BUILD Finance DAO

The document is non-binding. Some information may be outdated as we keep evolving.

BUILD Philosophy

BUILD Finance is a decentralised autonomous venture builder, owned and controlled by the community. BUILD Finance produces, funds, and manages community-owned DeFi products.

There are five core activities in which the venture BUILDers engage:

  1. Identifying business ideas,

  2. Organising teams,

  3. Sourcing capital,

  4. Helping govern the product entities, and

  5. Providing shared services.

BUILD operates a shared capabilities model, where the DAO provides the backbone support and ensures inter-entity synergies so that the product companies can focus on their own outcomes.

BUILD takes care of all organisational, hiring, back/mid office functions, and the product companies focus on what they can do best, until such time where any individual product outgrows the DAO and becomes fully self-sustainable. At that point, the chick is strong enough to leave the nest and live its own life. The survival of the fittest. No product entity is held within DAO by force.

Along the way, BUILD utilises the investment banking model, which, in its essence, is a process of creating assets, gearing them up, and then flipping them into a fund or setting them as income-generating business systems, all this while taking fees along the way at each step. BUILD heavily focuses on integrating each asset/product with each other to boost productive yield and revenues. For example, BUILD’s OTC Market may be integrated with Metric Exchange to connect the liquidity pools with the trading traffic. The net result – pure synergy that benefits each party involved, acting in a self-reinforcing manner.

El Espíritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive)

BUILD is a hive and is always alive. While some members may appear more active than others, there’s no central source of control or “core teams” as such. BUILD is work in progress where everyone is encouraged to contribute.

Following the natural free market forces, BUILD only works on those products that members are wanting to work on themselves and that they believe have economic value. Effectively, every builder is also a user of BUILD’s products. We are DeFi users that fill the gaps in the ecosystem. Any member can contribute from both purely altruistic or ultra-mercantile intentions – it’s up to the wider community to decide what is deemed valuable and what product to support. The BUILD community is a sovereign individual that votes with their money and feet.

BUILD members = BUILD users. It’s that simple.

$BUILD TOKEN

Tokenomics

$BUILD token is used as a governance token for the DAO. It also represents a pro-rata claim of ownership on all DAO’s assets and liabilities (e.g. BUILD Treasury and $bCRED debt token).

The token was distributed via liquidity mining with no pre-sale and zero founder/private allocation. The farming event lasted for 7 days around mid-Sep 2020. At the time, BUILD didn't have any products and held no value. Arguably, $BUILD has still zero value as it is not a legal instrument and does not guarantee or promise any returns to anyone. See the launch announcement here https://medium.com/@BUILD_Finance/announcing-build-finance-dc08df585e57

Initial supply was 100,000 $BUILD with 100% distributed via fair launch. Subsequently, the DAO unanimously voted to approve minting of extra 30,000 $BUILD and allocate them as:

  • 15,000 $BUILD (11.5%) to the founding member of the DAO (@0xdev0) with 1-year gradual vesting, and

  • 15,000 $BUILD (11.5%) to the DAO treasury as development funds.

For the proposal of the above see: https://forum.letsbuild.finance/t/proposal-2-fund-the-development-of-defi-lending-platform/24.

The voting took place at a later retired web-page https://vote.letsbuild.finance. The governance has since moved to Snapshot (link below). The results of the old proposals are not visible there, however, on-chain voting contract can be see here: https://etherscan.io/address/0xa8621477645f76b06a41c9393ddaf79ddee63daf#readContract.

$Build Token Repartition

Vesting Schedule

Minting keys are not burnt = $BUILD supply is not fixed as token holders can vote on minting new tokens for specific reasons determined by the token holders. For example, the DAO may mint additional tokens to incentivise usage of its products, which would, in turn, increase the value flow or TVL. Dilution is not in the economic benefit of the token holders, hence any such events has to be considered carefully.

Access to minting function is available via on-chain governance. A safe buffer is established in a form of the contract-enforced 24 hour delay, which should provide a sufficient time for the community to flag. Meaning that before such a transaction could be executed, everyone would be able to act in advance by withdrawing their funds / exiting from BUILD. Any malicious minting would, theoretically, result in an immediate market sell-off of $BUILD, making it economically detrimental to do such an action. This makes it highly improbable that any malicious minting would be performed.

$BUILD Liquidity

Liquidity is available via:

Note that BUILD Treasury is supplying liquidity to the Balancer pool, this gives BUILD additional return in form of LP fees and $BAL rewards as both $BUILD and $METRIC tokens are now whitelisted.

Rewards will be claimed from time to time, not too often as it won't be economically expedient. To see the current $BAL reward emission head to

GOVERNANCE

All components of the BUILD DAO and the control over its have been decentralised:

  • All contracts (incl. the Treasury and Basis Gold) can be operated by $BUILD holders with on-chain proposals (see https://docs.build.finance/build-knowledge-base/on-chain-voting);

  • All social accounts (Discord, Telegram, and Twitter) are managed by multiple moderators;

  • All frontends (Metric Exchange, Basis Gold, and the BUILD homepage) are auto-deployed and managed by multiple devs.

TREASURY & DEVELOPMENT

BUILD DAO Treasury

The BUILD treasury has over $400k that can be managed by on-chain proposals and used in whichever way the community desires. For example, to hire developers. Having a functioning product, enough funds in the treasury and a fully decentralised governance has been a long-term goal since the inception in September 2020, and now it's finally here.

Current holdings are (might be outdated):

  • Capital budget (dev / incentives fund) - 11,025 $BUILD (~$94k);

  • Operational budget (product development) - 204,300 $aDAI;

  • Ownership stake - 200,000 $METRIC (~$84k);

  • Ownership stake - 199,900 $UPDOWN(~$62k);

  • Ownership stake - 5,400 $HYPE (~$1.3k);

  • Ownership stake - 2% of $BSGS supply.

    • TOTAL: ~$445k

Funding of the Development

In an early stage, the development will be funded by an allocation of bCRED debt tokens for development expenses. After the first product was built (i.e. Metric Exchange), the DAO sold 5,000 $BUILD for 203,849 $DAI which will now be used for funding of other products or a combination of revenue + a smaller token allocation. This is up to the community to decide.

Operational Budget

Following the very first onchain voting, BUILD has established a Gnosis Multisig Wallet (0x39198bC9956AC06b1CbE9f6B186460BEA19C05B9). These funds will be used for operational expenses and to pay developers, designers, etc. The initial funding will include with 50,000 bCRED out the DAO's Treasury + plus all unvested bCRED allocation held individually by the guardians (specifically 0xdev0 and Son of Ishtar).

The wallet has 7 signers with any TX requiring confirmation of 3 out of 7:

  1. 0x2Cb037BD6B7Fbd78f04756C99B7996F430c58172 @0xdev0

  2. 0x78E0c53f0a71d345Abf9823588A3e2fea87B1b3a @Benjamin Mooney

  3. 0x35fd788f0DF50d94DED12560E03986fb625d9b2d @Son of Ishtar

  4. 0xeF0Ca09fbf9a5f61E657Fb208b46b8685c1d4766 @vfat

  5. 0x53e0B897EAE600B2F6855FCe4a42482E9229D2c2 @nickbtts

  6. 0x292c6DAE7417B3D31d8B6e1d2EeA0258d14C4C4b @0xSHA2

  7. 0x6061205c7ada4FB1Ef98bebf4ADb04aBF97ba051@Urbane Grandier

Smart Contract Audit

Contracts are not audited. It's up to the BUILD community governance to decide how to spend our funds. If the community wants to spend any amount for auditing, a voting proposal can be initiated. As with any decisions and proposals, the cost-benefit analysis must be employed in regards to the economical sense of spending any funds on audit vs developing more products and expanding our revenue streams.

DAO Liabilities and $bCRED

$bCRED is a token that allowed the DAO to reward members for work before the DAO source sufficient funds. Effectively, $bCRED is a promissory note or an IOU to give back $DAI at 1:1 ratio, when the DAO starts generating revenues.

"BUILDER" User Role in Discord

Since Discord is our primary coordination mechanism, we need to make effort to keep it focused on producing value. During the launch of METRIC, we’ve doubled our total number of users! This made it very difficult for existing users to explain what BUILD is about to new users and created a lot of confusion.

To help improve the quality of conversations, we’ve introduced a new user role called BUILDer. BUILDers will have write-access to product development channels while everyone else will only be able to read them. This should keep those product changes focused on actual productive conversations and make them more informative.

"GUARDIAN" Role in Discord

To increase our collective output as a community, a governance vote introduced an incentivisation mechanism for community contribution, tipping, and other small projects using our unique bCRED token (but may change in the future as required). These tokens are stewarded by active community members — “guardians’’ — who are free to allocate these funds to tip people for proactive work. Current guardians are @Son of Ishtar and @0xdev0, although anyone can propose the tip for anyone else. For more details see Proposal #15.

Hence, Guardians are defined as members of the DAO who are entrusted with a community budget for tipping other members for performing various small tasks.

PRODUCT SUITE & ROADMAP

  • Metric Exchange - is a DEX aggregator that allows for limit orders trading for any ERC-20 token via 0x relayer. Development continues with the product owner SHA_2048 and inputs from vfat. Live at metric.exchange.

  • Basis Gold - a synthetic, algorithmically-adjusted token pegged to the price of gold (sXAU) with elastic supply. Live at https://basis.gold/.

  • Updown Finance - binary options for volatility trading instrument (alpha is live at updown.finance).

  • Vortex - a lending & borrowing platform, which will target the long tail of assets that are currently not served by the existing DeFi money markets. Aiming to launch by March'2021.

The other immediate focus right now will be to make good use of our newly available funding and hire several product managers for other projects.

Please note that nothing is here set in stone. Just like any other start-up, we’ll keep experimenting, learning, and evolving. What’s listed here is just our current trajectory but it might change at any point.

SOCIAL MEDIA

NextOn-Chain Voting

Last updated