Hey @Adri thanks for the thoughtful response.
First Measure
I agree with the rationale and appreciate you guys listening to concerns about governance cannibalizing demand for DeFi. I personally will vote to aggressively reduce governance rewards. However not having a true ‘No’ option is still going to rub people the wrong way. It is total appropriate for governors to believe the best use of capital is to return it to themselves. I don’t agree with that, but the choice should be open.
Second and Third measure
Super excited to vote pro xGov, but appreciate that a ‘No’ option is being added.
Fourth and Fifth Measures
Offering a forum to display Algorand NFTs.The collection would be showcased in both virtual and on-site events, giving select projects/creators the stage and marketing visibility, and showcasing Algorand’s robust range of NFTs to people within and outside the ecosystem.
I’m still strongly against the foundation owning a collection of NFTs. NFTs that are offered as art, collectibles, or other non utility use cases have not demonstrated sustainable ROI. It is not clear that the ecosystem can sustain itself without external funding, since there are no economic incentives to holding these kinds of NFTs.
Providing support to existing creators on Algorand. Purchasing select pieces and/or emphasizing primary sales and shuffles is just one example of this kind of support. Other examples may include providing grants for strategic/high-profile initiatives, commissioning work, providing creators yield via fractionalization and/or collateralization or other support mechanisms.
In my opinion, any support to “creators” needs to be non financial. Using the foundations events and web presence to promote projects is potentially fine, but financial support via grants is a hard no from me.
Onboarding new users into the Algorand ecosystem. For example, running campaigns, shuffles and giveaways to attract collectors from other chains and incentivizing them to create new wallets.
Happy to support initiatives that look more like this.
Finally, we heard many voices calling for a choice on whether to pursue this project at all (the original drafting only contained a choice of whether to fund 300K or 600K Algos). We have responded by providing such an option.
Happy to have a ‘No’ option, however something I think has been missed in interpreting the outrage over this proposal is the lack of faith by many in the community of the long term value proposition of NFT collectibles, art, communities, etc. I think the first initiatives attempted in this area need to prove that this is an area where meaningful transaction volume can even be found. So once again I’ll reiterate alternative measures that are more likely to be successfully voted yes:
- Buy some valuable NFDs and auction them off to Governance participants and node runners. This incentivizes people to participate in governance directly since holding on an exchange wouldn’t be eligible. These NFTs actually have utility today since they are useable as domains via .algo.xyz .
- Contests (ex Algorand Mascot contest): Submissions are NFTs sent to a specific address. Governance decides the winner, the winner gets a small ALGO prize. This incentivizes people to make NFTs and engage with the ecosystem without creating any weird incentives. Winners could be showcased at Algorand events
- Governance votes on a charity every period for a donation. Commission an NFT to minted for each charity that receives a gift, given to all the governors who voted for that charity.
- Work with Dust Identity (an Algorand partner) to tag a few real world objects. Raffle these objects off to governance participants and give them the associated NFTs. Would be a cool way to showcase how NFTs in the real world could work.
- Buy an actual piece of art and allow museums the rights to display it when they rent the corresponding NFT.
- Have a raffle for any wallet that is holding any NFT, regardless of where it came from. Again this incentivizes users to take their Algo off an exchange and use an NFT marketplace to become eligible.