Proposal Title: [Proposal] THEIA - A HOME FOR WEB3 COMMUNITIES
Authors: Nikita Steel, THEIA Core Team
Date: 6/2/22
OVERVIEW
Web3 is missing a layer of trust and accountability. In 2021, 2.8 billion dollars was stolen through rug pulls.
THEIA is a social platform looking to turn web3 communities into marketplaces. The future is collaborative but the web3 ecosystem is fragmented. We are on a mission to connect the dots by integrating social capital and financial capital on-chain through our permissionless system.
THEIA is building a new home for web3 communities, solving the issues of rug pulls, discovery, and accessibility that plagues web3. We allow communities to monetize their social influence by turning their community into a marketplace. Communities can curate, support, and help launch projects, and generate revenue doing so. Through a novel escrow protocol, we allow Creators to auction their digital assets in a stress-free environment and investors to be protected from rug pulls.
Over the past three months, we’ve had more than 15k+ unique users test our product. We’ve also organically grown our community to 20k+ engaged members across Discord and Twitter.
Valuable Links
Website: https://theia.finance/
Testnet: https://testnet.theia.finance/
Discord: Discord
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Theia_Labs
Whitepaper: https://theia-finance.gitbook.io/whitepaper/
Social Alpha MVP Demo: https://www.figma.com/proto/F8wKhx6ip5kozOerQYeK30/THEIA-MVP?page-id=731%3A13527&node-id=731%3A15286&viewport=1685%2C346%2C0.06&scaling=min-zoom&starting-point-node-id=731%3A15286
Presentations
Pitch Deck: DocSend
HOW IT WORKS
THEIA is made up of two layers: Social & Financial
SOCIAL:
Web3 is struggling with the problem of fragmentation and content overload. Whether you’re an up-and-coming creator or an established project it can be difficult to find new users outside the many bubbles like crypto Twitter.
THEIA redefines web3 “Search” through our social network. We do this, by enabling communities to collaborate on-chain with other communities and creators and monetise their social networks throughout the process.
Collectives are communities with established social networks that endorse creators and increase their social reach. The intuition here is that each community has an existing identity which represents a vertical inside the web3 ecosystem, which acts as a filter for quality. These verticals can be as tightly focused or as wide-reaching as that community desires. THEIA allows communities to directly support creators and become the direct destination to learn about and support that project.
Collectives earn revenue by taking a commission from the primary sale of the projects they endorse and earn a trading fee for all secondary sales on their Collective’s native marketplace.
By allowing communities to endorse creators that align with their identity and vision, they become the curators that nurture a safe environment for social and financial coordination inside the permissionless environment that is web3.
CROSSING THE CREATOR CHASM:
Throughout history, technology has played a key role in the disruption of labour markets. From the factory worker during the time of Henry Ford to the emergence of the ATM in the banking industry. Creators will soon become the driving force of the worldwide economy.
In today’s world, it is difficult to become a successful Creator. Although overnight fame is not unheard of, it is largely an outlier, in the Creator’s journey of going Zero to One.
Collectives effectively act as a vehicle for on-chain marketing, which enables Creators to get the exposure they need to succeed.
FINANCIAL:
The financial layer is split between our “Primary” and “Secondary” market features.
Primary → Escrow Protocol
Our novel escrow primitive ensures protection for supporters of a project. Supporters can sell their investment at any time and take back the escrowed money out of the pool over the course of the fundraising period.
Secondary → Social X Financial
Much like commission flow to a platform like Opensea, collectives earn a commission off of every trade of the assets of a project they’ve endorsed. Each collective represents almost a miniature marketplace in that sense.
ESCROW PROTOCOL
First, the founder must deposit an allocation of their native asset into THEIA’s smart contract. This asset could be any EVM-based asset both fungible tokens or NFTs. The smart contract is sovereign in nature and is neither controlled by the Project Creators nor Investors, it is designed to align incentives between both the supporters and Founders of the project.
The smart contract acts as an escrow pool that Supporters can always sell back to during the duration of the fundraise. In such a case the Supporter can take back their principle minus a commission fee. The buy prices represent risk and reward. Early Supporters get a better price per token than later investors, as the project has been substantially de-risked by earlier investors. This solves the common problem in VC investing where most funds wait for a lead investor to come in before investing themselves because there is no incentive for investing first. Our system rewards your earliest investors by essentially offering a better deal for being first.
Note: Different “Buy” prices do not affect the selling price to avoid short-term speculation and front running. When you sell only get your principle back minus the commission.
For NFT auctions, there is a maximum number of NFTs which can be sold. Supporters buy Proof of Deposit NFTs at a set price determined by the Creator. Once the funding target is reached Creators can choose to convert the Proof of Deposit NFTs into the real NFT. Alternatively, Supporters can sell back their Proof of Deposit NFT back to the escrow protocol and receive a refund.
Once the fundraising target has been reached investors can convert their “Project Tokens” into the native asset of the Project, which was initially deposited by the founder/creator. Simultaneously the funds locked in the escrow pool are released to the project. It is important to note that Supporters do not have to convert all their Project Tokens at once, for example, they could convert 20% and the Project will only receive 20% of the funds invested by that specific Supporter. Each Supporter can make the autonomous decision to convert their Project Tokens on their own terms. However, there is finality involved: Once the conversion period is over (set by project) all “Project Tokens” are automatically converted and the Project receives all the invested funds.
HOW COLLECTIVES WORK
Anyone can create a collective by paying TEA to mint 1000 Collective NFTs which represent ownership of that collective. By holding Collective NFTs the owner is entitled to both the Collective’s Revenue & Governance. Collectives can also integrate existing assets to represent ownership; these assets could be fungible or non-fungible in nature e.g. BAYC integrating the 10,000 apes or apecoin itself to represent their collective.
DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY
Our core distribution strategy utilizes a two-pronged approach:
Bottom-Up: Growing our user base organically through our existing marketing channels (discord & twitter) and word of mouth. Since launching our Testnet V2 we’ve had over 800+ Projects created by our community and thousands who’ve tested the investment process, without any money spent on marketing so far.
Top-Down: Our Top-Down strategy is direct outbound - DAO to DAO. We target DAOs that are reputable and have large communities such as BitDAO. When these DAOs are onboarded, they will onboard projects they want to support (inside and outside THEIA) and their communities will subsequently be onboarded on to THEIA. This leads to a waterfall effect, attracting more projects and investors.
These are some of the top DAOs & Projects our team has spoken with directly, who are interested in creating collectives and directing deal flow (AVAX, Near & Axelar) when we launch our Beta.
ROADMAP
Our roadmap offers a path to progressive decentralization of our protocol. We believe that setting the precedent for quality gives us the greatest chance of success in the long run, which is why during our Social Alpha & Mainnet Beta stages participation will be primarily exclusive. For the alpha, The THEIA Team will directly onboard 30+ handpicked Collectives to create Profiles on THEIA. For the Beta, the THEIA team will give Collectives access to our Primary and Secondary market features. The final stage will be the permissionless launch where we will fully decentralize the protocol and enable anybody to create projects and collectives, by leading with quality from the beginning we strengthen our incentive structures where Collectives will compete for both investors and the best quality projects to maximise their revenue. Likewise, Projects will compete to be among the best Collectives to leverage their investment communities and social proof.
Our long-term Roadmap:
TEA TOKEN
Our native token TEA will derive its core utility as a currency in the following ways:
1. Collective Creation Deposit: Collectives will be required to deposit TEA to create a collective. This TEA will be locked up for the duration of the Collective’s lifespan. During our Beta, the THEIA team may waive this fee to highly reputable DAOs to incentivise participation. In the long-term, this fee will be designed to be affordable to avoid creating excessive barriers to entry for new Collective founders.
2. Collective Subscription Fee (Charged in TEA): Collectives will pay an ongoing subscription fee to maintain the operations of their Collective. This size will scale in proportion to the number of projects on their collective and the volume of capital which funnels through it. The fee will be deducted automatically from the revenue Collectives generate. A portion of the fee will be dedicated to maintaining automatic revenue payouts to Collective Owners as well as Free on-chain voting within the Collective. In addition, as we expand our product offering in the future there will be optional features available as add-ons (similar to an amazon prime subscription).
3. Secondary Market Trading (This applies to Collective NFTs as well): THEIA charges a 1% trading fee for every trade on Collective Marketplaces. This fee is completely waived if TEA is used as the trading currency. Hence TEA acts as a discount currency and accrues value in a similar manner to BNB. Such a design also enables the network to bootstrap itself more efficiently, as TEA doesn’t have to be the main trading currency from day one. This will give us time to make partnerships with exchanges and grow the liquidity over time without bottlenecking the core product. As TEA becomes solidified both in utility and liquidity we expect a switching event to occur where it will become the main medium of exchange over the other currencies inside the network.
TOKENOMICS & REVENUE PROJECTIONS
COMPOSABILITY
THEIA will be compatible with all major EVM chains. Projects with all kinds of EVM assets will be able to utilize THEIA for fundraising. Similarly, Supporters can invest with all major EVM-based Assets which have sufficient liquidity. Our Cross-chain interoperability is facilitated by our technology partner Axelar who we as a team have a close relationship with. This enables projects and investors to safely bridge assets across chains. We’ve also designed this process to be completely abstracted from the end-user. We firmly believe that investors don’t care which chain projects they are investing in, are built on. But at the same time, they want to invest in all types of projects on all chains. THEIA offers a simple and intuitive solution to this problem. We also have plans in the future to expand our product to Rust-based networks (We are already exploring a partnership with NEAR to facilitate this).
Note: Currently THEIA DAPP is deployed on the Avalanche Fuji Testnet which does not support cross-chain interoperability.
TEAM
Founding Team:
Our individual experiences have given us a unique perspective and skill set to solve this problem. Laurence. Our founding team came together from three separate perspectives: Laurence, Working in VC, understood that VCs acted as filters for quality and realised that Web3 was missing a similar filter. Rorke’s experience with trading digital assets familiarised him with the financial issues with current crypto markets. Whilst Nikita’s experience with tokenomics gave him unique insight into aligning incentives between Communities, Founders and Investors.
In just over the past 5 months, we have gone from nothing to a product that thousands of people want and have tested. We’ve done this by building a highly dedicated and talented team that weren’t obvious picks but shone through in our extensive interviewing process - allowing us to secure top talent at discount.
THEIA Full Team: THEIA Team Overview - Google Docs
What is required for THEIA?
Total required investment: $2M in crypto or wire transfer ( USDC / USDT / DAI or other ).
What does BitDAO receive?
THEIA will consider agreeing upon SAFE and Token Warrant structure with BitDAO pending legal/regulatory considerations
Equity Valuation = $10,000,000 → BitDAO receives 20% of THEIA’s equity
Token Valuation = $16,000,000 → BitDAO recieves 12.5 % of the total TEA supply
These tokens have a 12-month cliff and a 36-month linear release schedule.
Reduced fees for BitDAO Collective.
What will the raised funds go to?
-Delivering upon our Milestones & Roadmap
-Smart Contract Security Audits
-Cross Chain Development
-Legal Costs in terms of compliant business operations and issuing TEA Token
-Hiring Talent
-Marketing
-TEA Liquidity (Once token is publically launched)
How will your proposal, if activated, benefit BitDAO?
BitDAO could benefit directly from creating a Collective on THEIA. BitDAO already makes private investments in the projects that it supports. By creating a collective, BitDAO could give greater value to the projects it supports, by utilising THEIA’s mechanism to properly introduce projects to the public in a safe and secure environment for investors.
What are the projected outcomes?
THEIA becomes a Home for Web 3 Communities, fostering the next wave of non-crypto native adoption.
What are the milestones?
The following milestones are contingent on receiving investment by early July.
Social MVP - Mid July: Releasing the full social functionality of Collectives to the public.
Smart Contract Security Audit - October: Carrying out a full smart audit of our Fundraising Protocol and Collective Smart Contracts.
Beta Launch - November: Launching THEIA to the mainnet with a curated set of Projects & Collectives.
TEA Token Public Launch - December: Public launch of our native currency TEA on major exchanges in preparation for our permissionless launch.
Permissonless Launch - Q1 2023 Decentralising the protocol allowing anybody to create collectives and projects on THEIA
Next Steps? If this proposal is accepted, what are the immediate action items?
- Preparation of all information about company registration.
- Pass a BitDAO governance vote.
- Increasing the team for faster project development.
- Building and rolling out updates.
Temperature Check Poll
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