[Proposal] Increasing Grape's scalability and utility by proposing we create a Grape IDO launch pad

DAO
1

Hey guys, first of all congratulations with all you have achieved so far with Grape

I joined the dao in order to provide ideas that I thought would be in the interest of the project and its shareholders.

The first question I asked myself when I heard about grape was : “Is it scalable?”

From what I know as of now, the answer would be no… unless you guys have some unrevealed plans that have not been made public yet, which may very well be the case.

So as of now, the Grape token’s primary use-case seems to be: access to the alpha that the community/ researchers are willing to share, with a bonus of smaller benefits such as random nft give-aways and competitions.

From my point of view, this will never scale as it is. Simply because the diminishing returns of holding $Grape is too high. I do not currently believe there are any benefits of holding anything above 20k grape.

Gape’s model will have huge diminishing returns for multiple reasons;
There is no incentive to hold above 20k grape
2) Grape’s price appreciation or unique users will see a slow down as the barrier to entry ( membership price ) becomes higher and higher, out-pricing more and more potential members.
My solution would simply be to add incentives for holding larger amounts of grape, perhaps with no cap. I’m not sure how well advertised the MeanFi airdrop has been in the grape community, but I believe this could be an introduction to a new utility. Grape could become a quasi launch pad platform.

There are multiple ways to do this, such as airdropping ido tokens proportional to your grape holdings, or airdropping nfts which can be redeemed for ido allocations, or airdropping a derivative tokens that can be used to enter the ido selectively (starlaunch method).

Since the Grape team is in contact with so many devs and teams in the Solana ecosystem, I believe they would rather distribute their Ido tokens to grape holders rather than other launch pad holders ex. Solanium/ Raydium. I say this because we could combine Grape’s DNA of alpha seeking with a IDO launchpad. So each launch, we could create a new thread and discuss the project, potentially incentivizing holding rather than immediately selling. No other platform encourages discussions about the projects they launch.

TLDR ; I suggest we add more incentives to holding the Grape token, in order to increase demand for grape, thus attracting new minds to the community and more investment. My suggestion was to create a grape launch pad as a way to achieve this.

I believe this is a win for all parties, the Grape holders will benefit, the Grape team will benefit, and the teams launching their project on Grape will benefit by having an improved place to market their ido.

If we like the concept, I can go more into detail about how we can excecute this. This was just a brief overview of my idea.

The point of this proposal is not to conclude that my idea is the only solution, but rather to start a discussion as to how we can increase utility and value for Grape holders.

21 Likes
2

I love this idea and I would love to help in anyway to see this happen.

8 Likes
3

My growing Francium balance at currently 1072% APY would disagree with you :slight_smile: but I get the point and agree with you solely on the membership side.

I like the idea you have and it was one direction I was hoping we would go in conjunction with the NFT Membership Card / Build Value Proposal I had put forward. It was designed to add scalability (as we can leverage the nft infrastructure) and not have to rely on a centralized server for authentication in external projects and potentially internal ones too.

I too would be happy to help here as I think it is a solid idea and creating processes to scale grape will be key in the future to seeing it grow in a lasting way.

3 Likes
4

I think tha could be of huge potential, we need to check with our dev team.

2 Likes
5

I have a different take on this, for example having more tokens than the standart A class membership amount consists in having more voting power in DAO proposals at Realms.

The other side of having more $GRAPE than the standart A class is speculative guess. People with high amounts of $GRAPE are bound to speculate in selling their $GRAPE at higher prices.

That’s my take, being said $GRAPE at it is already has it’s utility on various things even comparing $GRAPE to others protocols, we are far ahead as being more than a DAO governance token.

Regarding the GRAPE IDO Launchpad, if i remember correctly Grape already planned to have one in the future years.

Although having an IDO Launchpad is great, pushing it to have it done in the next months is wrong. Grape should focus all the efforts in the dashboard side and automate the incorporation of Grape Bot in future Solana projects.

That being said, focusing on the dashboard and automation of things comes as a priority at least from my side of things. And to finish off things, of course community comes first as Grape without it is nothing.

As @Arximedis says, that’s my 2 cents.

5 Likes
6

love the idea and I agree, there just isnt enough organic demand for the GRAPE token and we need to figure out some better utility to warrant people holding and “staking” larger amounts of GRAPE.

Another idea would be to create a short run of NFT’s that gain access to more areas in the discord (I have some ideas here as well) with a limited supply of NFT’s and a royalty style tax on sales, this could also create another stream of revenue for the DAO to do more things, get bigger reach, more marketing, more networking, bigger prizes etc that actually gets the interest of some people to want to be part of the grape community creating more demand.

A launchpad style project should 100% be on the cards, with the networking and connections the GRAPE team already has in the industry we should be the go to when it comes to an incubator style system.
Pending how big out social reach can go with interviews etc it could be a huge benefit to projects wanting to launch knowing they are essentially advertising there project to an already huge established community.

A lottery style system of some sort of bonus each month to specific members (maybe only A class is eligible for the monthly lottery)

Protocol owned liquidity ?

But maybe something that causes GRAPE to be burnt on purchases of something to reduce supply, its always going to be a battle of inflation but if you can offset it with regular burns to try and control inflation you can some times see price stablise and find its true value if you get it right

8 Likes
7

Sure I agree with most of that

Certainly people can speculate with $Grape, however they can also speculate with anything, that does not give it a real incentive to hold anything more than the required membership criteria. Grape also has high inflation, thefore speculating on a (currently) infaltionary membership token would be unwise in the long term in my opinion.

I also doubt there would be many individuals or instutuions, willing to speculate on a coin only to be able to infleunce its DAO decisions with its voting power.

Sure, I was not proposing a completion date, I was just suggesting the idea, as I was not aware that there was already talks to have this implimented.

I strongly believe that the community would want this, and is also a good marketing strategy for Grape.

1 Like
8

Haha, i’m glad you’re doing well leverage farming your Grape, however, in my opinion this is not a justification for inidividuals to speculate and hold more than 20k $Grape, fundamentals and utility will always come first. The ability to farm grape on its own will never drive enough demand in the long term.

I like the membership card idea too, I think we could also think about building our own platform in the future (in order to not depend on discord) and using NFTs as our access cards. I also think cross-chain NFTs would allow people on other chains to join grape.

2 Likes
9

Like the new COPE, or similar vibes with continous/general airdrops.

I like this. Having a no-frill overview of the project with no bias…but an honest perspective of what they offer.

As with Legend, I am more along the lines of slow and steady on this front, and rather finishing what plans we currently have…make sure the foundation we are trying to set is firm before progressing to new ventures and dwindling our workforce.

If enough steam, maybe we can incorporate it into our roadmap if it if we update in the future…drawing speculation, but hey, that’s life

3 Likes
10

I would absolutely agree with your sentiment that there is no point holding more than 20k grape for A.
That I think was the old way of thinking. Above the classes, there was no specific reason to hold lets say 50k grape. Now that we have the grape on chain voting, this changes the dynamics. Those heavily involved in grape can actually influence the direction that it goes.

This is not enough IMO.
There needs to be a stronger underlying utility for holding large amounts of grape, other proposals we’ve seen include uncapping the grape emissions or changing the emissions so that you receive more for holding more. This is just getting more grape for holding grape right?
What’s the underlying utility?

I dont have an answer.
A pseudo IDO platform may have its benefits if we can structure it like a liquidity provision scheme like solanium where you have a guaranteed allocation for certain amount of lets say, Socean vested grape? Though I would really like to hear the specifics if you can please.

7 Likes
11

Most people just want to buy a token and make gains off it, I think it’s quite a few that are interested in Dao systems and being able to “influence” decisions.
I don’t know if what @Hype.Jr is proposing would work because looking at it, it might be putting too much weight on the community and we can’t possibly implement that soon enough.
But I generally agree with @Hype.Jr , Grape needs to have more Scalability and Utility.

2 Likes
12

Yes I agree with your analysis,

I have still not figured out the best structure, and I guess there is no perfect structure, the best structure will differ for different types of stakeholders ( eg. whales, small bag holders, old/ new holders).

I like the sound of guarnateed allocations, it seems to have worked for solanium. However, from what I have heard from Solanium holders is that their guaranteed allocation becomes increasingly diluted as the membership increases for that specific criteria.

I was interested in the Starlaunch type of structure. The structure works with a 2 token system, by staking $STARS you will periodically receive $N2H4 which is then used to purchase guaranteed IDO allocations. This allows users to chose whether to participate in the current IDO or save their $N2H4 and deploy it on a future IDO with more concentration.

I thought this structure would fit well with Grape because of the tradition we have, to research and share alpha about projects in order to allocate our capital to the best projects. This may dilute the best projects since more people would divert their tokens to the most attractive ones, however the expected price increaase would also be larger, therefore the dilution effect would not be so bad. This would help to keep IDO allocations relatively constant. We could then reduce the amount of the derrivative token ($N2H4) being distrubuted to stakers as the stake pool becomes larger. This would also reward early adopters and give incentives for users to get in early.

So imagine $GRAPE as the native token and $JUICE or $WINE as the derrivative token.

If we combine this with the previous idea to make a discussion channel for each project, it would be interesting to deep dive into each one and see which project will receive most demand. If we would have serious issues with allocation dillution, we could either cap the staking pools or ask projects for a larger allocation of tokens. We also could incentivise Grape researchers and contributors with the derrivative token in order to give bonus incentives to improve the overall Grape ecosystem quality.

I’m not certain this is the best structure, I have not heard any feedback from Starlaunch users, as it is a relatively new platform.

I believe the launchpad will expand Grape’s audience by a huge amount for a single reason;

Not everyobody loves going through alpha and making sense of it, but everybody loves getting ido allocations.

1 Like
13

Yes I agree this is what people would want. People are seeking alpha on Grape for gains, as well as seeking ido allocations for gains.

For now we are just discussing the fundamentals of whether this idea will work or not.

I don’t think we have any rush to implement it, but I think we should identify the potential of the idea and the demand for it, and act accordingly.

1 Like
14

This is one of those concepts that is killer in theory but very hard to implement, and ofc it would be huge and revolutionary if implemented, should check with Dev team, as they have their plate full already.

3 Likes
15

Yes sure, it’s never as easy as in theory but it’s quite simple when you think about it.

Each of these launch pad platforms receive X amount of IDO tokens and the debate is over how to distribute them so that the most amount of people are satisfied.

When the platform is relatively new and supply (IDO tokens) is > than demand (launch pad entries), most people will be satisifed.

However, when supply is equal to demand, the users will feel dilluted and will all be unhappy

Therefore, the 2 token system will encourage some people to miss out on some IDOs, however they will at least take part in the ones they believe in.

Raydium has used a lottery system in order to avoid dillution, and most people are unhappy since they cannot win without investing large amounts of $Ray

Solanium I believe have dillution for the guranteed allocation class as more members are entering, and I heard some allocations go as low as $70 ( need to verify ). It was much more profitable in the early days when there were less solanium users.

That is why I think the 2 token will make most people happiest, and also fit will into Grape’s discussions and alpha sharing.

There are other ways to implement the same philosophy; instead of the 2nd token, holders could be aidropped nfts that can have the same use as the 2nd token, or this could all be done off-chain, and you simply claim your selected IDO tokens from the Grape website ( not ideal imo )

So far we can say that there are 2 proven models that have worked ( Raydium/ Solanium )

Even I would argue the success of the platform is determined by 10% model and 90% execution

16

I agree with the sentiment about scalability and utility but I don’t think this is the answer. IMO there is a dearth of IDO launchpads and I think without a fulltime team focused on the Grape version it would struggle to compete for quality deal flow.

4 Likes
17

Yes I struggle with this too Adam. I have been in Solster for a bit and have been quite disappointed so far with the deals I have been able to access. I worry we will be in a similar situation if we are not seen as one of the top to launch on and/or do not have good quality listings.

18

It is true that maybe this is not the answer, however, I do not invalidate the idea because of other project’s failed attempts. We must be reminded that Grape is now an established player in the ecosystem, and has great connections with other teams, this is an advantage that other launch pads do not have and may never have.

Besides that, Grape’s purpose would not be primarily a launch pad, since the launch pad feature would simply be an add-on.

We also do not need to complicate the idea, we could start off by just aidroping tokens like we are with the MeanFi drop, although in a more formalized structure.

2 Likes
19

Yes, this is great idea. I’m close looking how XAVA (avalunch) works on Avax and they are sucessful with this idea.

3 Likes
20

I really like the XAVA system too and is similar in practice to the others. I generally do not love the KYC part of these platforms, but I guess that is a feature for most launchpads. Would we have to do that too for protection?