Yesterday, the newest Syndicate DAO launched on our platform—the Terra Ecosystem Incubator—an ecosystem fund and decentralized automated organization (DAO) enabling protocols and their communities to co-invest together in new projects.
Created by Terra, Delphi Labs, and IDEO CoLab Ventures, the Terra Ecosystem Incubator will provide grant funding to winners of Terra’s DeFi Connected Hackathon. The most promising projects will be invited to join an 11-week incubation program with Delphi and IDEO, and later on, the Terra community will have the opportunity to co-fund these projects via the Syndicate DAO.
Ecosystem Funds are just the second of many applications for Syndicate that are rolling out now and in the weeks ahead.
Empowering Ecosystems to Co-Fund Development
In the last year, protocol treasuries have grown exponentially. Uniswap’s is now over $5 billion. Compound’s is over $2 billion. Aave’s is over $1 billion. There are hundreds more and counting.
However, as protocol treasuries have grown, several new problems have emerged:
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Centralized: Protocol treasuries are massive, centralized pools of capital, managed by a one-size-fits-all governance process.
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Slow: Due to their centralized governance process, protocol treasuries aren’t as nimble or aggressive as they should be in funding the rapid development and build out of their ecosystems.
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Lack of Community Participation: When protocol treasuries fund new projects, their communities are unable to co-invest and participate with them.
But what if protocol treasuries were more decentralized—into a network of community-run ecosystem funds? What if each community-run ecosystem fund (backed by the protocol treasury) could have a different governance design and process, accelerating the funding and development of their ecosystems, globally? What if communities could co-invest alongside the protocol treasury and get directly involved in new projects?
We believe that this is the future of protocol treasuries: a decentralized network of transparently managed, community-run ecosystem funds sponsored by the protocol treasury—each accelerating in specific ways the rapid development of projects across its ecosystem, globally.
Protocols that decentralize their treasuries will develop faster than ones that do not. Community-run ecosystem funds backed by protocol treasuries will evolve to both disrupt and collaborate with VCs. And in the near future, more venture funding will come from protocol treasuries than VCs.
And all of this will be enabled at scale across the internet by DAOs.
Seeking Leading Protocol Treasuries
We’re pioneering state-of-the-art Decentralized Finance (DeFi), DAO, and cryptosocial technologies at Syndicate, and we’re applying them to democratize investing and bring radical new models for investing to the world that are more open, free, and fair.
If you’re at a leading protocol looking to accelerate the development of your ecosystem and want to empower more of your community to co-invest in its development, reach out to us.
We’re working with top protocol treasuries in the coming months to lead this change.