The last few weeks have been an absolutely instructive lesson for me.
While we ended Catstanbul on an extremely high note, announcing key initiatives like Jupnet, bringing together the amazing jupiverse, sharing important product evolutions like ultra mode/organic score, and delivering long requested token updates - the last few weeks have been brutal in terms of perception - and of course, perception is reality.
Integrity of JUP
To be very clear, i feel like we as a team have gone absolutely far and beyond any team in terms of protecting the integrity of the JUP token - note
- the 30% burn,
- the cliff lock up,
- the only community token audits done in crypto,
- me using personal allocation for team expansion and not taking a single jup till 2030,
- not a single JUP sold via OTC,
- and of course sending 50% of revs to litterbox.
These are massive, massive commitments few other teams have done, and there is no team more long term aligned than we are in JUP. While this has obviously not mattered that much so far, i remain proud that we executed on the above. will it matter long term? inshallah.
That said, what is not inshallah is the very urgent and real need to turn perception of JUP and DAO and Jupiter around. While many have correctly accused me of being an idealistic utopian cat, i am also a highly pragmatic one, so lets discuss what i got wrong, what currently plagues the project and share a plan to turn it around.
Core Issues
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The very, very public repeated votes on emissions (jupuary, 2030, budgets) created a reflexive loop where the fud over emissions took over as the predominant narrative. Example for Jupuary, the main harm by far was not even the airdrop itself, it was the worries about it that was the main damper over months. Ditto for everything else.
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The community and DAO being torn apart by arguments over fairness, compensation vs working together to make progress towards being a truly global community.
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The focus on budget over debating the scope made the discussions very unproductive, since the focus became on payments vs whether the workgroups actually can make the jupiverse great. Also, the word “work groups” is wrong - it does not indicate at all why it is so crucial that these people are to be voted on.
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The lack of clarity on the role of the DAO and JUP in crafting the future of Jupiter as a project and how the DAO is helping value creation is creating a lot of doubt amongst many about the feasibility/necessity of it even. This needs to be a far broader and bigger conversation.
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The DAO was formed just a year ago, with the workgroup idea completely brand new. Most DAOs don’t even work at all, with zero impact or engagement, so we basically had to throw out existing playbooks to make one that works.
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While i am really happy with the engagement at the moment, it’s clear we need to upgrade and work towards more clarity around vote formation, open debate about need for votes, and more open clarify of funding. For example, many people do not know that the DAO’s operational budget of 10M was funded by team treasury and assumed it was from the selling of JUP, which cannot be further from the truth.
Next Steps For DAO
Here’s my quick recommendations. I will let @kashdhanda take the lead on these along with the existing work groups - but here’s a starting point for what likely needs to change:
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Stop budget votes for now. The team will shoulder the budgets for existing work groups and members if needed in the meantime.
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Work through with the entire community on the role and scope of the DAO, along with how workgroups are branded and formed. Crucial to this is also the long term future of ASR
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Importantly, the wider community needs to see how these initiatives lead to value creation for the jupiverse, which is where a lot of the meta-unhappiness is at the current moment.
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Start brainstorming value generating DAO initiatives like LFG v2, and ways that the community can get involved in more new token initiatives like catstarter.
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Launch jup-com, where we will explain the full scope of the jupiter project, explain everything in detail, including having the external JUP token audits to have one central place to establish facts about the project.
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Take into heart the core criticisms by many about how the DAO treasury, community talent acquisition and how the votes can be a massive distraction, and change it up.
Next Steps For Me
Just as importantly, I need to drive focus back into why Jupiter is here in the first place. Too much of the discussion now is on zero sum token games vs how we grow both the jupiter pie and also the global pie.
On the building side, we have 3 major things we need to achieve:
- The superapp of crypto, on solana, for solana
- The omnichain network to aggregate everything
- A global decentralized community to push the meta forward
On the narrative side, we need to do a much better job of explaining the higher level vision of Jupiter, how all the many pieces we do fall in together, and introduce the key people in the team driving things forward.
I will focus on these, kash will focus on the above.
50/50 Experiment
We are the first project in history to try to run a 50/50 experiment where we put tons of effort into both a strong team that is able to execute hard on strategy in a highly singular manner, but also a maintain a strong distributed community that can get behind and add tremendous value in a completely different manner.
The going is tough, and critics would be right so far to say that we could have much better monetary outcomes for ourselves and maybe even the token if we were to stick to being the product and tech game, vs pouring our heart and soul into making this dynamic work.
But I strongly believe that if we can make it work, the synergy of a world class platform alongside a cohesive synergistic community will be one crucial piece in our quest to bring the decentralized to the masses.
M