RGP-16: RBN Grant to Ribbon Research

Summary

Proposal to grant 10M RBN to Ribbon Research Limited, an entity formed to further the development of the Ribbon ecosystem. This 10M RBN will be initially used to pursue professional market makers for deeper RBN liquidity on CEXs, as well as other programs to increase Ribbon exposure.

Context

As part of the RBN token genesis, the Ribbon DAO was allocated 49% of the RBN supply. This allocation has been used to further the protocol, for example through funding on-chain incentive programs like Liquidity Mining and so on.

However, since this DAO exists on-chain, it has been difficult to deal with off-chain entities that require a legal counterparty to execute agreements with. To deal with this, we have set up Ribbon Research Limited, a separate entity that is aimed to pursue avenues for growing/improving the Ribbon ecosystem that require off-chain legal structures, and cannot be pursued by the DAO on its own.

Proposal

We propose a 10M RBN grant from the DAO to Ribbon Research, which will initially be used for the following purposes:

  • Engaging professional market makers to provide RBN liquidity on various liquidity venues, which is a prerequisite for getting listed on certain exchanges. These engagements are usually structured as RBN loans with a call option, see here for example.
  • Sponsoring programs that generate more exposure to Ribbon, such as Coinbase Earn or otherwise, which has been a recurring request from the community.

This 10M RBN grant will be a one-time grant and will be able to last for at least 1-2 years, and Ribbon Research will publish transparency reports on how the tokens have been used. There are no operational costs associated with Ribbon Research, so RBN will not be sold to fund operations for this entity.

FAQ

What kinds of activities will be pursued by this entity?
This entity will only be pursuing activities that further the Ribbon ecosystem, and will not be profit-driven. The goal of this entity is to pursue avenues for growing/improving the Ribbon ecosystem that require off-chain legal entities and cannot be pursued by the DAO on its own.

Why 10M RBN?
Market maker agreements have been in the range of 3M-5M RBN, so 10M RBN will allow engagements of up to 2 market makers, or for other activities.

Why engage professional market makers?
This helps to create deep liquidity on centralized exchanges, which is often a prerequisite for getting listed on certain exchanges.

If the RBN is unused, can it be returned to the DAO?
Yes

Who makes the decisions on how these tokens will be used?
The decisions will be made by Julian and Ken, the co-founders of Ribbon.

Vote

We will leave this proposal up for 3 days, before we kick-off a Snapshot proposal.

6 Likes

My Dear King Julian,

It is fantastic to hear that we are going to fund such operations. It will certainly pay dividends in the future.

I wonder two things that you can help me with:

  1. For the cost elements I wonder instead of providing $RBN directly could we not do something a little more elaborate that reduces the sell pressure? This could be finding a way to use RBN as collateral, then posting those borrowed funds in one of our vaults with the yield being used to fund the works (and pay interest). Clearly some of this needs to be in RBN for market making but there will be some of this grant that is for expenses which we could do without seeing dumped (even with this being a good cause).
  2. Whilst I very much enjoy your leadership (and ken’s) and the way things have been going, I wonder if you can clarify what, if any, input this team will take from the community directly? Will there ever be votes on items as an example? Or will this work be entirely up to you and Ken as per the FAQ.

Thank you again for this and all your work.

2 Likes

Thanks for the initiative, I’m fully supportive of this!

Agreed, finding it hard to understand why even put this up for a vote if the point here is to dump RBN tokens and use it for whatever the two co-founders want to use it for. Seems eerily similar to the current atmosphere at Maker with Rune playing the game of plausibly deniable dictator.

Have you folks consider using hummingbot , they have most of the xchanges connecters in place. Also, this will also incentive RBN community to contribute liquidity and get more RBN if they chose to.