DivineDAO Philosophy and Tokenomics

DivineDAO
6 min readOct 13, 2021

👋

Hello friends!

At DivineDAO, we’re particularly fascinated by the enthusiasm and explosion of world-building in a few short weeks that builds on top of the radically simple LOOT project. Our previous post focused on what our collective of NFT builders and artisans have developed an effort in the spirit of what Simon de la Rouvier has insightfully coined “bottom-up fiction”.

In this post, we will introduce the DAO more concretely and discuss our tokenomics. It is worth noting that this is simply the initial state of DivineDAO; the specifics will be dictated and modified by the community in keeping with DAO principles.

Philosophy

We believe that LOOT can grow beyond the confines of “crypto Twitter” and the speculators on the generative NFT market. Proposals with hardcaps and exclusive, competitive rhetoric is in direct opposition to that belief set — ultimately limiting the upper bound potential of LOOT and NFTs at large to be as transformative as they are lauded to be. We believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. Instead of a virtual fiefdom where those with scarce tokens hold their potential back and gatekeep access to content in favor of rent seeking behavior, we can put those tokens to work. The best approach to accelerate the growth of LOOT is to use Divine LOOT as a focal point to direct the energy, enthusiasm, and awe to build better standards for upgradability, coordination, and value accrual. This is through sharing incentive structures, allowing for skin in the game, and giving opportunities to govern.

While many acknowledge that LOOT’s inherent openness and decentralized, or lack of singular leadership, allowed for this Cambrian Explosion in derivative and add-on projects, they fail to accept the inherent tradeoffs: that this is creating a more fractured community that is less scalable and sustainable, with many projects threatened to never be seen to “completion”.

There is already precedent in the opposite direction with the BLoot project, which rallied around a singular prominent NFT influencer named Beanie. Since Beanie provides the ideas and made the decisions, he was initially able to coordinate progress an order of magnitude faster than the LOOT community. However, this momentum appears to have stagnated along with community buy-in.

We at DivineDAO are not fans of the implications of a non-centralized effort and believe that a middle ground is ultimately the best approach. We believe that our partnership with SZNS, a new DAO-building platform, can help allow for both decentralized, inclusive decision making, as well as fast, focused execution to help drive the LOOT ecosystem farther.

In order to build a cohesive metaverse, we believe that there need to be structures in place that allow for more effective collective decision-making while retaining the decentralized nature of the original project and including more people in the process.

We firmly believe that inclusion ≠ dilution.

Core Economic Goals of the DAO:

We want to deepen bonds between our communities, accumulate Divine LOOT into a treasury governed by $DIVINE token holders, and acquire governance power in the LOOT ecosystem.

  1. Initialize the DAO with intrinsic value, giving members direct skin in the game to provide a layer for coordination.
  2. Acquire Divine LOOT and invest the treasury through a multi-sig.
  3. Lower the cost of access to Divine LOOT through $DIVINE for both current holders and new entrants without diluting OG Divine LOOT.
  4. Use the DivineDAO treasury-owned assets to create standards for upgradability.
  5. Evangelize art creation and cooperative world building in the Divine City for the LOOT ecosystem.
  6. Grow and serve the Divine LOOT community. (edited)

Launching the DAO on SZNS

Among other things, SZNS (pronounced “seasons”) can be viewed as a “DAO Factory”. The SZNS protocol makes it simple for anyone to create a DAO of NFT collections which they call Albums, that can be governed and managed collectively. As DivineDAO seeks to build a stronger community around LOOT and push through projects, SZNS gives us the ability to operate with a DAO framework on top of the $DIVINE token to allow for community governance and management.

SZNS Albums allow for fractional ownership of high-value NFTs through distribution of ERC20 governance tokens. The $DIVINE token continues to power DivineDAO, allowing for members of the ecosystem to have opportunities to be part of the collective management of NFT baskets without the high capital hurdles. You can read more about Albums here.

DivineDAO selected SZNS as the platform of choice because their tooling abstracts away the complexity of spinning up DAOs with an “out-of-the-box DAO toolkit for fractional NFTs”. This lets us focus on curating a welcoming community instead of having to divert our attention to constant technical development of the underlying infrastructure.

We will be launching as a SZNS Album on October 14th, 3pm EST, at which point users can become members by either participating in the $DIVINE token sale, or by offering their Divine Loot as Tribute in exchange for $DIVINE, per the community’s acceptance of the offer.

For more information, please see the SZNS Mirror post on the specific mechanics.

Tokenomics & DAO Functions

1. Acquiring Divine LOOT

There are two ways that the DAO can acquire Divine LOOT: Exalting and Acquisition.

  • Exalting:

Original LOOT holders can exalt through a tribute of their Divine LOOT to the treasury in return for their proposed amount of $DIVINE, subject to approval of said proposed amount by DAO vote. This enables Loot holders to diversify their portfolio while still participating in DAO voting without having to spend extra capital.

  • Acquisition:

The DAO treasury, controlled through voting and granted to staked $DIVINE holders, can seek to acquire additional Divine LOOT.

2. $DIVINE Supply

The DAO believes in rewarding those that bring the most value to the Divine Loot ecosystem, but at the same avoid discriminating against late adopters. Our aim is to encourage participation and maximize inclusion for the future of the DAO. If our thesis is successful, latecomers will have just as many incentives as so-called “early adopters”. As such, we have structured token distribution with an initial 110,400,000 cap allocated as follows:

Further to this initial cap, the supply will increase as more $DIVINE is issued by the DAO during the exalting process. It will be up to the DivineDAO community to decide whether the token should be inflationary or whether there should be some fixed supply of $DIVINE available on a reverse bonding curve or other mechanism to exalters to reward tributes and to accumulate Divine LOOT.

3. Treasury Management

As a part of the establishment of the DAO, the right treasury team/multi-sig to drive treasury and acquisition decisions will be identified. Key functions of the treasury are to:

What’s next?

Standard for upgradability

With all of the chaos and disorganization + competition from bgld etc, there needs to be a DAO that has skin in the game and resources to build the right standards for earning, leveling, and access. This is much better than waiting for governance from $AGLD/LOOT or gated discord channels to vote on ideas or possibilities.

Thesis: If DivineDAO holds a significant % of the OG divine LOOT, it can answer enforce these standards. If there is significant adoption, other guilds will adopt a shared mental model for games, staking, liquidity, and mechanics.

Example: mLoot holders could earn divine Loot status or items lent to them for games, staking, or other adventure activities

  • P2E with divine points (think SLP in axie universe)
  • defi mechanics — i.e stake AGLD/DIVINE and earn divine points to upgrade your mLoot
  • Loot status for share in derivative yield
  • Leveling based on items earned or owned

Things We Are Thinking About:

Genesis Liquidity Mining

$DIVINE liquidity is essential to the mechanisms of the DAO. The DAO could launch native AGLD/DIVINE SLP $DIVINE incentivized staking for the first 90 days. The genesis Liquidity mining program could be used to bootstrap secondary markets and DEX liquidity to drive greater organic growth .

Conclusion

We are immensely excited about the upcoming SZNS album sale and all that will come after.

If you have any questions or would like to get involved in any form, please meet us in the Divine City by traversing the Gateway. You can also apply for a Divine Key.

𝔚𝔢 𝔠𝔞𝔫’𝔱 𝔴𝔞𝔦𝔱 𝔱𝔬 𝔟𝔲𝔦𝔩𝔡 𝔱𝔬𝔤𝔢𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔯 — 𝔰𝔢𝔢 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔦𝔫 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔇𝔦𝔳𝔦𝔫𝔢 ℭ𝔦𝔱𝔶!

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