to give special acknowledgement here. As a thanks to @HannesP for his outstanding blockchain forensics research, we are offering him a compensatory airdrop of 1000 SDAO tokens.

People who experienced the following problems will be receiving a compensatory airdrop of 300 SDAO tokens:

• People who ran into a greyed-out ‘Join Now’ button. This was caused by human error in our handling of the whitelist.
• Did not swap ETH for WETH in time
• People who received mistaken confirmation that their KYC was approved. This problem happened to people who entered their home address in the Ethereum address field.

We will contact people affected by the third problem — not filling in the right address — by email before we send the compensatory airdrop. Let us emphasize here that when we contact you via email, we will not ask you to send us funds so be aware of scams. We will be the ones sending funds to you, and we only will need your Ethereum address to validate if you met the requirements and to send the SDAO tokens to you. This address must be the same address you used to pre-approve. You will be getting an email from info@singularitydao.ai if this applies to you before the 21st of May, requesting your Ethereum address so we can validate if you are eligible.

In all cases, only people who meet the following criteria are eligible for the compensatory airdrop:

• having completed KYC and whitelisting on time
• holding 1000 AGI at the time of the May 5th snapshot
• residing in an eligible country
• being pre-approved on the MANTRA DAO Zendit platform to demonstrate that you attempted to join the sale on a first-come-first-served basis.

Community Governance Generation Event Irregularities

We regret that these issues arose. The whole distribution process has been designed to distribute the tokens over many token holders with a substantial preference for our own community members, rather than having a few whales with disproportionate influence in the governance of the SingularityDAO.

We would like to go into the problems one by one, and explain what happened. Please note, we can only issue 300 SDAO to each registered Ethereum address; you cannot get 600 or 900 if you were affected by two or three issues.

Greyed out ‘Join Now’ button

We received reports that users had completed all the steps of the KYC process correctly and gotten a confirmation that they had done so correctly, but then running into a roadblock in the MANTRA DAO process: a greyed-out ‘Join Pool’ button that they couldn’t click on or interact with.

This, unfortunately, happened during a period of high Ethereum fees, and as users tried to get through the process, they in some cases paid fees multiple times to no effect.

We have spent the past few days engaged in a forensic investigation of what went wrong, looking at blockchain and database data to try to understand the extent and causes of this issue.

In essence, the problem was partly caused by a human error in transferring the whitelist between our system and MANTRA DAO’s. Our system at SingularityDAO gathered a whitelist of users who had completed KYC and met participation requirements, but this only got partly transferred to MANTRA DAO by accident, leading to users being missing from MANTRA DAO’s version of the list, and therefore experiencing the greyed-out button problem.

During the event, as we became aware of the problem, we were able to manually solve this problem for some users. We noted some people with the greyed-out button problem were on the whitelist (which was NOT visible for volunteering admins due to privacy reasons) and manually passed these addresses to MANTRA DAO to whitelist them. Some people were able to participate this way, but not everyone: that is the problem we are correcting by announcing the compensatory airdrop.

Users who ran into the grey ‘Join Now’ button will be sent 300 SDAO tokens as compensation by the 21st of May, meet the eligibility requirements of passing KYC, whitelisting, and pre-approval on MANTRA DAO, holding 1000 AGI at the time of the snapshot on May 5th, and living in an eligible country.

Exchanging ETH for WETH

The MANTRA DAO platform requires that users joining the ETH pool have both WETH (wrapped ETH) to pay for the tokens, and some ETH to pay their transaction fees.

As soon as we were made aware of this requirement, we communicated it to our community, but this was only very shortly before the Governance Generation Event.

We responded to this news by delaying the event by two hours, and this gave many users a chance to successfully convert their ETH to WETH and participate in the event. However, a number of users were not aware of this requirement, or could not financially adjust for this sudden change. Combined with the first-come-first-served arrangement, they had a higher likelihood of missing out.

Users who were prevented from participating by lacking WETH, will be sent 300 SDAO tokens as compensation by the 21st of May, meet the eligibility requirements of passing KYC, whitelisting, and pre-approval on MANTRA DAO, holding 1000 AGI at the time of the snapshot on May 5th, and living in an eligible country.

Incomplete KYCs due to auto-fill

Another — less common — issue was receiving an erroneous confirmation email that KYC was approved. Some people had accidentally used auto-fill to enter their home addresses in the place of their Ethereum address in the KYC form. Unfortunately, these users were not informed of this issue in advance and therefore were excluded from the whitelist.

Users who were prevented from participating by this problem will receive an email from us and be sent 300 SDAO tokens as compensation by the 21st of May, provided they meet the eligibility requirements of passing KYC, whitelisting, and pre-approval on MANTRA DAO, holding 1000 AGI at the time of the snapshot on May 5th, and living in an eligible country.

Incorrect approval of KYCs from ineligible countries

Some users from countries not eligible to participate managed to get through KYC. Whilst we would love to include all countries in the sale, this is simply illegal. These users got incorrectly notified that they have passed KYC and been whitelisted.

Unfortunately, we cannot compensate users from banned countries, as it is illegal for them to participate in the Community Governance Generation Event. We apologise for the miscommunication.

All users getting the same maximum tier

We announced four tiers of participation based on AGI token holdings, from 3750 SDAO tokens up to 25,000.

During the Community Governance Generation Event, however, the contract was deployed with the maximum 25,000 token allocation given to all users. This issue also was a result of the error in transferring the whitelist between our system and MANTRA DAO’s, as it seemed we were only going with the maximum allocation in the way this list was defined.

Conclusion

We regret that this incident happened at all, but now that it has, the right thing to do is offer reparations. The faith and confidence of our community is paramount to us, and we intend to do what we can to restore it.

We have learned a lot from this process, and we look forward to defining the future of AI-powered DeFi with you. We hope that these steps will help restore the confidence you have entrusted in us. The silver lining here is that these compensations will further broaden the base of DAO governance. The health of the DAO depends on as many users as possible holding the SDAO tokens. So we welcome you all as members of the DAO!

NOTE: If you think you meet the criteria listed here, but do not receive the compensatory airdrop automatically or an email from us by the 21st of May, please contact us via info@singularitydao.ai from the email you used during the KYC process, and mention your Ethereum address in the email. We will then inspect your case and come back to you shortly.