Im responding to comments like this and trying to ease a few minds. Comments like this are uncalled for.
Whatever route we go we will be fine as the market matures. If it costs a bit to stick around so be it. If you want solutions perhaps it could start by getting rid of that ‘we don’t trust you’ energy. Some people do care about the future and know things take a bit of suffering. That rhetoric has to stop.
Getting back onto the topic of the release plan…
Say that the AI DTF plan is a hit, and within months it has reached $7 billion market cap.
Using CMC20 as a benchmark in terms of minting and arbitrage (and ignoring inevitable price movements), the protocol could be burning 7 billion RSR a month.
All fine and dandy, and let’s remember that the burns are initiated manually, so no great concern.
But my thinking is this: send all “Burn RSR” to a locked smart contract with a hard-coded annual release wallet, rather than a burn address.
And allow that wallet to release up to 2 billion RSR a year (on Christmas Day, why not), to the Reserve Foundation, to use as you please.
Net result: inflation of 2% a year against maximum supply. Actual result, RSR is sent to that wallet constantly, locked up, equivalent to being burned from supply, but with a 2bn release (no rollover) a year, to be used as the Foundation wants.
I thought about complicating it with NARR calculations, but after that rabbit hole, realized it’s a simple 2% inflation a year against the supply, yet effectively an infinite supply each year to Reserve (assuming success with DTFs).
The roadmap going slow, well… 2% of supply still puts something in the bank. The protocol going very well… It scales to the size you probably might need for the next stage.
Investors can calculate that release into their forecasts (and consider it to all intents and purposes burned or thrown off way into the future), it’s a fixed amount (and inflation itself isn’t bad at 2%), yet the Foundation always gets up to 2 billion a year, and it’s effectively forever. RSR keeps continually getting recycled, rather than burned. It also aligns all stakeholders together - price becomes a metric, but one that scales with protocol success.
You have a recurring (effectively infinite) runway, 2 billion RSR a year, yet increased supply is capped at 2% a year.
If RSR is valuable, the tank never gets filled to 2bn a year. But that’s okay, and you get a good $$ amount. If RSR is not valuable, you’re probably getting the full amount of it, but its only worth what the market values it at.
The downside is if there’s no success in DTFs, and less than 2bn RSR gets locked away. That’s still not the worst outcome: while take-up is poor, there’s still a supply of funds to turn things around. In a bad moment, there’s runway and still relatively aligned incentives.
But you get a reliable-ish runway, and investors get a reliable inflation amount, with zero uncertainty.
This is a bit of a brain fart of an idea, one I’m not sold on. But it’s one that keeps RSR circulating, while also locking it away, while also releasing it to the team who need it, while aligning incentives for all parties.
TLDR:
Up to 2bn RSR can be released per year, with no rollover. Everything above that remains locked.
The better DTFs perform, the stronger the Foundation’s funding base becomes, but token-holder dilution remains predictable.
I am all for this conversation.
What I do not stand for is acting like people can’t be trusted, or that Nevins journey isn’t authentic.
Let me cut through the bs.
I’ve been reading through the debate on the milestone proposal, and I think it’s important we take a step back. I hear the concerns about dilution loud and clear—it’s valid to demand accountability for how treasury resources are managed, but I’m worried we’re currently debating the ‘tokenomics’ of 2026 while ignoring the financial infrastructure of 2036.
A lot of the current tension assumes that the financial systems we have today are the ones we’ll be using in ten years. I’m not convinced that’s true. We are optimizing for a local maximum—solving for today’s market psychology—when the industry itself is shifting under our feet.
For a long time, the dogma in crypto has been ‘Open Source = Trust.’
I believe we are moving toward a world where ‘Performance + Accountability = Trust.’
Think about it: We are entering an era where the most valuable asset isn’t a stock or a token; itll be the intelligence system that decides how to allocate capital.
If we frame Reserve correctly, it isn’t just a protocol with products—it’s a capital allocation engine.
The token emissions being discussed are not just ‘dilution’; they are the necessary fuel to build the factory that will define the next decade of finance. We aren’t just building baskets of assets; we are building the infrastructure that will host the AI allocators of the future.
However you have to optimize for this? Do it.
Just do not set things in stone like what we see now has anything to do with how the landscape will look down the road.
The market will eventually care less about seeing every line of code and more about verifiable performance records. The allocator itself becomes the moat; the decision engine becomes the asset.
My fear is that if we optimize too aggressively for the ‘disgruntled retail’ sentiment of today, we might accidentally handicap the protocol’s ability to pivot into this future. The greatest risk in an emerging industry isn’t making the wrong decision—it’s being overly confident about what the future requires before it has even revealed itself.
Let’s focus less on protecting the RSR of 2026 and more on building the infrastructure that makes Reserve the indispensable settlement and governance layer for the intelligence-driven markets of 2036.
If AI eventually democratizes high-quality capital allocation, wealth won’t concentrate in the assets themselves; it will concentrate in the layers that orchestrate, govern, and guarantee the trust of those intelligence systems.
Value moves from the capability itself to the platform that provides the accountability and trust required to deploy it. In this future, the goal isn’t to stop RSR from entering the market—the goal is to ensure that every RSR token that enters the market is immediately utilized to secure, govern, or power a high-performance AI agent.
If we build this correctly, the market will stop seeing RSR as a ‘share’ that can be diluted and start seeing it as the right to command the most intelligent capital allocation engine in the world. In that world, concern about dilution is replaced by competition for influence over the allocator.
Ultimately, we have to recognize that the laws of the financial system—like the recent shifts toward clear, digital-asset-friendly frameworks—are finally being written to allow the ‘plumbing’ of finance to be fully digitized.
Once that plumbing is in place, the ‘intelligence’ (your AI agents) will be the ones that decide how the water flows.
The laws are essentially building the tracks, and we are the ones designing the engine. We need to be ready to run.
Many thanks for trying to get this discussion back on topic and on track again. To be honest it is sometimes difficult to wade through some of the other recent contributions that either seem AI-driven and/or off-topic altogether.
Think your suggestion is very interesting and deserves serious consideration. Did have one question: when your suggested way forward would be implemented, would that mean there is no need anymore for (the majority of) the current locked supply? I mean, if I understand correctly, you are proposing to create a ‘self-sustaining’ system where yearly unlocked RSR to fund upcoming initiatives is fully ‘financed’ by the success of DTFs. I could see that some of the current slow/slower wallet-based locked RSR is sent initially to the smart contract you propose to kick it off and ensure there is sufficient locked RSR for, say, the first one or two years. But other than that, what would you need the current (majority of the) locked supply for?
I sorry, but I have once again absolutely no idea what you are saying and contributing. It does not at all make sense to me and from what I gather from the reponses to your earlier contributions I am not the only one. It would be beneficial for you and for all of us if you can stick to the topic of this thread and make your point in a clear and concise manner - right now it is more disturbing the discussion than enriching it.
Agree with @R72. Need to get back to substance.
I’ll put my point more directly and clarify what I was trying to get at earlier.
I do think there are valid concerns in this thread. Questions about dilution, unlock mechanics, treasury visibility, reporting, and accountability are fair. Holders should absolutely pressure-test those things.
What concerns me is when skepticism turns into default cynicism.
A skeptical person asks whether a decision creates long-term value. That is healthy.
A cynical person assumes bad faith and interprets every difficult decision through that lens. That is not healthy, and we can do better.
This matters because the quality of the discussion affects the quality of governance. Comments suggesting the team is funding themselves at holders’ expense, that leadership is incompetent, that every unlock is a hidden dump, or that every hard decision is evidence of bad faith do not improve the proposal. They make the room less capable of thinking clearly.
The uncomfortable truth is that successful organizations are rarely built by consensus. If consensus already knew the right answer, there would be no opportunity.
Decentralization is the goal, but premature decentralization can easily become short-termism with a governance label attached to it.
Reserve is still building in an early market. In that environment, leadership, discretion, and patience matter. Locking every strategic decision too tightly too early can also create risk. If the market changes six months from now and the plan needs to adapt, people may treat that adjustment as another broken promise.
The better path is to ask for clearer mechanics: stronger reporting, better dashboards, treasury visibility, milestone discipline, and more explanation around how RSR usage supports long-term RSR health.
So my position is not “ignore holders.”
It is: hold leadership accountable, but do not let distrust become the default operating system.
And furthermore, some people don’t know better, others are capable of stepping up and addressing it.
You’re doing it again. This thread is about a Reserve proposal/proposed direction how to deal with unlocks. You manage to constantly share seemingly random observations and generic statements that at best have a distant link to the topic but mostly don’t make sense at all. It is becoming quite annoying to be honest. Is anyone moderating this thread/forum? If so, please consider how keep the discussion on topic instead of allowing ever-increasing paragraphs in here of either poorly generated AI texts or consistent unsuccessful attempts to meaningfully contribute to the thread’s topic.
The way you are addressing this is part of the issue. The only battleground for resolve is your mind, not this thread. We can moderate ourselves.
I really spoke about two main issues, both had much to do with the proposals.
If you don’t understood, ask.
The first thing was…
Community is better off proposing and voting as a collective, in confidence, and in trust. But if we can’t discuss unlocks or proposals without defaulting to distrust and accusation, then no unlock or proposal will feel ever legitimate. Nothing will ever be good enough. If you had to address similar nonsense about you, as the Founder, how long could you hold up and keep talking to those same folks in the community? That disrupts the goal. To get the most out of these discussions from the top down that rhetoric has to stop.
Check this thread alone. 1 out of every 2.5/3 posts are negative, 30% of the posts spread some form of negativity, mistrust, impatience, or dismissiveness.
If you want participation and focus @R72 from top to bottom, this is something worthy of annoyance, and worth addressing.
That energy isn’t welcome.
My second point is simple, vague, though I can see why you could use clarity.
Capping the USD value of the unlock changes the purpose of the unlock. The proposal is milestone based. A hard USD cap could underfund the very phase the milestone is meant to unlock.
A USD cap today also assumes we know what Reserve will need across that whole future period. That is a weak assumption in an early market. Early markets don’t work that way. If the market changes quickly and tokenized assets accelerate, or AI-driven capital allocation becomes real, we may need that capital tomorrow, at least the access to it.
A cap can also punish our success. If RSR price rises, the cap unlocks fewer tokens. The better the market gets, or if we get more opportunities, we end up suffering the more constrained the project becomes.
The same applies to burning, especially burning.
A burn gives short-term certainty but it permanently removes strategic capacity. Is this too AI-ish? Strategic capacity is capital, we can’t just burn money. This project may need those tokens for liquidity, integrations, incentives, partnerships, governance distribution, we won’t be able to if they’re gone.
Burning 30B is even crazier. Absolutely insane.
If we are considering proposals, reconsider burning. A burn helps if you believe the tokens will never produce more value than removing them. But if those tokens can capture a larger part of an existing market down the road, burning them destroys upside
The more ambitious the project, the more valuable flexibility becomes.
If you need clarity DM me.
You’re a good man, but the world is getting weary of AI-smoothed paragraphs. They drown out honest points into a sea of mediocrity.
Just use your thoughts, original, clunky, typo-filled. That’s a true community of voices.
Thanks Smeddy. Likewise Brother.
Using these systems for 18 hours a day can do that.
I’ll keep my messages short unless they’re directly relevant to the room topic.
Founders should do the steering through early company formation.
Centralize the vision, decentralize adoption.
Prior to escape velocity, strategic calls prior to PMF should stay with the people that would be held accountable if things didn’t pan out. Down the road we can slowly decentralize different aspects more. Article at the bottom.
We can’t have people demanding things like major burns. Much of that is desperation and guess work. You can’t possibly understand Reserve thinking that would be wise.
Cronos already ran this experiment in 2021 when they burned 70 of their 100B tokens. It was great for the community until 2025, when opportunity came along and the burn turned out to hold the company back. It was bad enough they minted back the 70B against the communities wishes. They minted them and put them into their “Cronos Strategic Reserve” where they should’ve stayed all along.
The cost of burning early will almost always end up a debt you pay for later.
Let this be a lesson learned that luckily, we didn’t have to experience firsthand.
Here’s an article about the 3 components of crypto success.
Voting yes, with one modification worth discussing.
The direction is right. Tying unlocks to NARR is the correct move and the Q1 reporting format gives this the infrastructure to be credible. No issue there.
There’s a problem, though. The X amount of RSR unlock is denominated in tokens.
3B tokens at RSR = $0.003 = $9M.
At RSR = $0.10 = $300M.
The project’s operational needs at Milestone 1 don’t vary by 33x. The token count does. That’s a structural inconsistency IMO.
My fix: dual cap.
Set two limits at once: a maximum number of tokens and a maximum dollar value. Whichever is more restrictive at the moment of trigger, applies. Both run in parallel, no team discretion at execution.
The USD cap shouldn’t be a number I or anyone else proposes arbitrarily. It should come from Confusion Capital publishing a detailed operational budget for the period between Milestone 1 and Milestone 2, justified line by line and open to community discussion before the RFC is finalized.
The token cap exists as a hard ceiling for bear market scenarios where a pure USD denominator would let the team accumulate unlimited supply. The operational budget is the anchor. The token cap is the floor protection.
In a bull market the dollar cap kicks in and fewer tokens unlock than your proposal would allow. In a bear market the token cap prevents the team from accumulating unlimited supply to cover a fixed dollar amount. Either way the release stays bounded by what the project can actually justify spending.
Beyond the cap, unlock and distribution need to be separated structurally. Right now the proposal treats them as one event governed by comms. “Strategically over one to two years” is not a commitment. Unlocked RSR should enter a release contract with a fixed monthly ceiling, unused allocation moving to a governance-gated buffer and anything left at month 19 burned automatically. The team keeps full discretion over what to do with the tokens. They lose discretion over how fast supply enters circulation and that’s the variable holders can’t observe.
On the deviation clause: keep it but gate it with an onchain vote, 15% staking quorum and 66% supermajority. If a deal requires confidentiality, sealed vote with mandatory disclosure within 30 days.
To be clear about what I’m not proposing: no burn, no price trigger on the milestone.
The monthly release rate and the governance parameters are all negotiable. The principle of separating unlock from distribution isn’t.
Yes, with the above.
LOL WHERE IS TEAM AND @nevin.freeman kinda funny at this point that the whole giga project just turned out to be just another liquidity suck from retail
Hi @fortis We continue to read the forum comments and take them into account as we work toward defining the best proposal, one that reflects as many voices as possible.
I believe the concern regarding the USD amount represented by the unlock is valid. However, as I mentioned previously, we also have obligations denominated in RSR, so this must be taken into account as well.
I just wonder, so the thesis for $RSR was always to fight inflation that was the big plot. What was going through Nevin head and Team as well when you 1. Started diluting the token HARD, 2. Knew you have some obligations to non retail investors and that you have to release tokens to them so it will automatically inflate the token. 3. Structured relationships the way that its a one way street “obligations denominated in RSR” 4. Had no mechanics in place aka burns as example to off set the dilution. 5. Had no plan to onboard real value as in institutional investors and relied only on hype and hope that retail will pick this up. 6. In a mean time your actions is the exact reason retail bailed out and suffered so much. And lets not start this non sense its bear market bro. Yes it is. But from the get go, it’s deceiving to push the inflation pitch while at the same time inflating the core product that supposed to fight inflation. $RSR
This is what strong teams are doing. Read carefully @nevin.freeman and Team
Raised 65 million dollars
@Fortis appreciate the share on VVV, but respectfully disagree. Here is why…
Tokens without ownership and enforceability are increasingly uninvestable.
Here is the correct take on VVV:
Similar situation at EtherFi:
Dual equity/token structures mean value funded by token holders can leak to the equity holders. And you end up with situations like Circle acquiring Axelar’s team and IP, leaving AXL holders out. Coinbase acquiring Vector.fun while TNSR holders were left with souvenir coins.
Its a massive problem in token projects right now, very few are investable.
Its also why you are seeing the rise of ownership, transparency and enforceability frameworks like Blockworks TTF, Aragon OTF and DefiLlama TRF (Lido example). Sadly, RSR isn’t listed in any (yet).
But there are plenty of examples of healthy public/liquid token investment deals that prevent value leakage, align core teams with the token, and furthermore send a big market signal of belief in the product strategy:
Paradigm, a16z and Ribbit Capital acquire $175M of $MORPHO, Jun 2026. https://morpho.org/blog/morpho-association-raises-175m-to-build-the-open-credit-network-for-the-world/
Paradigm, Variant and 6th Man acquire $10M of MetaDAO (META), Oct 2025. Felipe Montealegre on X: "Unbelievable outcome — 6MV, Variant, and Paradigm have contributed $9.9M to MetaDAO at spot. The team has everything it needs to lead the market out of the narrative sloplands of futility tokens and into the cash flowing promise lands of ownership tokens. Futardio." / X
Imo the new Reserve DTF strategy is genuinely exciting and the re-orged/focused team’s productivity has been impressive. It might be the perfect storm of right product, right place, right time and hopefully “surround sound awareness/distribution.”
RSR health is still a question mark but adding new institutional RSR holders could help nudge in the right direction and be very strong validation for the ecosystem growth. NARR gated unlocks make sense but they dont fundamentally address RSR health.
Adding RSR to the transparency/ownership frameworks would be nice easy additions as well.
But in respect to the busy product team, understand Rome wasnt (re)built in a day.
Slop time, even though calling it “AI slop” is silly. The argument either has substance or it doesn’t. The thoughts are your own or they’re not. Unfortunately, I think some people are threatened by the tool for whatever reason.
And @Smeddy, you know I love you brother, but if you prefer humans do the work, book a consultation with me unless your scaling days are done 
Here’s my argument though.
Founders need tokens on deck, and they need cash on deck. If some of that cash is sitting there waiting to fund future infrastructure, consider that before demanding complete clarity. Sometimes people know things you don’t, and revealing exactly where that money is or may go isn’t necessarily in their best interest. Sometimes it’s simply bad timing. Speak too early and you can bury yourself.
Trust matters, and transparency matters, but distrust shouldn’t be treated as intelligence in itself. Whenever I see distrust treated almost as a virtue, I start questioning the person doing the distrusting.
But putting that aside, your argument is interesting. I still very much disagree with the conclusion.
You’re absolutely right that value leakage is a real problem. If tokenholders finance and create the network effect while a separate company can capture the IP, customers, revenue, team or other productive assets, leaving tokenholders with an economically hollow token, that’s bad architecture.
Ownership, transparency and enforceability frameworks are useful precisely because they expose that risk.
Where I think you go too far is drawing the conclusion:
“Tokens without ownership and enforceability are increasingly uninvestable.”
I think that assumes we already know what a token is supposed to become.
We don’t.
You’re applying a framework that makes enormous sense for securities. A business creates economic value, therefore the investor needs an enforceable claim against that value.
But not every valuable token needs to become synthetic equity.
Bitcoin doesn’t derive its value from an enforceable claim against Bitcoin Inc. ETH doesn’t need a dividend from the Ethereum Foundation. Commodities don’t require ownership of the companies using them.
A token can become valuable because it is necessary to access, secure, govern, collateralize or coordinate an increasingly valuable network.
VVV is interesting precisely because Venice is experimenting with this distinction. Revenue can create VVV buy and burn demand, while staking VVV produces DIEM, and DIEM represents persistent inference capacity.
That doesn’t make VVV Venice equity.
It means the relevant question is whether Venice’s growth makes VVV increasingly economically necessary.
If Venice becomes a $50B company while VVV can be bypassed and none of that activity creates meaningful demand for VVV, then your criticism wins. Absolutely.
But if Venice grows into enormous AI infrastructure and increasing usage structurally requires or economically benefits VVV/DIEM, then judging VVV primarily by the absence of equity style ownership is measuring the wrong thing.
And even the ownership distinction isn’t as binary as it appears.
Tokenholders can collectively control treasuries. Treasuries can own productive assets. Multisigs and governance systems can control capital. Smart contracts can enforce how revenue and assets are handled.
So I don’t think the destination is necessarily making tokens resemble shares.
I think the much bigger destination is making ownership itself programmable.
That brings me to Reserve and the constant claim that Reserve needs PMF. PMF with what?
Crypto today is intensely tribal. Most people aren’t coming into crypto saying, “Give me a diversified basket of the crypto economy.” They want BTC because they believe in Bitcoin. ETH because they believe in Ethereum. SOL, XRP, RSR, whatever it happens to be. That psychology is almost the opposite of the psychology that made index investing enormous in traditional finance.
And tokenized stocks aren’t enough to answer the question either. We’re extraordinarily early.
Regulation isn’t settled. Distribution isn’t settled. Market structure isn’t settled. Mainstream users barely understand tokenization, let alone why they would replace their existing brokerage account with a tokenized portfolio.
So when we talk about Reserve needing PMF, I think we need to distinguish a product finding users today from the underlying primitive finding its ultimate market. Those are completely different things.
The potential index market is vastly larger than “crypto indexes” looked at as modernized versions of old ETFs.
Stocks, bonds, commodities, credit, real estate, currencies, crypto, compute, intellectual property and eventually entirely new forms of tokenized productive assets can all become programmable.
Then add AI and ask yourself:
Why would tomorrow’s “index” even need to resemble today’s index?
That’s why declaring what does or doesn’t have PMF right now misses how early we are.
Most people have absolutely no idea where this industry is going. Neither do I with certainty. But there’s a difference between claiming certainty and recognizing convergence.
Blockchain, AI, tokenization, autonomous agents, programmable ownership and global capital markets are beginning to collide.
Some things can be learned at university.
Some can be learned inside corporations.
Some can be derived from financial models.
But recognizing where several seemingly unrelated systems are converging before the resulting category even exists is a different ability entirely. Some people naturally see those patterns earlier than others.
Mind you, I agree that tokenholder protection needs to improve.
I agree that value leakage is real.
I also agree that transparency and enforceability are valuable.
Where we disagree is that I don’t think the solution is necessarily to make tokens increasingly resemble equity.
I think we’re still discovering what programmable ownership actually means, and I suspect AI is going to make the answer look considerably stranger [and considerably larger] than the way we’ve been used to evaluating and understanding the financial structures and markets of yesterday.
