Provide as much information as possible about your idea.
After what happened this March 10-15th, it’s obvious that we are not safe using any pegged coin. This is a temperature check to use funds from the common pool to buy Ethereum as a way of (i) protection (ii) long-term investment.
Although I think Dai is probably the safest pegged coin out there (because of the variety of collaterals, ability to change them, etc.), we must put the TEC in a position where we’re reasonably safe no matter what happens, and with a treasury fully denominated in xDai, we’re quite far from that.
Especially now that we’re moving to Tao voting, we should be able to deposit all Ether in the same contract where xDai is and make proposals to spend it as we’d do with xDai. Only caveat is that because UI limits, it will not show up on the main Gardens interface.
Other options include bridging it back to Mainnet or an L2 with decent liquidity on LSTs to be able to get the ~5% APY on staked Ether. We’d need to work on a custodian setup to trust it’ll be managed properly.
Here are a few polls to get the sentiment of what we should do.
Buy $25k usd of Ether
Buy $50k usd of Ether
Buy $100k usd of Ether
Buy more (please say in the comments)
0voters
Keep it on the Common Pool address
Buy staked Ether (only available on Mainnet and some L2s)
0voters
Note that this is not an active treasury management proposal. It’s a one time purchase for protection that ideally will only be used when or if necessary.
How is it relevant to the TEC mission, vision and values?
The only way we’re going to keep advancing Token Engineering forever is if we have money to spend even in the worst case scenario, which we don’t if we keep relying 100% on pegged coins.
Who is going to be affected by what you’re proposing?
The whole community.
Who has expertise in this topic and could advise your process?
I know @natesuits worked quite a bit on treasury management stuff, I’m interested in hearing what he thinks. This is a much simpler proposal though.
Yes, I think you’re correct in getting feedback from the community, and establishing next steps. In the end, this decision should result in a Snapshot Vote as well as a Tao Vote.
Here are my concerns/suggestions:
1.) Removing Funds from the CP in addition to our current proposals may be a hard vote to swing with token-holders.
2.) I can see the benefit in holding a large portion of interest bearing ETH to hedge against the increasing risks of depegged USDC, and therefore DAI (and xDAI, and wxDAI).
3.) The problem is that in order to acquire interest-bearing ETH, we would need to develop the infrastructure to monitor/manage/trust those funds on Mainnet or other L2’s. While this capability is important to develop, it is not urgent by any means.
If we do move forward with this, I would suggest that we forgo the ambition to manage funds on alternate chains. I would say that any purchases of ETH should be done on Gnosis, and commit ourselves to diversifying further. Also, if we are going to do this, I would suggest the amount be for the max we can afford.
The risk of depegging is a continuous liability for DAI at least for the next 2-3 years. Until there are other reliable stablecoin options on Gnosis, I agree that this should be explored by the community.
I hope we can see some additional feedback from the community, because I’m not sure what the temperature check is regarding allocations from the CP.
That’s a fair comment, but let’s not overcomplicate ourselves. We’ve had Lasertag deployed on Gnosis & Mainnet for at least a year and a half now and we oftentimes even forget it’s there with >30k.
We can’t of course be playing around with money, but we can either just send it to Lasertag or make another multisig with a high threshold and important/active members, not like they’ll be signing stuff in there everyday.
Anyways, just buying Ether no matter the chain is good enough for me.
I think this is an excellent idea @enti - Eth is being deflationary and all nation-state-associated currencies have high inflation.
I think it’s still valuable to keep part of the common pool on XDAI, but getting ETH is an opportunity to prepare for future changes in the macroeconomy and to have part of our treasury independent from traditional economies.
Also. As the Token Engineering Commons is a shelling point for a field of science, expanding to other chains and diversifying our impact is a good way of supporting the wider ecosystem.
There’s a few incentives coming as we speak to attract wstETH liquidity! From both Agave and Balancer, this means we should be able to buy wstETH on Gnosis and deposit it directly into the DAO.