As I am based in Asia, I am not able to participate during any community or call discussions as they are in the middle of my night…
I have been chatting with Max and Ivan (both of Reserve team) as part of the user-feedback, and just finished writing feedback to Ivan and realized I prefer it to be seen on the forum as well.
It started around a conversation regarding CMC20, but as that is not related to this topic, please read those thoughts here.
A major concern which is holding me back at the moment to invest heavily into DTFs is the clear community vs team rift that is ongoing. Nevin and the team seem to be aware, but as a newcomer in the community, there are clear trust issues and accountability issues. I have seen plenty defeatism within communities during my 12 years in crypto, and this project currently has a lot of it within the ranks.
Big changes have to happen towards empowering community members, following the footsteps of many DeFi projects that have been able to create some working balance between shipping and a division of power. RSR has existed too long to still be in this kind of a centralized top down structure. It looks bad.
For someone to ‘set-and-forget’ their wealth into a CMC20 index, the underlying protocol has to be healthy and balanced. I know the team has runway, that is good. I know its been around for a long time, that is good too. But RSR is a gov token and Reserve is centralized and permissioned. That is bad.
My suggestions:
- Build out a permissionless Index Launching model with a separate tab for the (hopefully) 100s of small cap indexes being launched by users. And let the ones who gain over 100k TVL graduate to the main tabs.
- Initiate a delegate program for voted delegates who help steward the DTFs, thereby making votes and rebalances happen within 1-2 days, not 1-4. And giving it more address vote diversity compared to now.
- the team has years of runway, and an insane amount of treasury allocation. This overhang is bad for investor sentiment. If it would be burned outright, as I have seen many proposals suggest, the deflationary sink of burning RSR alongside usage of DTFs would start to become meaningful, creating a more attractive RSR token (mainly optical, but sadly just how investors work..)
Also, personally would have loved a Solana deployment. Would chose Solana over (semi) centralized BNB and centralized L2 Base any time. Also Wormhole has loads of wrapped tokens, so that would help the DTFs there, although this would create centralization risk again, but that would be up to the users who create DTFs.
Plus it would allow for the recent PreStock and xStock waves to be included within DTFs. A major new narrative which should not be underestimated.