The most active members of the DAO think it’s a good idea to create a Founder NFT. This NFT would give early supporters and believers a way to support the DAO financially, while also getting immense value in return.
We’d like to follow the Proof Collective model, which Kevin Rose discusses in detail here:
How?
Supporters who want to support JournoDAO will go to a webpage to mint a Founder NFT. Once minted, this NFT will give owners complete access to anything JournoDAO does in perpetuity – events, future NFT projects, airdrops, special chat channels, exclusive content, early access to content, etc. Anything that JournoDAO can dream up. The only stipulation being that access may be limited on some future resources in order to run the DAO effectively and maintain our status as a provider of public goods.
For example, if for some reason all 1000 Founders came to an event with only 100 openings, the DAO may decide to raffle off only 5 openings to the Founders to keep 95 openings for the public or new contributors. The Founder NFT will always convey some sort of privilege however, no matter the offering.
In addition to the minting fee going to the JournoDAO treasury, there will also be a royalty fee that will go to the JournoDAO treasury multi-sig whenever a Founder NFT is purchased on the secondary market. The hope is that these royalty fees will generate a significant amount of recurring revenue to fund the public goods generated by DAO members.
What tools and platforms should we use?
At this early stage, the biggest threat to moving forward with the Founder NFT is paralysis by analysis. Weeks have already gone by with no progress due to conflicting schedules and the uncertainty surrounding the “best” tools. Therefore this proposal focuses on the easiest path forward which may in hindsight be determined to be sub-optimal. So it goes.
The platform that Keith and Crystal would recommend is the Unlock Protocol.
This platform creates a “Lock”, which is like the NFT factory, and then allows users to mint “Keys” (in this case the ERC 721 Founder NFT) via a provided web interface. The JournoDAO multi-sig would own the Lock, which would give multi-sig signers, and by extension the DAO, privileges to update and control the minted NFTs later on.
Using Unlock, we can have mintable NFTs complete with minting web interface in under 10 minutes. Hooray!
With their API, we could also move to a custom minting front-end if we wanted to later.
Which network?
Here’s a summary of the trade offs I see with each of the main networks we’ve discussed.
Ethereum
The major league for legit NFTs.
Pros
Lots of NFT activity. Would help our reach by being listed on the most active chain in the most popular marketplace, Opensea.
Cons
Expensive to mint. Favors people who already have money (although those are the types of people we want to court for the Founder NFT).
Optimism
Crystal and Keith really like the Optimism network:
Pros
It inherits the unprecedented level of security provided by Ethereum mainnet, but at a fraction of the gas costs.
Cons
Not yet supported by Opensea or any other major NFT marketplace. This means secondary trading will be stunted, potentially strangling recurring revenues in the first year or more.
Polygon
Polygon is also a strong option:
Pros
Cheap gas fees. Compatible with Opensea. Proof of stake so it’s far better than Ethereum for the environment.
Cons
Not a true L2 to Ethereum. More like a sidechain that promotes Ethereum. Lots of NFT spam. Perceived as the minor leagues for NFTs.
Royalties
While it is possible to bake royalties into the NFT contract, it’s a bit of a square peg in the round hole of the ERC 721. It looks like most people rely on the marketplace where their NFTs are sold to handle the setting and administration of the royalty fee.
Since we will likely want our NFTs to be on many different marketplaces, tools like Royalty Registry should be used to carry our royalty preferences from protocol to protocol:
What numbers?
How much are we going to charge for the mint? What percentage should we set for the royalty?
I’m opening the discussion with the following numbers, to be heatedly debated:
Total supply: 1000
Mint Price: 1.5 ETH
Royalty fee: 5%
At the current price of ETH, this would put our mint price around $2500 - $3000 USD.
If we sold out the mint at this price, we would raise $2.5m - $3m for the treasury. This amount puts us well above our estimated high-end budget for the year.
With a 5% royalty, a $2k sale would earn the JournoDAO treasury $100.
Discuss!
I’d really like this to be a team effort, so please comment and ask questions below.