Proposal for Creating a Token

Community Governance
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Background

Community sentiment towards creating a token is very high. We are also in need of some urgent action to be able to provide short-term and long-term liquidity for grain.

Proposal

  • Launch Grain as a free-floating ERC-20 token (on-chain grain) with variable supply minting and burning functionality (i.e. no hard cap on supply, allowing us flexibility to mint more grain down the line if needed).
  • The token minting will be technically controlled by the existing SourceCred Multi-Sig, but will be governed by SourceCred Core, or whatever governance body/mechanism SourceCred Core may choose to delegate/defer to.
  • Anyone can sell grain from their sourcecred instance ledger balance (instance-grain) in exchange for an equivalent amount of on-chain grain.
  • For now, our funding will only be used to purchase instance-grain as describe in this proposal up to $1USD. Our funding will not be used to buyback on-chain grain for now.

Effects and Benefits

  • The ability to convert instance-grain into on-chain grain on request allows folks like DL to lock in their commitment to not eat up our current funding, allowing us to have a clearer picture of what kind of short-term liquidity we can provide.
  • The convert-on-request model is also important because we do not have a viable Eth address for contributors, nor a good way to mass collect them.
  • The proposed parameters of the token leave all the doors open for changing minting terms and building additional infrastructure, so that we retain the power to choose more deliberately.
  • ERC-20 is easier to use and easier to learn about than side-chains such as xDai. Although gas fees are high, L2s will soon address the problems with Eth mainnet, and our ERC-20 token will be compatible with L2 functionality. We will even be able to use 1hive tools like Gardens using L2s, in the future.
  • The urgent creation of a token has the possibility of creating additional liquidity, since the creation of some infrastructure like liquidity pools is permissionless. This means on-chain grain might open up more short-term liquidity with no additional effort on our part, even potentially to the point of being more attractive than our up-to-$1 instance-grain liquidity.

Plan to propose

This will be proposed at the Emergency Core Meeting today if there’s time, or next Tuesday otherwise.

Thanks @s_ben for helping draft this.

6 Likes
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Just as an aside, 1hive has a bot that when you submit your eth address it confirms it without publicly displaying it… sorry if I’m off topic but I am looking into it because I want to replace our current google poll model. Should I stop looking into this because we won’t need it with this new proposal?

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Collecting ETH addresses is something we’re going to need to do anyway eventually. E.g. if we decide to do an airdrop (note: not a current plan). And even if we just continue our current policies, a bot sounds better than a google form. Not required for current proposal I guess, but something that would be good to move forward on anyway.

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:thinking: I was wondering at what stage we would want to do this.

I can throw together a spreadsheet to house wallet details so we have the thing and it’s ready when we need it if that’s desired.

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The form for opting in (fill out if you haven’t already and want to move your Grain on-chain!) has a neat feature where you can send responses to a google sheet, so we got that covered. If you want you could help with verifying the submissions (just DM me if interested!).

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Are we ready to talk about a governance Token yet? :wink: