Genesis Event
LunarDAO is a decentralized organization, not based in any juristiction, not represented by any legal entity. It is a fully experimental project. Everyone shall judge based on their own risk assessment.
The Moonrise is Here
April 6th 2023.
Fullmoon.
The anonymous squad converges around the inner fire of ircd chat. Faces under capes, night wind, wolves howling over the mountains.
A looming threat hovers in the fragrant air. The forest is alive and beautiful. Committees share updates, the time is ripe, the assembly decides:
LunarDAO is launching! Sunday, April 16th, 17:00 UTC
The moonlight ignited the Genesis Event - the initial DAO raise to support privacy development, the leap to assert our destiny and realise our mission. Between April 16th, 17:00 UTC and April 30th, 17:00 UTC the dark forest opens its permissionless gate for anyone to join the LunarDAO Squad and participate in shaping the future.
LunarDAO Summary
LunarDAO is an investment fund based on lunarpunk philosophy. By allocating funds in privacy projects & anonymity tooling we aim to expand freedom, ensure autonomy and sovereignty. Squad wealth leverages collective strength and capture value in the ecosystem by building a portfolio of privacy assets. DAO members called the Squad manage the shared treasury, anyone can exit at any time. Members are prompted to remain anonymous in order to participate in building this vision without fear of frozen funds, legal implications or any kind of repression. We aim to move to a full anon setup and develop infrastructure for a parallel economy outside of control and centralization.
Read our Manifesto and the whitepaper to know more about LunarDAO: Mission, Governance, the DAO architecture and the smart contracts overview. To learn about LunarDAO plans, check out the Roadmap.
How to Join
- It is recommended to anonymize your assets before joining the DAO.
- Go to the Staking page. The entry is permissionless, but only opened between April 16th, 17:00 UTC and April 30th, 17:00 UTC.
- $VOX represent the members share of the treasury as well as their voting power (voting power can be delegated as well).
- $VOX (shares) are non-transferable.
- Everyone's entry price is the same: 1 ETH = 100 $VOX (- 0.25% admin fees).
- The minimum tribute in order to join the DAO as a Squad member is 0.1 ETH which equals 10 $VOX (shares).
- Admin/management fee on entry of 0.25% is paid to the Stewards' (core-team) account from every tribute in the form of $VOX for the DAO operations.
Governance TL;DR
This is the initial governance setup for LunarDAO governance (changes can be proposed any time):
- LIP (LunarDAO Improvement Proposal): A proposal is created and shared with the community. Use the template in LIP-0001.
- Forum discussions: A thread is created on the forum, where the LIP is discussed. The proposal should be announced at least 7 days before voting.
- Voting: A proposal is submitted on-chain and the voting is opened for 72h.
- Grace Period: Follows voting for another 72h. Members can exit the DAO with their funds if they don't want to be affected by the decision.
- Execution: Proposals are submitted on chain, hence the changes will apply automatically with pushing the execution button.
- If unrelated to treasury: Stewards update the documents.
Investment Thesis
Anonymity and privacy oriented developers will face an increasing difficulty in finding support among traditional VC's and investment funds, because of regulatory measures. This will lead into a dynamic where the developing teams will be forced to sell their work underpriced to counterparties who don't share the same vision. This scenario portrays privacy as a taboo, developers are under stress and value is extracted from the ecosystem.
We don't accept the future to be so grim. The prospect of privacy is ultimately bullish. LunarDAO offers a solution.
We form a decentralized squad of sovereign individuals and lunarpunks <!---zoresh: of sovereign lunarpunks --->, to allocate resources together and assemble squad wealth. The DAO becomes an investor. The community discusses which tools are needed to empower the ecosystem, the research committee looks for the solutions, and lists them in the Investment Portal. The Squad members vote on the proposals and invest in the chosen projects.
Gains
- The privacy projects will get support from a decentralized, anonymous organization, aligned with their mission.
- The teams will be provided with the needed resources to develop, grow and deliver the solutions.
- LunarDAO Squad is a privacy investor building a treasury (portfolio) of accumulated privacy assets.
- The value is conserved in the ecosystem, both parties profit from the upcoming lunarpunk cycle.
- While leveraging collective power, every individual is protected against majority rule and can exit the DAO any time with 100% of their shares (without any fee).
The list of primitives and projects discussed as possible investments, has been updated in LunarDAO Investment portal.
The loop of tightening regulations and growing demand for privacy and anonymity is inevitable, these events will happen with or without us. We can strenghten the ecosystem, capture the value and grow wealth, or be left out in the desert with regressive regFi. Our choice is clear!
Investment Proposals
Note: All the listed proposals are to be discussed, submitted and voted upon by the Squad after the initial raise according to the governance.
Our research team is looking into a few different potential fundraising opportunities including:
- Anonymous DAO primitive
- Community managed fork of zk-money
- Anonymous L1 allowing for smart contract
- Secured p2p broadcast layer
Mel Project
In LunarDAO community meeting, the lead dev of The Mel Project @nullchinchilla shared an investment proposal to support the project development. Mel is a direct contrast to the "zk-washing" teams. The team doesn't portray themselves as privacy first, while at the same time developing some pretty novel solutions under the hood. Particularly their censorship resistant native layer working with composable light clients and coin covenants based on a primitive without oracles, a protocol-internal mechanism deriving its value from computation time. The team is also developing Astrape, anonymous payment channels.
Read a short report on Mel Project in the Investment Portal repository and join the discussion on the proposal on the forum.
Community Managed zk-money
As Aztec connect has sunset, the moon is rising. Rumours about a zk-money fork surfaced as shared ideas. We made a call out to connect efforts, support the development of this vital primitive and manage community run zk-money as a DAO.
Essential Privacy Solutions
LunarDAO has more projects on the list to fund the needed solutions. DarkFi presented anonymous DAO primitive at #hcpp22 and recently published a testnet release of their full anon native layer. This seems to be one of the most interesting options to keep track of at the moment. We will begin discussing possible collaborations with the team as both their L1 and the anonymous DAOs are essential primitives.
Navcoin is working on Privacy-enhanced Proof of Stake protocol. LunarDAO and Navcoin joined forces to initiate Private finance Syndicate. To find a common path for the further collaboration shall be smooth.
Let's keep our eyes open and discuss which primitives are the solutions that LunarDAO Squad wants to invest in.
Knowledge as a Value
Besides the privacy venture we see education as an essential value to fulfill our mission.
The DAO creates possibilities for technical literacy by building research and wiki and by supporting educational structures such as the partnering project Adalan Academy, where people can acquire knowledge and master skills in programming and economy while developing a philosophical frame to generate the future path of lunarpunk ecosystem. Such education empowers the community and shapes thinkers, who bring value back to the movement. Education is a long-term investment.
Veto Agent
LunarDAO deployed a Sentinel committe (a multi-sig safe) as a veto agent. At the same time the DAO architecture itself is based on Moloch V3 primitive with a full on-chain execution. This contradiction is solved by a design where the main LunarDAO treasury is a Gnosis Safe with two signers of which only one is needed for an execution (1/2). The two signers are:
- LunarDAO Squad: a Moloch V3 DAO
- LunarDAO Sentinels: Gnosis safe (5/8) multi-sig
In this setup all the proposals are submitted, voted upon and (after grace period) executed on-chain without any Sentinel interaction. Only in the case of a malicious proposal, the Sentinels can step in and reject the proposal. Five Sentinel members must sign in their safe in order to make a veto execution in the LunarDAO treasury.
