Thanks to everyone who joined on Wednesday. Full recording is here: https://youtu.be/_HuAmPkJ5HE
Nevin covered the Q2 numbers, presented the revised RSR unlocking proposal, and took questions for the last forty minutes. Timestamps, a summary of each section, and the Q&A are all below.
Read this first if you hold RSR!
The revised RSR unlocking proposal goes to a vote, and there’s something you may need to do before it opens.
The vote opens Thursday, August 27 and closes Thursday, September 3.
Voting power is measured once, at the block the proposal is created on August 27. What you hold at that moment is what you vote with.
Your RSR counts wherever it’s held onchain — in your wallet, vote-locked as vlRSR, or staked as stRSR — across Ethereum, Base and BNB Chain. You don’t need to delegate to yourself, unstake, unlock, move anything between chains, or register. Voting is free; there’s no gas.
BUT: RSR held on an exchange cannot be counted. It sits in the exchange’s own wallet rather than yours, so there’s no way to attribute it to you. If your RSR is on an exchange and you want to vote, withdraw it to a wallet you control before August 27.
How the vote works
| Options | For / Against / Abstain |
| Passes if | For outweighs Against, and quorum is met |
| Quorum | 1,000,000,000 RSR. All three options count toward it |
| Window | Opens Thu Aug 27, closes Thu Sep 3 |
| Not voting | Confusion Capital, ABC Labs and Best Friend Finance. Nevin is also abstaining personally from this first vote |
Current and former team members who hold RSR personally are encouraged to vote.
To be explicit about what this is: it’s a Snapshot vote, so it isn’t cryptographically binding onchain, and the commitment to honour it is a pledge from Confusion Capital rather than a legal obligation. Nevin said so plainly on the call. What it does do is make the decision, and the result, public.
If the proposal is rejected, we go back to community deliberation on an alternative. As you deliberate, note that there’s another related RFC in flight right now.
Q2 call chapters
- 02:43 — Welcome and agenda
- 04:20 — Q2 ecosystem numbers
- 06:39 — How NARR is calculated
- 13:15 — Q2 figures, margins and RSR burn
- 21:06 — Treasury: cash runway, RSR runway, unlocked RSR
- 26:48 — The RSR unlocking proposal
- 36:36 — How the Snapshot vote works
- 47:33 — Reflections
- 50:01 — eUSD and Ugly Cash
- 55:27 — AI DTFs and the marketing problem
- 1:05:10 — New crypto DTFs and the agentic oracle network
- 1:11:31 — DeFi, tokenization and regulation
- 1:25:41 — Q&A
- 1:26:02 — Why isn’t a burn on the ballot?
- 1:34:57 — Due diligence on adding tokens to ETH+
- 1:36:50 — Attracting investors, the Clarity Act, and the price
- 1:49:54 — Status of the agentic AI DTF
- 1:51:28 — Institutional interest
- 1:58:49 — Exchange distribution and Venezuela
Q2 in numbers
April through June 2026.
| Q2 2026 | Change | |
|---|---|---|
| Total market cap | $46.7M | −63% QoQ |
| Gross revenue | $149.5K | −49% |
| Net revenue | −$154.1K | +74% |
| NARR | −$1.6M | from −$7.4M |
| Active DTFs | 18 | 14 Index / 4 Yield |
| RSR burn | 14.9M RSR (~$21.2K) | −58% |
| Treasury RSR | 0 bought, 0 sold | unchanged |
Most of these numbers are down, and that’s the plan described at the last quarterly call doing what it was meant to. We cut incentive spending to near zero, and the TVL that spending was renting left with it.
On NARR specifically: it improved from −$7.4M to −$1.6M because spending fell, not because revenue grew. Revenue fell too. Almost all of the remaining −$1.6M comes from two DTFs — CMC20 and ETH+ — where incentives were still winding down through Q1 and into Q2. Every other DTF combined would have been slightly positive. Those incentives are gone as of Q3.
Treasury disclosures, new this quarter:
- Cash runway: ~4.1 years, across Confusion Capital, ABC Labs and Best Friend Finance
- RSR runway: ~3.5 years
- Unlocked RSR: 6.4B, of which 1.4B is staked, vote-locked or in liquidity pools, leaving 5.0B non-utilized
The point of disclosing both runway figures: there is no short-term need to sell RSR to fund anything, and we haven’t.
From the reflections section
eUSD is now the highest-TVL token in the protocol, at about $22.5M — with no incentives behind it. That’s Ugly Cash. User balances there went from $784K when the revenue-share program was first proposed in June 2024 to $15.7M today. 10% of the yield on those balances goes to RSR stakers. eUSD overcollateralization is at 18%, down from roughly 100% at the start of the program — still a meaningful buffer, and an open conversation with eUSD stakers about the right split. ABC and Best Friend Finance are working on raising the underlying collateral yield from ~3.5% toward ~4.5% via Morpho, with technical blockers still to clear.
The AI DTFs are a mixed result. Product feedback from around 25 user interviews is positive — people respond to holding real underlying stocks through Ondo rather than synthetic exposure. The blocker is marketing. Reverse solicitation is legal in most places, but advertising, targeted campaigns and paid local promotion generally require the asset to be registered in that jurisdiction. Nevin was direct that Reserve launched before mapping this out, as a deliberate speed-over-certainty trade, and is now working through which markets allow a real demand test.
A decentralized agentic oracle network is in development. Node operators sample price and sentiment data, run formulaic or LLM-based processing, and post proposed baskets daily to a contract that aggregates them by median. It pairs with the optimistic proposal flow — the aggregator becomes a whitelisted proposer and token holders retain a veto. Currently running in a test environment. Built for one specific DTF, but reusable.
A new line of crypto DTFs is in development with a release expected soon.
On distribution: LCAP launched on Kraken and didn’t catch on… nor did Kraken’s own competing bundles product. Nevin’s read is that retail crypto index products don’t have product-market fit right now, and Coinbase would likely look the same. CMC20 has 21,000 favourites on CoinMarketCap, which now supports trading directly from the coin detail page.
Q&A
Why isn’t a burn on the ballot? — 1:26:02
Ateeb opened by noting there’s a strong community view in favour of burning some or all of the locked supply, and asked why that isn’t an option alongside the unlocking plan.
Nevin’s answer: no burn proposal he’s seen yet looks like it’s in the ecosystem’s interest. The test he applies is to take any chunk of RSR and ask whether more expected value comes from deleting it and reducing supply, or from deploying it to grow the project. There’s a point where deleting wins — when the project has real momentum and no further need for growth capital. We’re not at that point. There’s a healthy treasury and no need to sell RSR, but also no economic machine throwing off cash yet.
He also addressed the burn-now-mint-later variant: he understands the rationale, but a fixed upper bound on total RSR provides certainty that’s worth keeping, and he isn’t in favour of anything that allows unlimited future minting.
On the follow-up about whether the goal is token count or USD value: he agreed it’s the dollar value that matters. His position is that the price decline tracks the ecosystem’s actual performance plus a broad crypto bear market, and not treasury selling — there hasn’t been any, and in an earlier period Reserve was a net buyer. He does not believe a burn would raise the price, pointing to other projects that have tried it.
Attracting investors, the Clarity Act, and the price — 1:36:50
Cartier asked how RSR becomes attractive to larger investors given the chart. Nevin: RSR has a clear value-capture mechanism, but what sophisticated buyers look for is un-incentivized growth from real product-market fit, and that has to come first.
On the Clarity Act: any new regulation has trade-offs, and Reserve is far more exposed to whether it can build something people want than to how that bill lands.
On the price and the all-time high, he was candid about a past mistake: emitting tokens too slowly at the start produced very high per-token prices during 2020–2022 and left a lot of holders underwater. He’d change it if he could. He also declined the suggestion of getting a famous investor to talk publicly about RSR — speculative attention produces exactly the pattern that hurt holders last time. Asked whether he sells, he said he still holds 90%+ of the RSR he’s ever earned.
Status of the agentic AI DTF — 1:49:54
Development is going well; nodes are running in a test environment. Weeks from production-ready. Legal and strategic questions remain about the specific product, so no launch commitment yet… but the underlying oracle technology looks solid and will be available regardless.
Institutional interest — 1:51:28
On the buy side, there’s no channel yet: the US private-fund route is complex and expensive, and registered investment advisors overwhelmingly only want Bitcoin exposure. Reserve is looking for jurisdictions where institutions and high-net-worth investors can buy directly without registration overhead or tax disqualifiers.
On the Thiel/Erebor question, the answer generalizes: “the product needs to get product-market fit before any connections or institutions or whatever are going to come into play.” Put a product people don’t want on the best distribution platform available and nobody buys it.
Exchange distribution and Venezuela — 1:58:49
Ugly Cash has reopened in Venezuela as conditions changed. The AI DTFs aren’t available there yet because they’re on BNB Chain. On the broader “why isn’t this on Coinbase” question, see the LCAP/Kraken experience above.
What’s next
- Aug 27 — the Snapshot proposal goes live
- Sep 3 — voting closes. We’ll post the result and the turnout here, either way
- Questions about the mechanics are welcome in this thread — several have already been answered in @Raphael_Anode’s thread, which is worth reading if you’re unclear on how quorum or the options work.