Requesting Index Coop Support For Products After Launch
After launching a product, the Index Coop has resources at its disposal to continue the growth of a product. It is important to provide a framework as to how we can best support that development. Currently we divide the four post-launch activities into: liquidity mining, marketing support, internal productivity, and external productivity.
Liquidity mining and external productivity will be external proposals driven by requirements that the Methodologist recognizes and pitches. Marketing and intrinsic productivity will be internal proposals driven by community members when most strategic.
There are two cases in which liquidity mining may be considered for a product:
- 1.Increased secondary market liquidity is a necessary precondition for the product to exist.
- 2.There are growth, distribution, marketing, or persona related reasons why we would wish for further liquidity.
A good example for #1 would be a product like the DeFi Pulse Index. Primary market minting is extraordinarily hard as it requires a user to gather all the component pieces at the right proportions and pay a gas fee to get it minted. Having a secondary market structure letting users gain the product through a simple Uniswap transaction was a necessity. Furthermore, because the biggest users of DeFi are whales, maintaining a liquidity pool that is large enough to provide low slippage for big purchases led the community to continue a liquidity mining program.
For Methodologists pursuing option #1, the requirements and expectations for a needed liquidity mining program must be specified inside of the proposals and implementation will occur after the proposal is passed. The Methodologists may request different levels of support (ideally x% program, minimum y%).
A good example for option #2 would be utilizing distribution on secondary markets such as Uniswap as a mechanism to get distributed on all the wallets that currently integrate Uniswap. As such, creating/increasing a secondary market leads to more users being able to access such a product.
For Methodologists pursuing option #2, they must submit the request for the additional liquidity mining after at least 2 weeks of the product being live. It is important for the community to be able to judge the success and viability of such a product as is before committing to support it further with protocol tokens. The better a product is doing, the more likely the community is to back it for further growth.
The request should take the form of a normal IIP submission and will follow the standard voting and governance guidelines therein.
Index Cooperative has integrations with other protocols that power extrinsic productivity that are potentially available to all products the Coop launches. However, the reasons for making such integrations should be driven by utility requested by personas that use the product.
As an example, with DPI there is significant demand by whales for it to be on lending protocols in order for people to draw stable coins from it and use those stablecoins to participate in liquidity mining opportunities.These are good reasons why we should push for DPI to be integrated with other protocols.
If a Methodologist recognizes such persona driven use-cases, it is up to them, or a passionate community supporter, to outline the case why and submit the proposal for an integration through an IIP. The proposal will follow the standard IIP voting and governance guidelines.
While part of the burden of the Methodologist is to provide significant marketing support, the Index Coop also has a large and passionate community that has the capacity to aggressively market its products.
In marketing, we typically have two types of content: educational, evergreen content and topical, campaign specific content.
Evergreen content is content that is created once and reusable/topical for a very long time. As an asset management organization, we are in the content marketing business and it is our job to educate people on the value of our products. Evergreen pieces like this are incredibly important. Such pieces are organically produced by the thought leaders and educators in our community.
As such, the critical question is how the community decides to create and run campaigns. We can think of campaigns as 2-3 week sprints where we focus on manifesting a narrative using a variety of media channels. Choosing which narratives to run and how to execute on them falls under the purview of the Growth team.
Selections on which marketing campaigns to run will be decided internally based on:
- The popular currents gaining traction within DeFi
- The perceived growth opportunity of a certain product
- Increase momentum around exchange listings, community contests, collateral onboarding
As an example, if we launch a structure products around options in partnership with an options protocol and we see that a lot of the activity on Crypto Twitter, doing a marketing campaign would be an opportune moment to capitalize on the predominant narrative and increase our position as the ones creating the most innovative structured products. A product not performing as well as a Methodologist thinks it should is not a sufficient reason to launch a marketing campaign.
For every product or productivity that we launch, there will at least be a supporting tweet and likely a blog post.
Marketing campaigns will not go through governance channels. Campaigns will be discussed during our weekly product meetings.
Internal productivity will be driven by the community as most of the gains driven by internal productivity will accrue to the community as opposed to the methodologist. There are two ways we can think about internal productivity:
- 1.Influence over the wider DeFi ecosystem.
- 2.Extra revenue generating opportunities for the Coop.
Adding the governance module to the DPI is a prime example of #1. It allows the voting power represented by the tokens held by the DPI to be expressed and thereby used by the Coop to further our own goals.
If other structured products amass non-trivial holdings of governance tokens, then we can also implement governance modules for such products. We may also see other strategic, non-revenue linked options emerge that community members may take advantage of.
Similarly, there has been a lot of discussion around the DPI around gaining extra yield on the underlying tokens. The progress of that discussion has largely stalled out because of the fact that the extra yield generation possibilities are simply not that high - especially compared to the amount of development work needed to realize those gains.
For opportunities around #2, it is up to the community to highlight the amount of gains possible and for the Product Development team to provide context on the amount of development effort to make such a sprint possible.
Because such sprints will require significant smart contract development efforts, they will be treated as new product additions for governance purposes. This means that they will follow the flow highlighted in the “Process Overview” section, although, of course, the proposer does not need to meet the same requirements mentioned in “Aspects of a Successful Application” section.
Last modified 2yr ago