🌌 Should we setup a Stellar wallet for pending donations?

[JFWooten4]

I think we'll need to create an account to receive the discussed USDC grant from donor BlockTrans Syndicate. Ideally, this will be tied to a smart contract associated with on-chain member rights in the future. For now, I propose we set this up as a 2/3 multisig with the existing GitHub Admins: @tehchives @JamesAlfonse @JFWooten4

If each participant finds this agreeable and sends me their public key, then I can get this configured 🫱🏼‍🫲🏽

[tehchives]

Hm, that would make sense to do, you're absolutely right. At the moment the donation structure provided by every.org can only handle crypto donations by immediately liquidating them - we've discussed holding donations in USDC for transparency purposes after receiving them. I do not yet have a Stellar wallet, will take care of that this week.

[JFWooten4]

Yeah, fwiw most of the crypto "payment processors" are like that, and it makes complete sense in terms of integrating into the platform for credit cards, bank transfers, and the like. But with our own wallet on a well-supported chain with accessible gas costs, we could additionally enable more web3-native gift options which, by their very nature, have zero fees or middlemen.¹ As for the last bit, big proponent

Footnotes

1. Save for the certificate authority issuing the asset, as seems particularly unavoidable outside of L1 network tokens. ↩

[tehchives]

Oh, no doubt - and additional provide and clearly label those options. A detailed transparency page including links out to these various wallets is going to be crucial too.

[JFWooten4]

Hey Chives,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the policy relationships between the Syndicate and Foundation as we lead up to the governance config. Firstly, my bad on the delay getting that configured as we approach the one-year mark lol! There is some pending semi-public work I need to continue.¹

Combined Expensing

For issuers, the ideated "donate excess value received" to the DUNA idea hasn’t been passing out during internal sentiment tests with collaborating prospects. Things have generally fallen into one of two camps:

• Already donating to the efforts

  • Be it time, energy, or monies, many of the issuers most afflicted by incorrect ownership are already familiar with our group
  • They are candidates or even existing donors who see the immediate value in community efforts, as I did in that first Bibic email
  • That or we have the credible and simple option of directly marketing donation fundraisers to clients, drawing on established credit

• Need defined corporate expense figures

  • We are a decentralized organization serving central institutions, by the very definition of corporates raising capital
  • The bureaucratic (in the nicest way possible for private enterprises) accounts-payable department isn't used to valuation²
  • Generally, a completely different line of the business would even consider charitable donations, which requires a non-billing approach

These two assumptions lead me to believe we need a more nuanced approach with managing Syndicate capital, akin to an early-stage public company retaining earnings before later paying out. Of course, the difference here is that any such "dividends" go to funding DUNA operations.

Onchain Fiats

Given our discussion shortly after the thread here on TS, I’ve been jumping through hoops to set up USDz from GMO Trust. This would make it easier to convert funds on the Syndicate side, since we were permanently banned from Circle’s redemption process. However, waiting now.

They’ve been processing some compliance items for a couple months now, and the webpage currently says they will contact me shortly “to continue the onboarding process.” I’m not sure what this means, except that I don’t have any way to reliably deploy stablecoins from the BT side. Not to say I couldn’t get a USDC account set up in twenty minutes given DUNA code.

All this makes it more challenging than I’d like to implement the existing lumens-denominated payment pricing. Practically, we leave issuers with only centralized-exchange options to acquire the currency. This contrasts starkly with my original vision of integrated cash.

Expanding Needs

All these items ought to get handled over time by people more adept and interested in payments. Bur comes to mind as someone who might just have the silver bullet hiding on the backburner. That said, there are some more immediate personal circumstances which relate to the chief oath.

After a near-crash on balding tires, I found myself needing to replace Kayla’s wheels last month. The expense just came through on my credit cards, and the result is not awesome. Briefly, I don’t have the funds to cover personal cost-of-living bills and rent.

My annual lease comes up next month, and the thousand bucks the Syndicate received from that grant would sorely help cover basic living expenses. This would just be a one-time move to my personal account, which I can off-ramp to my landlord through Coinbase. Sound OK Chives?

Practically, this is not something I’m thrilled to ask for from the community. There’s nothing I want more than to fund community developments, encouraging apes with our unique reward model. But I think I’d be best equipped to work toward this with a roof for a while.

Footnotes

1. Briefly, this is a full specification of the NQG mechanism made fully open-source around the time we founded the DUNA legally. It will help greatly in the documentation work I’ve needed to write explaining the proposed governance mechanism to everyone. And it requisites joint collabs. ↩

2. The decision-maker here rests “higher up” a traditional entity structure’s finance branch, especially if we consider shareholder proposals to modify TA. Yet the majority of CFOs I’ve talked with literally don’t know how much they pay their transfer agent because it’s a non-item. This leaves practically any reasonable fee, factoring into my SRO governance choice given non-extraction of TA rent, something much more common on the tech stack. ↩

[JFWooten4]

Errr, sorry—the Association, as per James 💜
Trying to keep DUNA in that framing and foundation for the SDF 🧠

[tehchives]

Thank you John for bringing back to fold the potential avenues for the relationship between these entities.

I have two initial thoughts: Syndicate could be transparent concerning it's own balance sheet and, rather than flatly designating that all excess capital flow towards the DUNA, there was some kind of bureaucratic role within it to determine what kinds of outflows are appropriate. We want to be able to develop and grow and scale, optimistically in response to a clear market need. If differences in costs are minimal for issuers then strategy will need to focus on specific advantages presented by this kind of organization: not just reporting for SECs purposes but for live issuer observation and investor participation etc. Second, having something of an operating buffer may be very important if we can push for a new TA SRO which newly heads up this kind of transparent and investor-first market framework. Users won't be [easily] able to donate to the Syndicate in the same way they can donate to the DUNA, so unless we normalized funds allotment from the DUNA, having some kind of recurring delay I think could be helpful.

Extremely sorry to hear about the near-crash that recently happened for your household and very glad to infer that at least everyone is safe. My perspective is 100% that you should be able to utilize those funds to fit emergency needs if such needs arise, and it seems that they have. The relationship between that grant and the DUNA is informal, whereas that grant is entirely intended for BT operations and safe management - which of course is majorly effected by your own ability to safely maintain a roof above your heads.

[JFWooten4]

Had the pleasure of discussing some of these items in an impromptu casual VC given logistical discussions. Esine if these items could come up in our recorded session tonight, but I wanted to ink down one material point. And thank you for the sympathy—I love running fast and tight, and it always works out.

Users won't be [easily] able to donate to the Syndicate in the same way they can donate to the DUNA, so unless we normalized funds allotment from the DUNA, having some kind of recurring delay I think could be helpful.

Yeah, I've thought about doing regular fund allotments from the DUNA. This kind of operating relied more on donations as the primary form of issuer fees. Basically, I was envisioning running the DE corp like a nonprofit, which frankly was a form of incorporation I wasn't familiar with as possible back then.

Without diving into legal semantics and IRS classifications, the Syndicate has actually had GitHub Sponsors enabled for circa eight months. This is the mechanism I've used for income these last twelve months. There hasn't been any use of this even though the main webpage has prominently featured our GitHub for two months.

I'll dig out the traffic reports if we want to explore this avenue more. Briefly, the Syndicate has generally received about 10X the pageviews of WhyDRS. And I've only lightly promoted the GitHub through email P.S. notes for the last four months, as direct marketing is a territory I refuse to partake in morally.

I do want to normalize the allotments and incorporate the Association in the articles for shareholder conflict resolution, as I see no other option to protect global investors. I'd love to explore the recurring delay idea further, as that's something I haven't particularly considered. In private chat just now the impetus seemed to surround keeping everything above water, my approach with it.

[JFWooten4]

Just got the email that our application for GMO Trust was denied for unspecified reasons.