Treasury Committee Notice: DPI KuCoin Listing

Finance Treasury
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Hey all,

Following IIP-27, KuCoin requires an additional 150k USDT loan in order to make a market for the DPI listing. In total, that means 150k USDT and 150k USD worth of DPI will be loaned to KuCoin market makers under the same terms laid out in IIP-27.

Here are our next steps:

The Exchange Listing wallet currently holds 60k USD worth of INDEX. The Treasury Committee will send an additional 200k USD worth of INDEX to the Exchange Listing wallet. The Exchange Listing team will handle conversion of the INDEX to USDT however they wish and complete the listing process.

UPDATE:
The Exchange Listing Wallet has been funded as per above. You can view the transaction here.

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I’ll be honest here, I am all for the attaining an exchange listing and improving how we forecast our costs. However, I am concerned that these costs are emerging and the level of visibility around them.

I see this post as highlighting shortfalls in our forecasting and identifying areas we can improve.

My understanding from start to finish here, is GWG received $100K (bottom snippet) which was to allocated towards exchange listings, Apr-June period. Then IIP-27 emerged requesting $200K and now we have an additional cost increase. These 3 events occur within a 6 wks period and the KuCoin listing is not new.

Questions:

What changed been GWG budget proposal (11/03/2021) to IIP-27 (02/04/2021) and now today ?

  • GWG Budget 100K

  • IIP-27 200K DPI approved, this post reduced to 150K DPI

  • This post additional 150K USDT

  • Exchange Listed Wallet Address Balance $356K +$150K more 13hrs ago.

Easy question - is KuCoin giving Index Coop back the 50K left over from IIP-27 ?

I am of the opinion that all these costs should have been thought through and budgeted for when the working group proposal was submitted requesting funding. We need to improve in this area.

I understand things change. The way to communicate this is by defining deliverables and assigning a cost in more detail. Then when the deliverables change, there is justification for cost/budget changes.

We need our working group funding requests to have more detailed costing data.
Change is fine, but known costs should be defined clearly and then an allowance can be made for unknown expenses.

There is currently had $356K in the Exchange List Wallet address, has now received $150K, how does that decision making process go …

This wallet looks well funded already. Sell $50K DPI, use $100K GWG exchange budget - done. No more funds needed. This circles back to the above point, what does the GWG $100K cover and how it is different to KuCoin.

$200K DPI and $307K INDEX.
KuCoin listing $300K all up ??
GWG budget excl. exchange listings $300K

My assumption here is that this post feels a bit rushed and therefore is lacking some of the details. So I think someone closer to the topic can outline in a bit more detail how all this capital is being assigned - that would be great for the DAO to have that level of visibility.

IIP-27 Wallet Address - 0x154c154c589b4aeccbf186fb8bc668cd7c213762

DPI Transaction

Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 12.46.16
Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 12.46.162788×650 107 KB

INDEX Transaction

Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 12.51.23
Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 12.51.232760×550 83.7 KB

Combined Value

Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 12.49.00
Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 12.49.001384×524 36.2 KB

GWG Funding Proposal

Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 12.30.20
Screenshot 2021-04-27 at 12.30.201390×452 22.2 KB

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Matthew Graham made excellent points above and I share many of the same concerns/questions.

It might help a lot if the GWG would help shed some light on the events that happened, and where the need for the extra funds come from. It seems like it was a lack of transparency from Kucoin’s side, but more info on this would be appreciated.

I want to also reiterate Matthew’s point that we need our working group funding requests to have more detailed costing data and breakdowns to help the treasury team know exactly what funds are being used for, with provisions in mind for possible extra costs if any.

We are always striving for more transparency, and part of this process would also be evaluations on whether the Kucoin listing would still be justified given all the new costs. I believe it still would be justified, but in my opinion that conversation should have taken place.
We should always be mindful of the cost vs benefit of any process we engage in.

It would be great if GWG can help provide more clarity on this issue, answer the questions around it, and explain what happened, as this will help us all learn from what happened and improve our processes to prevent something like this from happening again.

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Hey all, you guys raise good objections. I’ll provide the extra color I can here on the Treasury Committee side and @reganbozman can give us some more insight on the KuCoin side.

Some answers:

  1. The DPI and USDT being sent to KuCoin is strictly a loan . Half of the loaned amount is to be returned to the Community Treasury after 6 months. The remaining half is to be returned after 12 months. Any other funds left over/not used in the DPI market making will be returned to the Community Treasury.
  2. The quantity required by KuCoin is 150k USD worth of DPI and USDT. 200k USD worth of DPI and 200k USD worth of INDEX was sent to the Exchange Listing wallet to account for any price volatility before the KuCoin listing is complete.
  3. The Exchange Listings portion of the GWG budget is meant to cover exchange listing fees, market making fees, costs for legal opinions, and marketing. More details here.
  4. DPI has rallied considerably in the past 24 hours. When the funding was being considered yesterday the USD value of DPI in the Exchange Listing wallet was close to 185k USD. The INDEX value was close to 60k USD. Even if the INDEX + DPI was sold for USDT, we would not have reached the required 150k USDT.

Some thoughts:

Process and accountability
We should likely tolerate lower levels of transparency in specific working groups, and expect higher levels of transparency from higher level budgeting organizations. In turn we should also expect higher levels of flexibility in specific working groups and lower levels of flexibility in budgeting organizations. It strikes me as odd to request the GWG provide a loan to the Exchange Listing wallet in response to KuCoin, but in retrospect I think that would have made the most sense.

I agree a lack of transparency around this process makes the job of forecasting and budgeting for the Index Coop more difficult. In a bull market some of this less careful behavior is OK, but I agree that it undermines our efforts to build a sturdy ship to float during a bear market.

If it’s any reassurance from a process oversight perspective, I proposed the above solution and received consent from other members of the Treasury Committee (@anon10525910 & @DarkForestCapital) before moving forward.

The IIP-27 vs. this funding process
No one asked this, but I thought it would be good to clarify: the DPI loan required an IIP because the funds being requested were in the Community Treasury. The INDEX loan above did not require an IIP because the funds being requested are under the control of the Treasury Committee. One of the goals of the IIP process is that any request of funds from the Community Treasury must be attached to an IIP.

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Thanks, Dylan. @reganbozman apologies if I have missed this anywhere I’m sure safeguards are in place on these loan aspects but just for my understanding could you provide some context here?

  1. What contractual agreements are in place on the loans?
  2. Is a form of collateral necessary, warranted/possible in anyone’s view? (Context: From my tradfi days we required min 105% collateral with daily margin calls marked to market. And that was lending blue-chip stocks to blue-chip investment banks!)
  3. As there is no legal entity of Index to speak of, what recourse options do we hold if any, in the event of exchange default/hack/regulatory event etc

And lastly, just on the sale to USDT, do we have/need procedures in place for such transactions? To ensure best execution, value etc?

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Hi all - these are great concerns that are raised. These highlight a few issues that I think should be examined more in depth.

These are the line items for the KuCoin listing.

-$100K listing fee (USDT)
-$50K marketing budget (DPI) PAID
-$150K liquidity deposit (USDT) (loan)
-$150K liquidity deposit (DPI) (loan)

The confusion here is a direct result of our treasury currently being made up mostly of INDEX. This drastically reduces our ability to forecast future expenses because we are exposed to daily price-volatility.

With that said -Exchange Listings has spent almost nothing for the last 6 months. Outside of our expenditure on the legal opinion and the Bitmart listing we have not used the funds in that wallet. @reganbozman and myself have turned down 10+ Tier 2/3 exchanges due to high listing fees.

@Matthew_Graham makes a great point about forecasting and highlighting these expenses. We spent 5+ weeks negotiating with KuCoin to reach the final number for this listing. I’m happy with the result of these negotiations but also recognize that we need to do a better job of highlighting these expenses as they emerged on KuCoin’s end.

This is a huge opportunity for us to level up as a community - we are all on the same team here. @Matthew_Graham and @ggraham1 want Index Coop to succeed just as much as I do. These points would not be raised if there was not some confusion. Lets use the questions raised to improve how we forecast and communicate expenses moving forward.

We need to work more closely with the treasury committee to build a detailed three month budget forecast for BD activities and publish that to this forum for discussion and review.

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This is all totally valid feedback - this request for a loan should have come in IIP 27 but I prematurely asked for those funds before realizing the full extent of our obligations - that is on me.

This has gotten more expensive than I would’ve hoped but some of these costs (like loans to market makers) are inevitable and were always going to come up. The truth is that we do not have the upper hand in conversations with exchanges - DPI does not have the brand cache as YFI, nor the trading volumes. So while I fully believe these exchange listings are valuable strategically, we are a bit beholden to the exchanges.

We 100% should develop procedures here. I was going to get a quote from GSR (major OTC desk) and leverage them for liquidation.

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Totally agree! Building/working in the open is something I would like to see more. For example, I would love to have more visibility over the negotiations that took place with KuCoin and how we arrived at the final numbers.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic with my example, but I feel we should always be pushing for more openness and transparency.

Thank you @BigSky7 and @dylan for the great clarification.

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I am all for transparency but I don’t think it’s feasible for us to do large deals like this in the open. We were required to sign an NDA as part of negotiations (which is quite standard) and these exchanges understandably don’t want all of their specific pricing out in the public

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I totally understand that when we interface with centralized companies some transparency is thrown out of the window. Maybe a brief summary can be produced without breaching the NDA?

This is a great opportunity to look around for opportunities to be more transparent.

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