[Secondary Proposal] Mission 1B20N24 #3

Governance Meta
1

In the following, you can find the DRAFT proposal for the third cycle of “Mission 1B20N24”. Please feel free to leave feedback. The draft will be left up until the end of the week, after which it is going to be moved on-chain for an official DAO Proposal.

Mission 1B20N24 Proposal #3

Period: March 2024 – May 2024 (3-months)

Amount: X,XXX,XXX USDC (amount will be filled when proposal gets posted)

Destination: Gnosis Safe (Multi-sig wallet)

Address: 0xa742e1d181c59c9c4dd5687172efc119e3868d09

# Recap of Last Cycle

OEV Network:

1600×900 428 KB

During this cycle the OEV Network was revealed. In collaboration with gateway.fm and built on top of PolygonCDK, API3 is going to release a ZK-rollup, designed to auction off oracle updates and enable protocols to recapture hundreds of millions in OEV that protocols are currently leaking away due to OEV unaware oracle solutions.

Phase 2.1:

In the past cycle significant work went into Phase 2.1. This upgrade of Phase 2 will drastically increase the speed of deployment of data feeds onto new networks as well as the user experience of getting access to them. Network deployments currently take a lot of time and with the anticipation of serving an increased amount (due to the developments in the field of rollup deployments), significant improvements had to be made in this field, which Phase 2.1 will bring. Additionally, the user flow of getting access to data feed services has been revamped. The current flow requires the creation of an order, after which payment is awaited. After successful payment, the API3 team manually created the desired data feed together with the node operators which has the potential of taking a couple of days. This flow was very unintuitive and the expectation upon buying subscription services typically is, that access is granted immediately after purchase. This is exactly what Phase 2.1 will enable. Data feed services will begin automatically upon receiving payment, which makes this service a one of a kind for receiving fully managed oracle services. Decentralised, instant and on-demand. Neither dApps nor chains need to actively engage with or wait on the API3 to receive these services. Phase 2.1 has been audited by Quantstamp and is expected to be launched imminently.

Integrations & Deployments:

Apart from these major two releases that are being heavily anticipated, API3 has been very active in terms of integrations as well as network deployments in the previous cycle. The integrations and growth of our partners INIT Capital, Lendle, Minterest, Gravita and others over the past months has propelled API3 TVS from 10M to over 100M, bringing us closer to the outspoken goal of $1Billion by the end of this year.

1600×323 88.8 KB

Among other things the network of API providers that are running first-party oracles keeps growing. Coingecko recently joined the ranks of API providers powering dAPIs and more high profile integrations are expected to be released shortly.

ETHDenver:

Lastly, API3 is happy to have been a sponsor at ETHDenver. Many current and upcoming partners have been met, OEV Network was presented and the first official hackathon on OEV Network was hosted. The hackathon challenge worked flawlessly and participants were able to partake in auctions, be awarded bids and successfully execute data feed updates. This successful on-field test underlines that OEV Network is nearly ready to be made available with an official launch date to be revealed shortly.

# Upcoming Cycle

The upcoming cycle will focus on four major areas of interest for API3 with the goals of growing adoption and consequently the value being secured, community building as well as overall presence and recognition for API3.

OEV Network Launch

The testnet version of OEV Network has been running throughout February allowing for the extensive testing of all functionalities, being rounded off by a successfully completed hackathon that allowed participants to utilise and showcase all functionalities without issues. The coming week(s) will be utilised on some optimizations and the determination of an official launch date. Existing users of API3 can simply utilise the upgrade by deploying new "OEV proxies” over the API3 Market for each dAPI that they are consuming and simply updating their read contract addresses to the new proxies. This will allow for auctions to be hosted for their specific OEX proxy. Partners like INIT Capital have already deployed these proxies in anticipation of being among the first projects to officially utilise an oracle that pays them.

Phase 2.1 Release

Most of what Phase 2.1 is about has been presented in the recap section above. Contracts have been audited by Quantstamp and are ready to be deployed, a revamped API3 Market is completed and API Providers have redeployed Airnodes with the necessary upgrades. We expect Phase 2.1 to be released early this upcoming cycle, after which chain expansions will be heavily prioritised.

Marketing 2.0

If you have been following API3 channels more closely, you’re more than likely already aware that new leadership on the marketing front has joined API3 and that there are big things planned. During this upcoming cycle the focus of marketing will be the following:

  1. Simplification of API3: Oracles are a complex product. OEV is even more complex. One of the core missions for marketing will be to create content that breaks apart the technical parts so that a wider audience can understand API3’s mission statement
  2. Empowering the Community: Significant marketing efforts in recent months have been put towards dApps and chains with not enough resources to empower our community. This will drastically change with the addition of the marketing lead who already bootstrapped an entire community for one of the leading blockchain ecosystems in the space. This means there will be more opportunities for the community to get involved and be actively contributing to API3s success.
  3. Impactful Product Releases: Two major products are to be expected within this cycle. In order to maximise their impact API3 will be working together with PR specialists. This includes but is not limited to more press coverage, social media campaigns as well as public video/audio content surrounding these launches.
  4. Physical Presence: During this cycle the focus will be to show more presence during conferences and also use opportunities to arise to speak and present API3 in front of greater audiences. A lot of the connections and consequent success API3 is seeing currently was built upon being present and networking. During this cycle you will find API3 at ETHGlobal London, EthereumZurich, ETHDam, Token2049 Dubai, ETHDubai, Dappcon, ETHBerlin and Consensus2024.
  5. Media Relations: Thanks to our renewed marketing approach, we’re looking to expand upon our media relations by firstly building out our portfolio of media relationships natively, secondly, onboarding a industry powerhouse PR agency, alongside leveraging our partners to maximise coverage of API3 and OEV Network.

Integration Incentives

This proposal will be followed up by a primary proposal to establish an integration incentive program using grants in API3’s native token for maximum mission alignment. API3 tokens will be requested from the primary treasury and be used to align interests of partners through e.g. gradually unlocking API3 allocations, token reciprocations or other means of collaboration through the API3 token. This incentivization program will be another tool alongside returning value through recapturing OEV that will help secure high profile data feed and/or API3 token integrations and continue to broaden the distribution of API3 Foundation beneficiaries and DAO governance. More information will follow in the primary proposal.

The Numbers

The previous cycle expenditure was within expectations. 1.23 Million USDC of the requested 1.2 Million USDC ($1.32M with the buffer) were spent. Of the requested 75.000 API3 tokens a total of 10.000 were utilised. We expect the expenditure within this cycle to be similar, anticipated at 1.25 Million USDC with minor shifts in allocation of money. The grants cover a total of 32 DAO contributors. The API provider costs are covering a total of 13 providers with two recent additions to be revealed shortly.

In addition to the currently available API3 tokens the authors of this proposal would like to request the remainder of the API3 tokens that the hot wallet holds. These tokens will be made available for new marketing initiatives throughout 2024 to maximise the impact of OEV Network and Phase 2.1. The hot wallet posesses approximately 200.000 API3 net of outstanding or pending transactions.

image

Summary

In this cycle, the DAO can expect the completion and release of the OEV Network & Phase 2.1. The addition of an experienced marketing lead will make API3 significantly more visible through increased media presence, event presence, social media campaigns and community engagement. The release of Phase 2.1 will allow API3 to scale to over 30 networks within this cycle. High profile data feed integrations will be released in the following weeks in addition to significant business development efforts going towards an integration that will contribute to API3 TVS immensely.

# Explanation of Proposal Parameters:

The destination will be a 3-of-4 multi-signature wallet address managed by Burak, Andre, Ashar and Ugur.

Target contract address is the USDC token contract address, which is 0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0ce3606eb48

Target contract signature: transfer (address, uint256). This is the function to call on the target contract, which triggers a transfer of USDC tokens.

The parameters stated include the address these USDC are to be sent to, which should match the proposal address, followed by the number of USDC. USDC has 6 decimal places, and solidity is unable to deal with decimal places - hence we add 6 zeros after the proposed USDC number. The number of decimal places can be verified on the USDC contract page of Etherscan - $1.00 | USD Coin (USDC) Token Tracker | Etherscan 1

7 Likes
2

Hello everyone, I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself to the DAO Forum. I’m Joe, I joined the team at the beginning of March. I have been a participant in the blockchain industry since 2017, and was previously the Head of Crypto at Chiliz where I worked for 6 years focusing on community building, social media growth, brand awareness and more.

I’m incredibly excited to bring my wealth of experience to API3 and to become a key player for the team to lean on for anything marketing related.

I think as my first post here, it would be great for me to expand upon some of the marketing related items in this proposal written by Ugur.

Simplification of API3:

API3 has managed to secure huge amounts of technical talent and if you compare the GitHub commits to other industry participants, the level of contribution by the technical team has continued to shine as one key metric to cheer about.

On the other hand, the heavy technical focus has spilled into a large portion of marketing material, which is fine for example, when talking to and targeting highly technical developers and founders. To be able to build a global and engaged community, we need to refine our messaging to simplify a large portion of heavy technical communication and understand that we have a few different target audiences.

We will be taking part in a messaging workshop soon in which we will work with a third party media agency to help us refine our message so that it’s ready for increasing community adoption and engagement alongside increasing the chance of our key news and updates being covered by journalists in relevant crypto media.

I’m lucky to have this opportunity as the OEV Network is launching soon, it gives me a chance to have a deep review of the above so that we can get geared up for a successful launch from a marketing and communication perspective.

We’re also going to lean more into video from a content perspective, for example, we’re currently working on a simple explainer video that will be able to explain OEV Network in an animated way with less words as many people are more visual learners. I can’t wait to share the video we have cooking.

Empowering the Community:

In the blockchain landscape, community and identity is everything, currently we have a somewhat small, but engaged community that’s mainly tailored towards English speakers. This has served us well for the past few years, however, the industry is a global one and more needs to be done to incentivise and support local communities that engage with blockchain products like ours. For example, we need to start having a much larger presence in APAC (Asia–Pacific).

How will we achieve this?

  • Launch of a community ambassadorship program which will incentivise selected community members to work closer with API3 to help us reach our goals in specific regions.
  • Attending high quality blockchain events in the regions in which we feel there is a gap missing in our plans for growth.
  • Launch of an ecosystem focused podcast and invite members of the API3 ecosystem to discuss Oracles, OEV and the participants product and vision.
  • Merchandise, may not sound revolutionary or interesting to most, but having more availability of merchandise to distribute to our most loyal members to show gratitude for the time and effort they have spent discussing and sharing API3 related content (and great for brand awareness at events too!)
  • Marketing community events, discussing overview of our marketing strategy with active community members, for example in Discord, allowing them to take part more and have their say and share relevant feedback so we know what we could be doing more or less of.
  • Localisation of API3 content into different languages to be more accessible around the world, which fits with our plans of community growth and engagement.
  • Community surveys to receive relevant feedback/suggestions from our active community members to ensure that we’re not missing the mark.

I have no doubt that with more collaboration and marketing efforts in the areas listed above, we can truly make API3 and the OEV Network globally known within our industry.

Physical Presence:

Attending events is a great way to open up networking opportunities and increase brand awareness, we will be working on a more refined event strategy and event PR plan to maximise our potential at blockchain events, whilst keeping our costs as low as possible as it can be very easy to just want to have the biggest booths and biggest presence, but from my experience, that doesn’t always convert into something material.

We’re going to be more active in side events. Side events are a large portion of the event calendar and happen around almost every large blockchain conference. We are already planning some side events for big upcoming conferences and are cooperating with our partners to have sponsorships in place so that we can maximise presence and as mentioned previously, not overspend where unnecessary, co-hosting and event sponsoring is a great way for us to achieve our conference goals.

We’re going to create a splash!

Media Relations:

Finally, we’re expanding our media presence. Off the bat, I’m onboarding a highly respected and high quality PR agency, to initially help us fill gaps in our connections with journalists in blockchain media to maximise our potential of coverage in a wide range of media including news platforms, podcasts and more.

Secondly, we are in a position to activate and lean on some of our partners to help us achieve the media presence in which we believe is required to make sure that OEV Network is not missed by anyone following the DeFi and Oracle subsection of this industry.

Lastly, we will start building our own relationships more directly with journalists and other crypto media platforms, sometimes form sponsorships to activate marketing related opportunities around the launch of the OEV Network and key growth milestone achievements.

I hope that this was a good addition to Ugur’s proposal above, and a brief introduction about myself and my plans to ensure that we’re not missing anything when it comes to marketing. Obviously, there is much more to our plans than just the above, but I didn’t want to write a book.

We’re currently working on the launch marketing surrounding OEV Network, and after that I look forward to focusing on a large amount of the community building strategy and communication strategy to make everyone who has been following the progress of API3, feel that they can contribute in a meaningful way.

Thanks, and good luck to us.

Joe G

You can find me on:
X: @joebgrech
LinkedIn: /grechj
Telegram: UnfunMid

9 Likes