I see! Well let me repeat that I really enjoy your reflections and analyses. I do not in any way want to suggest they are not important for helping us orientate our direction. There is just always this danger that the focus on the universal can make us lose sight of the particular, creating a night in which all cows are black 
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Does that mean it does answer the questions? Or doesn’t?
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Rereading this, you are right, you did in fact answer in more concrete terms in your earlier reply than I suggested, apologies!
In a nutshell, the problem in the current governance structure is taken to be that the specific interests and talents of individuals has too little room for expression, and are too hard to coordinate across the larger community; sub-protocols solve this problem by creating a sub-community in which there is more room for individual expression and easier coordination / organization. Is that a fair summary?
I definitely see the general line of thought here, in terms of concrete motivation, but I do not yet see a reason to think that this problem indeed arises. Is it currently the case that individuals are unable to have themselves heard? It’s not my own experience; on the contrary, I feel listened to, I have a vote in correspondence to the amount of SOV I have, which seems fair, and don’t at all feel that we are somehow too large as a community or unable to coordinate. If the motivating problem is really meant to be this, then I just don’t see that the problem is actually there in the current system.
Martin, you are right, we don’t need this yet. The thing about decentralised systems, is that the bigger they get, the more difficult change becomes. If you are building institutions, this is a feature - not a bug. However, it means you need to bake in the structure of what you want to build early - before it is necessary.
By the time it is necessary, it is very often too late.
For example, right now delegation is built into the system - even thought it is hardly used. SubDAOs are a way to increase use of delegation.
Additionally, we are likely to get the subDAO structure wrong with our first attempt at the model. We will need to iterate on it, to get it right. This is another reason to start early.
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I take your point that it’s better to build the required structures early, before we need them, and before things grow large and rigid. But I think it then all depends on what reasons we have to think that the governance problems would really arise if we don’t preempt them.
Perhaps a helpful question here is whether we know of other DAOs that became dysfunctional or otherwise problematic when they grew. I’m not myself aware of any. For example, Uniswap (large DeFi platform yet no subDAOs) doesn’t seem to have dysfunctional or problematic governance, afaik. MakerDAO (one of the oldest DAOs) also seems to work quite fine to me without subDAOs. Do we have any assurance or reasons to think that the hypothesized need would arise when we grow larger and older?
Could it not be that de facto sub-communities arise naturally anyway, on the fly, coming and going because of time constraints of members, interests, expertise, and so on, without the need for them to be fenced off at the protocol level? Seems to me that people in this discussion, for example, can be considered a transient little sub-community if we want, reading and contributing here (as opposed to over there, at another SIP) because of their interests; a group that dissolves when the SIP has been decided. Perhaps there just is no need for any mechanisms to make this happen, or to make it more rigid. Perhaps not, but it would be good to have some additional reasons to think that real problems will arise if don’t create the sub-protocols now.
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Hi Martin,
I’ll just chip in the conversation a little bit.
One simple problem I see coming is the amount of SIPs the bitocracy would have to deal with, if you have all these projects built. You will not have time or be able to discuss in detail the SIPS as we do now with this one.
Also, what do I know about bitcoin backed stablecoins or launchpads etc!?!? It is best to have specialized individuals voting decisions rather than having somebody questioning something he knows nothing about.
If a knight will start forging swords and go into battle with what he has forged I would not bet on him, how would he know how to forge a sword when all he is doing all day is training? A blacksmith would be more suited to build the sword, he knows his metals.
I do not think that any other project is attempting to do what Sovryn is doing. I have looked but did not find a good example to compare Sovryn with.
When i think if it is necessary to have sub-dao’s or not I think first and look to find problems or negative outcomes that might come out of this change.
Personally I did not find any major problems that would arise. If that is the case then why should we not build a structure earlier on? If we are attempting to build the Defi Ecosystem on Bitcoin we have to do it right. A problem anticipated is a problem you do not have to deal with.
I like efficiency and I prefer to have a community of blacksmiths having their own incentives and being driven by the same goal knowing that the success of that com unity is dependent on how efficiently they conduct their business.
The Citadel they belong to would benefit greatly form having the blacksmiths doing the forging and the warriors doing the fighting!
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I think we need to shift this narrative from a solution to governance to a solution for development resources.
Short term it’s about creating incentives to bring in new talent and ideas. Then long term it’s about scaling governance.
^^^This was the biggest realization for me. Sub-DAO’s enable scalable talent acquisition. The best and most innovative founders/devs don’t want to be paid salaries. They want an equity bet on themselves, which has asymmetric upside profit potential. We need to embrace this incentive and the ability for individuals to make asymmetric bets both on the investment and development side while still keeping this all under the Sovryn umbrella.
The reality is the development road-map is too big for our core Sovryn team of devs. Additionally, it’s not viable to fund all potential ideas directly via the treasury for two reasons:
- The receivers of any SOV we allocate for outside development could ride the coat-tails of rest of community and not succeed or fail on the merit of what they specifically contributed.
- There is just limitation on the amount of SOV the treasury has to spend.
In a traditional start-up world if we needed more shares to acquire talent (or in our case more $SOV), it would mean raising more money at a higher valuation and issuing more shares, thus causing inflation. When you issue shares it socializes the devaluation of the token across the entire community with hope it creates more value from projects we fund. FWIW this is also effectively what the government does when they lower interest rates. They raise more money by incentivizing new loans (meaning new money creation from the banks) and the hope is that creates more economic activity to off-set the inflationary dilution.
The sub-DAO’s allow concentrated and isolated gambles on innovation, both for the creator and the investor. This is a good way to create scalable innovation.
It has the potential to be a phenomenal recruitment tool in a hyper competitive environment for talent and dev resources.
With that said, there definitely are some potential down-sides of sub-DAO’s, which I may write a longer post on. But overall I think they have the potentially to be a real game changer.
My primary critique is that we need to be hyper diligent of the individual SIP’s trying to become sub-DAO’s rather than the idea of sub-DAO’s themselves.
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@dseroy @Sitizen Thanks for your thoughts! Let me just dump my final thoughts here and then shut up.
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Will having a separate OG token in any way lead to more expertise within the sub-community? I see no reason why. You don’t need to pass a test to get the OG token, you can simply get it if you have the money. It will just attract people who like to invest in ICOs. The analogy with guilds is no good, there are no special “token launch experts” in the way that there are blacksmiths, those people who have an understanding of blockchain typically have it across the different aspects of projects, and these people will eventually be forced to get a whole handful of tokens. That’s shitty and might just turn them away, leading to a loss of expertise, instead of a gain.
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Will having a separate OG token help with talent acquisition? I see the thought, I think it’s the one and only pro argument that makes sense to me so far, yet I remain unconvinced it’s enough. We can’t just start to introduce a new token everytime we add a new feature, just because the team would like to have a token of their own and we like it that some SOV is locked up. It’s an ad hoc incentive that we can’t keep going.
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The overall platform loses in value in my view. Imagine, we are one year further, this SIP has passed and there are now 5 sub-protocols. If I want to have a say about which token is launched I need this token, and if I want a say about AMM pools, I need that other token. What a mess. Hard to explain to newcomers. Cries out shitcoin casino. Gives us the task to explain why it isn’t. For people to understand how all these tokens give value to SOV people need to understand bond curves, creating learning curves.
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From a user perspective, as someone who is excited to be active in the Bitocracy, I’m not at all thrilled abut being forced to get all kinds of tokens to continue to have a say. I don’t like the risks this involves. If I don’t see a certain token will be popular, and yet I want to vote on that topic, I would be forced to get the token I don’t want, or not vote.
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Say, we have the OG token, imagine two extremes: (1) very few people are interested. Now a very small group is making decision, and we have effectively created centralization. (2) very many people are interested. Now there has been no point to the whole thing, no scaling, or focussing, just forcing people to get some other token beside SOV. If there is a lot of interest, it’s very bad UX and serves no scaling or concentration purpose, if there is little interest, it’s bad for governance (especially now that we are small).
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The veto / overruling governance power of SOV community. Why would one veto anything if one is not part of the discussion or not keeping track of it? Meaning that the veto power, if it is to have a point, implies that the SOV community will need to keep track of all the SIPs anyway.
I can go on. (one more: Dev resource is scarce, as dseroy mentioned as well, and it has already been admitted that there is no direct need currently. So why spend our scarce resource on this now. I’d would much rather have the dev time spent on preparing for the Mintlayer launch, for example. OK, I can’t help myself, another worry: if a launch has problems, as with babelfish, it might take the launchpad token down hard. With a token for specific features it becomes very tied to the functioning of that one single feature, and hence a relatively risky unattractive asset to have. Lot of risk, yet little governance power. okay now I stop).
I care a lot about this topic because I sincerely think that this decision could be rather harmful to the entire Sovryn project. But it seems I’m the only one left actively criticizing, and I don’t want to drag the discussion, so I will leave it at this. I think it is a serious mistake, motivated by unconvincing analogies, metaphors and speculation. I really hope the community votes against it.
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These are some great discussions and vitally important to get correct. It’s encouraging to see such useful debate from our community. A detail I am interested in is: What are the candidate algorithms for the bonding curve shape?
Examples from the Bancor work look like: 
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I will be voting against this proposal in it’s current form as well.
My feelings exactly. I do not want to give up 80% of OG profits for the current benefits outlined.
Every OG buyer could have been a SOV buyer imo.
Thank you for all your responses and thought!
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what you do not realise is that the 20% you will get is free!! You do not spend any resources on it!
One thing that is great about having Origins as a sub-dao is that you separate the risk. SoV is used as collateral , you do not want to see a failed launch mess up the value of SoV and mess up your loans. You do not want the whole project to suffer from a problematic sale like it happened with babelfish where it wasn’t even Sovryns fault. For every negative i find i see an even bigger positive. And I have been very critical in my thought process.
Every OG buyer is a SOV buyer.
OG - speculative, SoV - Long term investment and this is exactly what we want. People invested in the long term.
One other thing i see is that If you are not a meme coin or you do not feed the greed of the market you as a project have very small chances to get traction. Building a community like SOVRYN has, is extremely hard and rare. My gut feeling is that many teams will give up on 20% of profits to get into the bonding curve just to get access to the ecosystem and community!
I would love to see 20 sub protocols in a year, not just five!
I will not be surprised if i see a sip from Babelfish asking to get into the SoV Bonding curve.
I like how @dseroy thought of this. He was very skeptical at first but he gave it a shot and I think that he got to the same conclusion that many have arrived at. Like @yago said , I think that there is so much more to lose if you do not build now, the structure that will allow exponentiol growth, and I personally think that it is worth to give up now a portion of the fees generated by Origins in exchange for many other 20%.
I look forward to the SIP update because I think that the SIP in the current form lacks some clarity.
@Martin_Adriaan also my last post. I fell that I might start to annoy some people. :)) I personally enjoy these debates. I like when the extremes comunicate because out of that debate you get the best outcome/decision. The middle path is always better than the extremes.
Cheers!
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I really enjoy this discussion. Every one of you brought so many viewpoints and opinions to the table.
I´m still thinking and scratching my head about it. Like today I’m probably 50/50 on the whole idea. BUT all the provided input (no matter if pro or contra) makes it so much easier to form an opinion/decision. 
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Also loving the discussion so far. Many great arguments being put forward on both sides. I think dseroy hits the nail on the head with these points in favour:
Sub-DAO’s enable scalable talent acquisition . The sub-DAO’s allow concentrated and isolated gambles on innovation, both for the creator and the investor. This is a good way to create scalable innovation.
Thanks to @Martin_Adriaan as well for articulating some of the worries I have, but wasn’t yet able to express so eloquently. I think his last post raises great points that deserve additional engagement/refutation.
A thought regarding the predictable dilemma this SIP would introduce: “creating more shitcoin fragmentation, more complexity, more learning curves”…
From a communicative clarity and brand identity point of view, how do we make it instantly clear that (and ideally also, how) the new tokens are part of Sovryn? How they’re bonded through the curve? And why they’re needed spin-offs?
From an onboarding and educational process point of view: many purist bitcoiners will frown upon additional tokens. More importantly to me, how do you make this layered system accessible to laymen? Big brains already struggle with the complexity. And the discussion here, as well as the SIP planning, is dominated by delightfully high-IQ brainiacs with years of experience in DeFi and DAO’s. Many Sovryns who don’t operate at that level, surely currently lurk in the shadows. Perhaps even feel intimidated, and unable to contribute.
Do the advantages of subprotocols weigh up to the increasing difficulty of navigating and communicating the SOVRYN ecosystem?
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I agree, speaking as one of those with far less knowledge and experience, I’m learning a lot on this forum, and I’d appreciate understanding better how the bonding curve might be applied in this context.
Can anyone point at a simple explanation?
Does it mean that SOV holders will have the opportunity to buy OG tokens early, and as they do the price of the OG tokens will automatically increase, driven by the bonding curve?
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“what you do not realise is that the 20% you will get is free!! You do not spend any resources on it!” -Sitizen
Yes if someone takes 80% of my revenue ,100% of my cost, I do not consider that a win. The cost is far less(people bring us the IP) and the revenues can be huge!
I would like there to be a effort made to hire and reward OG protocol devs in SOV.
AWS is still is part of AMAZON, AWS stock is AMAZON stock. Can’t we find a way to incentivise hiring and development without creating another governance token.(like we delegate our staked sov and or stake our sov into a OG pool to increase weight.) there has to be other options to try vs new token.
I dont believe that the thing holding back OG success is that they don’t have a coin to incentivise.
We have SOV! How can we have a bigger draw than that? We have art teams, comics, marketing, devs, so much more.
Is the OG team going to have access to SOV dev resources and dev time,hosting, and marketing after OG token release? If so is that not detracting from our “free” 20%
Down the line if we have all this wonderful utility of Zero , OG, and more , I want people to buy SOV. I do not want competition between SOV and it’s Sub Dao’s. (OG maxi, vs Zero maxi, Vs SOV maxi) .
I for one do not want to trade current value for future value when we are already dooing poorly vs the market. A lot of us are holding SOV bought at values 3x greater than it is today.
I came to be Sovryn and would have to sell/ wire more fiat to hold OG. It favours those who can afford multiple launchpads.
I would hate to think that future Airdrops would have a OG staking/holding requirement.
I would like to minimum push this vote down the line until OG is smooth operating and we have some calcualted revenue numbers. Lets see what revenue vs dev cost is, to see if 20% makes sense.
Appreciate this discourse and am trying to see all sides.
I want to see the highest possible SOV price like all of us.
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I see the sub-protocols as an absolute necessity and huge opportunity and I accept the token as a necessary evil. I do not like it BTW
I think that this is how Sovryn will be able to scale and still be as decentralized as it is now.
I think less about the price to be honest. Could the price be negatively impacted by adding the sub-protocols!? Maybe!?
But I would rather buy into an index rather than the company.
My view is that giving up on a little bit of revenue for a limitless future is worth it rather than holding on to a few cents and limit ourselfs.
Also i prefer to be inclusive rather than exclusive.
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I agree with you completely. This seems way too early for something like this. Plus, let’s say we have 12 or 24 launches in a year, that is only 1 or 2 SIPS per month. Not a lot. I would prefer a way to delegate with SOV for specific area decisions (Origin, Trading, etc.) and all share in the benefits vs. a bunch of coins that dilute SOV.
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We bought SOV with Origin as part of it. Unless OG is airdropped to us, and then we let it prosper, how are we not losing out? I am really trying to understand this argument. If OG is sold, the proceeds go to developing the protocol, and then we SOV holders only get 20% in the future, how are we not losing. Maybe airdrop 80% and then sell an additional 20% for protocol buildout?
Appreciate hearing what I am missing.
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@KCoin, from what you write, it is seems that you are concerned that OG token would be a dilution of the value of SOV. I think your proposed remedy, an airdrop, is an inferior solution to the current proposal.
An airdrop would create zero value for SOV or the Sovryn protocol going forward. It would create an entirely new and separate protocol, the stakeholders of which would have no skin-in-the-game, having received something, essentially for free.
The bonding curve, on the other hand, means that OG is tied to SOV. SOV holders will gain far more value - both in the short term and in the long term.
In the short term, there will be increased demand for SOV from those interested in acquiring OG. In the long term, any appreciation of price in OG will translate to additional demand and value accrual for SOV, through the bonding curve.
Airdrops are an idea that’s popular primarily in communities with short term focus. Its an idea that makes sense for shares, since shares are primitive tokens with no programability - SOV has programability and can create more sophisticated alignment of incentives.
If the OG bonding curve created greater price appreciation for SOV than an airdrop, would you be in favour?
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I see it the same way.
We have 100% of origins platform as SOV holders currently.
This is a proposal to only retain 20% ownership for current SOV holders, on the theory of 5x greater future value. Derived purely from having their own token.
I fail to see how a bonding curve creates more value than retaining 100% of the protocol.
An airdrop of the last 80% ownership seems like it would keep current SOV holders whole.
I dont see how OG is going to be 5x more successful with its own Token. SOV already has funding and devs who got us this far. We are able to make a sub team in Sovryn for OG that pays in SOV. I’m sure we already do.
I want SOV to stay a launchpad. Keep it core like swaps and amm’s.
I am more interested in a governence token for something like Zero where I do not see easy paths to revenues, and a bonding curve may be valuable and accreative to current SOV holders.
What are the official revenue numbers currently for Origins?
What are the current costs for the OG?(devs,hosting,ads)
What % of SOV resources go to OG currently?
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