Proposal to create an Investment Committee

Governance Proposal
1

Proposal to form an Investment Committee

Summary:

In simple terms, Index Coop is an asset management platform with a mission to create widely used crypto structured products. This means that over time, Index Coop will hold a growing number of underlying tokens while managing people’s investments in these tokens.

Just like Vanguard, BlackRock and others, we should aim to provide educational resources and investment insights to investors in our products. Whether it’s a macro piece of research on crypto or an investment thesis for a particular project.

This is a job for an Investment Committee (IC). To analyse and understand the underlying tokens and create investment insights for our investors. This further serves to cement our place in the centre of crypto investing, not just as a product provider, but also as an education and trusted resource.

Abstract:

The role of the IC is to really understand the underlying tokens held in the Index Coop products. Understand their tokenomics, roadmap, governance initiatives, etc. We can think of it as our own internal investment team.

In TradFi, every asset manager has investment analysts, portfolio managers, maybe a CIO and an IC. Published investment research adds to their credibility and helps investors to understand some of the underlying trends and portfolio positions.

I think we need to do the same. There’s an incredible value add opportunity from providing high quality information and research to crypto index investors. Think of it as Messari within the Index Coop.

If approved, the IC would have the following mandate:

  • Cover and analyse the underlying tokens held in the Index Coop products;
  • Produce “investment insights” style content for internal and external distribution;
  • Cultivate relationships with crypto & macro investors to challenge and guide our thinking.

Motivation:

Simple:

  1. It would be beneficial for the Index Coop to have a group of community members who really understand the underlying tokens. This could help for some of the intrinsic productivity analysis, governance proposals, etc.
  2. Adding high quality “investment insights” content will give us further credibility as a structured products platform and create a sort-of educational moat around Index Coop.
  3. Expanding our contacts and building relationships with crypto investors could lead to positive second-order effects. An example would be @LemonadeAlpha getting the Maker whale to abstain on the governance proposal to add DPI as collateral.

Specification:

At this stage I propose that the IC has 4 members, meeting weekly. Each member will be responsible for covering individual tokens as the primary analyst and producing “investment insights” content for their respective token.

The IC will also seek out industry experts and crypto investors as guest speakers. This will help the IC to form macro views and create macro content, while raising the profile of the Index Coop in the crypto community.

For:
Form the Investment Committee as per the above proposal.

Against:
The Investment Committee is not necessary at this point.

Thanks @DarkForestCapital, @overanalyser , @Thomas_Hepner and @0x_Dev for reviewing this proposal.

Investment Committee Proposal
  • FOR: Form the Investment Committee as per the above proposal.
  • AGAINST: The Investment Committee is not necessary at this point.

0 voters

3 Likes
2

@verto0912 I do not think you, or anyone else, needs permission to create the Investment Committee. You can just do it! That being said, I would like to join the Investment Committee.

I did an analysis on DPI and INDEX as part of the Index Challenge, and was planning to do a deep dive on the tokens contained within DPI sometime soon.

What we do need community backing behind is to publish/distribute our research on the Index Coop website and other official channels like Twitter, Discord, etc… Would also be great for the committee to partner with the Index Methodologists on both research and distribution as well!

4 Likes
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I like it. It will be good to get such content created and visible.

I think a related activity would be to keep on top of the other protocols governance and to make recommendations as to how the coop should use it’s meta governance powers.

4 Likes
4

Great suggestion. And, as @Thomas_Hepner says, you can just do it too. He, you, @overanalyser and many others here would add a load of value here.

I also see this is a key part of building a moat around the Coop, and building on recent progress such as unincentivized AuM.

Strong +1

5 Likes
5

This is fantastic. The treasury committee can fund the work necessary to be done here.

1 Like
6

Yes, that would be part of the mandate for the IC. This function is similar to what proxy companies like ISS and Glass Lewis do in TradFi. This would help in getting more people to delegate their shares to us which is, once again, the model of proxy voting companies.

2 Likes
7

I agree with all points above and I think it’s a great proposal. Having a group dedicated to producing valuable insights and research makes a lot of sense.
One point to think about, however, is the proposed organisational approach. Currently this has a notion of exclusivity. What’s missing in my view, are the contributions from the community. I like the idea from the GWG proposal, that one role of the committee is to function as a funnel for ideas, or a proxy for publications, responsible for coordination and prioritizations of contributions.

As pointed out by @Thomas_Hepner, I also think that methodologists should be welcomed to contribute to this. They have a lot of valuable knowledge and insight, plus it’s part of their role description. Therefore, a meaningful co-working environment should be the goal.

2 Likes
8

Thanks @Lavi, appreciate your comments.

I would disagree with this. The role of the IC is to understand the underlying tokens. Once someone does a deep dive on a particular token, it’s much easier for that person to maintain their knowledge and assess how news & events might affect that token. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel here, no need for multiple members of the community to do deep dives on same tokens.

That said, I think that IC meetings should be open forum and free for anyone to join. Similarly, if other members of the community want to get involved in analysis & research, they would certainly be encouraged to do so. We can have lead analysts and back-up analysts for each token, similar to how stock coverage is structured at most asset management firms. I think allowing content contributions from the community makes a lot of sense as well and something the IC can manage.

I’m also conscious of spreading our human capital resources too thin.

I would love to further understand the role of methodologists. If it’s within their mandate to publish research then there’s a clear area for collaboration that we can explore. However, I haven’t seen much research on the DPI product to date. Either way, happy to explore this further and see if there’s any interest on the methodologists side to get involved.

1 Like
10

Like the idea, but I think this should be done by the methodologists. An additional Investment Committee would be redundant.

11

Can you elaborate on why?

In TradFi, the comparison would be Standard & Poors having to provide investment research for anyone who runs an index against their benchmark. Which doesn’t happen.

12

Because I think the research papers can be done by owls without setting up a committee. I cant see the benefits of a dedicated committee at this stage.

Right now I think its more important to get the website in shape and update the INDEX Logo on CMC, gecko provide educational Content and explore L2-solutions.

13

I think that casually created content, outside of the Index Coop website, is not the most effective way of promoting the Coop. For example, we have limited educational resources on the site. So when people visit because of DPI there’s nothing there that would make them stay. Providing high-quality investment insights would add significant educational value. It will also let us establish relationships and connections in the space.

At the end of the day, we are a provider of structured index products. We invest people’s money. Only fair that we work to understand what that money is invested in.

2 Likes
14

I could see some short-term benefits out of this:

  1. Providing a platform to coordinate investment research efforts (which currently doesn’t exist)
  2. Having a more binding opportunity for dedicated community members to specialise in a specific topic/token
  3. Contributing to growth by publishing valuable information that can also be used for marketing purposes

And potential mid- to long-term benefits
4. Establishing Coop internal experts
5. Leveraging know-how to create educational material
6. Strengthen partnership with methodologists
7. Supporting meta-governance

2 Likes
15

I agree with @0x_Dev 's point regarding building a long-term sustainable mote. Research reports help build a nucleus of community members with DEEP industry knowledge. Reports and this level of analysis will help drive investor decision making while reinforcing Index’s lead in this marketspace.

16

@verto0912

I personally like the idea of utlilizing something like this for content marketing/research coming from Index Coop. I would be interested in funding something like this from the GWG on a recurring basis, idk if that is a structure that is interesting to you guys.

And perhaps this team would even kick off producing the initial content/research we identify for the site.

17

cheers @LemonadeAlpha

so I spoke with @Lavi earlier this week about types of content we could produce. This is what we thought would be easy wins off the bat (initial thoughts obviously) :

  • One-pager / short summary for each of the underlying tokens

  • Monthly “Notes from the Investment Committee” insights piece

  • Obviously a commentary on any significant token-related news AND a summary/recommendation for governance proposals for the underlying tokens where meta-governance is enabled

  • I’m keen on inviting one guest speaker a month to come and talk to the IC and we would publish a summary / key takeaways from that

  • The committee could also curate investment insights type of content from the community

The preference would be to publish all of this on the Index Coop website and kind of build it up as the centre for everything investment related. But I don’t have a strong view here. If people think Medium is a better platform, I’m okay with that.

Longer-term, we had a cool idea of making all of this stuff free for INDEX holders while charging a small fee from non-INDEX holders. With income accruing to the Treasury. Sort of what APY.vision does now.

Yes, let’s definitely have a chat about how the IC would fit with GWG and your guys focus. I think there is definitely room to turn some of this content into growth/marketing vehicles.

3 Likes