Solace forms a Launch DAO to deliver its DeFi coverage products
The Solace team is pleased to announce the formation of Solace Launch DAO, another stepping stone in spinning up Solace Protocol and executing on our mission! After months of investigation into legal structures and implications of forming a company to launch and run a decentralized protocol, we have realized Solace existing in some legal jurisdiction is, at best, a suboptimal decision. Going with a crypto native approach, often called “DAO-first approach” (here’s more on the DAO-first approach by Kain Warwick), offers a unique ability to run the project as a DAO from day 0, have complete transparency, equitable voting, and quickly adjust to an ever-changing environment in DeFi.
The philosophy of this novel operational model is to democratize the control and offer everyone a symmetric overview of the project. We deeply believe in the future of open finance and decentralization, and so Solace starts off with a foundation optimized to seamlessly hand off the governance to the community in the coming months.
Solace Launch DAO Members
Obvious question, who are the first members of the DAO? As the early team was designing the architecture and writing code, we wanted to reach out to leaders in the industry from diverse backgrounds to ensure that Solace is best-positioned to fulfill its mission and has all the necessary resources.
Solace Launch DAO was formed by the crypto OGs & “shadowy super coders”, yield farmers & degens, founders & builders, VCs & liquidity providers, veterans from finance & gaming industries, infrastructure & service providers. The founding team is extremely thankful for the support and stewardship of Gustav Arentoft and Doo Wan Nam (MakerDAO & StableNode), Preston Van Loon (Prysmatic Labs), Sandeep Nailwal and Arjun Kalsy (Polygon), Illia Polosukhin (NEAR), Alex Shevchenko (Aurora), Aleksander Larsen and Jeffrey Zirlin (Axie Infinity), Seth Ginns (CoinFund), Evgeny Yurtaev (Zerion), Kiril Nikolov (Nexo), Julien Bouteloup (StakeDAO & rekt.news), Quentin Milne (Stake Capital), Cameron Dennis (Blockchain Acceleration Foundation), Alchemy, Parataxis Capital, LD Capital, 1010.capital, and Prycto.
Solace starts off with a well-rounded community to push DeFi to the new frontiers, but we need you to pressure test our ideas, decisions, and design choices to make DeFi and crypto a safe, secure, and trusted space for any individual.
Additionally, we would like to thank Kain Warwick (Synthetix) and Bogdan Gheorghe (BarnBridge) for pioneering DAO-first approach and offering us tips and guidance in the formation process.
Governance Structure
The core team along with DeFi industry leaders have formed Launch DAO that acts as a coordination vehicle to deliver us to Solace DAO. This Launch DAO will hold the funds, $SOLACE tokens, and be controlled by the Solace Launch DAO tokens ($SVOTE). The funds held by the Launch DAO will be released in a drip fashion through proposal voting over time to finance the development and growth, and ultimately ensure transition into a formal community-run DAO structure.
We decided to use Aragon’s DAO Company Template because it is a mainnet battle-tested DAO framework and offers the exact features we need at the moment along with a simple UI for everyone to interact with. The founding team controls 44% of the $SVOTE token supply, while 16% goes to the advisors, and 40% to the industry stakeholders. In order to successfully pass a proposal at least 51% of the shares must participate in the voting and the support was set to 67%, meaning that 2/3 of the voters have to say “Yes” to enact a proposal. Each proposal has a vote duration of 48 hours.
Solace Launch DAO URL: https://launchdao.solace.fi/
The scope of the Solace Launch DAO proposals will focus on high-level protocol decisions of significant importance. You can expect the first few proposals to be concerned with the tokenomics, vesting schedule and funds allocation to the core team’s MultiSig running the operations.
Executive MultiSig
It’s obvious that voting on every single spending or day-to-day ops is unrealistic, so in order to avoid any coordination overhead and excessive requirement for engagement the core team of contributors uses its own MultiSig wallet for discretionary spending. That includes any spending related to operations of Solace protocol like deployment of smart contracts and state variable updates, marketing, payroll, etc. At the current stage, having another wallet controlled by Solace’s full-time contributors allows greater management efficiency. Solace Launch DAO will allocate and vote to transfer funds to this Executive MultiSig on a monthly basis to make sure the core team can act in a timely manner and run the protocol’s operations.
Transition to Community-Run DAO
The purpose of Solace Launch DAO is to bootstrap the development and allow for rapid scaling of Solace’s platform. Eventually we want to reach the point where the governance can be handed off to the community and Solace can be a self-sustaining protocol. With that in mind, our job is to push the project forward, build a community around it, and create a system that will inherit the rule.
Within the next few weeks we’ll launch our first products on the Ethereum Mainnet, Aurora, Polygon, and other EVM-compatible chains. Starting October, we plan to allocate resources to the development of Solace DAO, so you can expect the transition to happen within a reasonable timeframe. Further details on the mechanics of Solace DAO as well as the native governance token deployment will come later, however YOU can already help shape this transition by joining the community and offering your input!
Get Involved!
You can already shape the future of Solace by joining our Discord and commenting on the testnet app! We’ll be posting various bounties and atomic tasks for you to contribute soon. Also follow us on Twitter for more updates!
