Part 1 of this post is a critique of M3 of the current proposals floating. Part 2 is a proposed alternative.
Part 1 - NFT sales should be driven by the collectors who want to buy them, not through a centralized subsidy to create an artificial demand/hype. That’s not how you create stable markets; rather that is how you create bubbles.
Moreover, it creates a potential conflict of interest. If the Foundation is picking which projects to buy, and then later promoting them, then it gives the Foundation the power to pick winners and losers ahead of time and orchestrate a pump and dump among various NFT projects. It also creates an information disparity among those on the inside about which NFT series is going to pop next.
I’m not saying that the Foundation and those with insider information will definitely abuse this power. However, we’ve seen other projects do it (e.g. Open Sea). In my mind, it is better to design a trustless system (as far as you can do so) rather than one that has deliberately built in mechanisms capable of facilitating shenanigans. After all, aren’t trustless systems one of the animating principles of crypto? I do not want to have to trust that the Foundation and the people at it will forever remain immune from the pull of greed.
If the Foundation wants to promote NFTs by highlighting projects or overall marketing, that is one thing. But, entering into the business of trading in them is a non-starter for me.
Part 2 - Instead of buying NFTs (many, though not all, of which are profit seeking projects) and then, presumably, selling them back to Algonauts for a higher price, the Foundation should consider a method for incentivizing those that have purchased equipment and invested time to decentralize the very network that all of this runs on.
Though we nominally have a lot of “nodes” according to the Metrics page (it strangely exploded this past week), in the last 7 days, it still only ~250 of those nodes actually participating in consensus. That is what matters for decentralization. That suggests the vast majority of “nodes” are client nodes. They are not actually participating in consensus. Otherwise, statistics would mandate that the number who have participated in a round would be much higher.
So, instead of allocating money to buy NFTs to countertrade against Algonaughts, I humbly submit that the Foundation consider the following proposal.
Allocate 10% of existing Governance rewards to be distributed to all Governors who run a participation node that maintain 95% uptime during that governance period.