AirDAO Council: December update

GM AirDAO Community,

Welcome to the last Council round-up before we head into an exciting new year for AirDAO. What a rollercoaster of a year 2023 has been! It’s with great pleasure that the Council has governed this fantastic ecosystem for nearly seven months. We’ve made great strides toward creating our democratized future within the DeFi Industry.

We look forward to further empowering the community as we enter a new year. We’ll provide further updates for 2023 in the next AirDAO Town Hall, which will go ahead on December 27th as planned.

This short blog covers two Council meeting sessions — December 5th and 12th. All Council members attended both meetings.

Community

We’re pleased to have onboarded several key hires into our ecosystem after many months of planning. They’ll play a pivotal role in our expansion into new regions. We welcome Eleanor Wang (Regional Manager: Asia), Andrea Felipe (Regional Manager: LATAM), Nasir Garba (Regional Manager: Africa), and Jitendra Naik (Country Manager: India). All joined on December 4th, and we expect huge community growth to follow as they pick up momentum.

Now, onto the additional nodes going live in new regions. As you know, we bought the required AMB tokens from the market. We’re currently testing the first node. In 2024, we’ll open applications to participate in this program to improve the geographic decentralization of our network. Our newest Council community member Oleksii Dmytrenko will continue leading this program superbly.

Oleksii and Igor have worked hard on the prospective DEX listings alongside the node program. We’re ensuring that AirDAO’s visible across the DeFi industry on various trackers to maximize awareness generated by any listing. The dev team is also working on the technical aspects to improve how new users will engage with our ecosystem via DEX platforms — expect more on this soon!

A big shout-out to Jerome. Jerome is a long-term node operator who provided wonderful feedback on the new and improved node management portal. Having long-term members around to see our progress and point out our continuous elements to improve is encouraging.

Product

We shared a high-level overview of our future roadmap with the community — I’m sure you’ll agree it’s jam-packed with exciting products. First, we shared The Bond Marketplace upgrade with the community for feedback. Our ecosystem builder team has been working hard to ensure that we bring to market a great product that will attract new users and offer a fresh and exciting opportunity to engage with our ecosystem. The Community Product Working Group has given initial feedback, and we’ll hold a vote for product acceptance into the ecosystem. If the vote passes, it will enter the development phase. We expect this to come to market quickly in Q1 2024.

We’ll roll out the rest of the products within the roadmap in a similar way. We’ll call upon the community for feedback across various platforms to ensure we deliver high-quality products the community wants and expects.

Regarding recent tokenomics updates, we’ll reduce the minimum stake for Apollo nodes to 400k AMB. We’re also implementing a delay in on/off-boarding. We’re capping the node count at 150, as previously discussed. Simple logic decides the top 150 list: the higher your stake, the higher your ranking. The ‘top list’ ensures the number of staked tokens remains reasonable and secures the network from attack.

As we roll into January, we’ll dive deep into the roadmap deliverables and showcase what is coming down the pipeline. Our newest ecosystem builder — Modus — will go live on AirDAO with their first property development in January/February. We expect a big push across all verticals after.

A reminder of the AirDAO products you can expect in 2024: Bond marketplace, staking update with liquid staking, AirDAO DEX, a fully functional wallet, bridge updates, Governance platform, IndexDAO, Investment DAO, Account Abstraction, and a Perps DEX.

Marketing

While there are only a few weeks left of 2023, we intend to celebrate and close the year as we mean to go on. We’ll have two rewarding campaigns with key CEX partners who will communicate with you soon. We hope you’ve seen our recent commitment to promote Modus on Cointelegraph and our tokenomics update on Coingecko. As we move into 2024, we have a significant pipeline of products coming to market. We’ll support them with extensive marketing. Lena and the marketing team are super excited as we’ll have many eye-catching topics to share with the global crypto community.

Regarding events, some of the Council members will be going to the World Crypto Forum in Davos, Switzerland. We’re proud to be the Crypto Sponsor for the entire event. The event will run from January 15th until the 19th. AirDAO Council member Alina Tustanovska will be hosting a session on Governance following her significant progress in leading the governance working group. She will attend alongside Council members Igor Stadnyk, Michael Grimwood, and Sophie Bein Mack.

Treasury

AirDAO has a significant runway. We also have capital in the Gnosis Safe that’s currently not generating revenue. The Council wants to take action and earn a return, extend our runway, and secure a longer future without relying entirely on future fundraising. We’ll engage the community in early 2024 to get your thoughts on various lending protocols available in the market. We’ll cover elements such as time in the market, potential returns, risks, and security. There’s a possibility that we use generated returns to buy back and burn tokens from the market, and we look forward to your input.

That’s all for now. Have a merry Christmas; we look forward to seeing you all at the Community Town Hall on December 27th.