Summary
Although Verto and I aren’t a working group, as full time contributors it’s still important we lay out what we’ve achieved with the MVI product and our goals going forward. I’m sure the community has expectations for us and we want to be transparent in sharing our strategy and achievements.
Where we’ve been
In the 5 weeks since launching MVI we have seen:
- Market cap grow to reach $6.5m
- Upwards of $8m in the Uniswap pool
- Generated revenue of ~$6.5k + approximately $40k from the Methodologist bounty for the Coop (@ current INDEX price)
- 1162 unique addresses holding the token
- Coverage from Blockbeats in China all the way to Yahoo Finance in the US
- The launch of our new content hub, MetaPortal
- Decentral Games treasury passing a proposal to add $200k liquidity to MVI/ETH
Our target at launch was a $5m pool and the liquidity mining program was designed around that, but we’ve managed to organically outgrow that target which is great news. The fact that MVI is seeing a steady 1000-1200 new units being minted per day shows there is market fit for the index too. If we look at our closest competitors, Indexed Finance’s NFTP is at $1.4m and PieDAO’s PLAY is at $2m, which we are comfortably ahead of, despite launching after both.
Some of these numbers are of course dwarfed by other Coop products, but let’s consider that DPI sat at $1m for the first month before liquidity mining kicked in and sent it into overdrive!
Dune Analytics
We also wanted to highlight some of the data from the MVI dashboard that JD put together. The retention rate for MVI is currently about 78.5% for the April cohort (36 days in) and close to 93% for the May cohort (14 days in). By comparison, retention for the first three monthly cohorts for DPI (September, October, November) at day 36 was around 70%.
Another interesting stat is AUM breakdown by wallet size. About 47.2% of AUM comes from wallets that hold less than 250 units (under $18,000 at current prices). Within that, approximately 20% hold less than 50 units ($3,600 at current prices). For comparison, 78% of DPI AUM comes from wallets holding more than $28,400 of DPI.
Lastly, 39% of the unit supply is not incentivised. Taken together, this data suggests that MVI, as a product, differs from DPI. The target audience tends to skew more retail, which would explain the relatively large share of unincentivised unit supply. It also tells us that 61% of the unit supply is responsive to liquidity mining incentives.
Where we are going (Q2)
Building on the above data and also the pre-launch survey, our hypothesis is that MVI is primarily a retail product. We also think that a large share of the retail market “resides” in the gaming, virtual worlds and NFT parts of the crypto ecosystem, as opposed to DeFi. These areas of crypto are also a more effective gateway for mainstream adoption and are getting much more media coverage than DeFi. To sum up, our target audience can be characterised as retail and mostly non-crypto native.
With that in mind, we have a number of initiatives to continue growing MVI through Q2, the best way to describe the approach during this period would be ‘spread the word’. At this early stage for MVI and the idea of the metaverse more generally, it is important to share the message and let people know the product exists. As Lemonade might say, impressions impressions impressions!
While this means primarily focusing on content and social media, we are working closely with the communities for each project too. Being responsible governors is a big part of how we see our roles as methodologists, as such we are trying to get delegated staking switched on for a start. Once that is done we can start to get involved with governance and if MVI grows sufficiently, put forward proposals ourselves.
All that being said some of the main initiatives over the next 3 months are:
- Continue to produce articles and podcasts through MetaPortal. Target 1/week of each
- Amplify MP content through Twitter, using LA feedback to ensure we are optimising
- Explore opportunities to sponsor a gaming guild, Axie tournament or blockchain gaming streamer/s
- Enable delegated snapshot voting for DCL, Rari and NFTX as a minimum
- Partner with underlying projects (currently looking at MEME and Sandbox) to give MVI further utility outside of the LP pool
- Conduct user surveys to learn more about our customers and stay optimised
- Explore the option of bringing MVI off-chain through a partnership or a licensing agreement
Another consideration during this period will be switching on intrinsic productivity (IP) for MVI. As a community we have discussed the idea since launch, but haven’t been able to agree on a suitable approach. Today, two tokens in MVI - $DG and $AUDIUS - currently return 40% & 27% from governance staking. This is relevant because governance staking is the safest way to earn yield in terms of smart contract risk, but it is also necessary if we want to vote using the tokens. In the next few months we expect Rarible and Axie Infinity to roll out similar gov staking, in which case we might reasonably expect MVI to yield >10% even with only 3-4 tokens being used productively.
Some targets that we set ourselves for next 3 months are:
- $12m market cap
- 150k supply units
- Run a partnership with two underlying projects that give MVI utility
- Carry out our first metagovernance vote
- Grow MetaPortal subs to >500
Extra-curricular involvement
Outside of running MVI full time you will see us in a number of meetings across the Coop, writing the newsletter and recording the index insights podcast. This is important as we continue to enjoy being involved with pushing the entire DAO forward. This support won’t stop over the next quarter as we look to stay involved in discussions relating to Index Coop’s critical functions.
