Business Development
Step 1: Identify a project you believe could be a good fit for a token swap deal
That is probably the most difficult/time consuming part of the job as it requires conducting proper research (“due diligence”). The last thing we want for the DAO is to get into token swap deals with overpriced tokens where MNTA ends up being used as exit liquidity (emptying our quality token pools). Typical due diligence items include:
Project overview: What do they do? Is it something we can get excited about, or is it yet another DEX / Money Market / General Purpose L1 / etc.? What have they achieved so far? Is there proof of demand/usage?
Team: Who is behind the project? How do they come across based on interviews/podcast/interactions in Discord/Telegram?
Funding: How much did the team raise? And how much cash are they burning each month (generally in devs salary)? How long can they survive this way? This information is usually not readily available and requires speaking with the team; asking cordially on Discord often works as long as you show this is part of your research process; teams unwilling to disclose that type of info are usually a red flag.
Tokenomics (supply): Understand initial token distribution, vesting schedule and inflation. Form a view on expected intensity of sale pressure in the coming months/years as a result of those factors. Knowing the average entry price of pre-sale investors is also a valuable datapoint to form an opinion.
Tokenomics (value accrual): What is the utility of the token and how does it capture value? Does the protocol generate some real revenue based on usage (i.e. non-inflationary rewards) and distribute at least part of that back to token holders? What does the revenue trend look like in the past months/years? This is a very critical part (together with supply dynamics) to form a view on a token.
Competitors: Who are the other projects in the field and how does our potential partner differentiate? Any benchmarking to help put things into context is helpful (e.g. Market cap, Revenue, TVL, and corresponding multiples and growth rates).
Roadmap: What’s coming up next? What is expected to drive growth/adoption?
Token Price & Valuation: Look at the token price overtime vs. a standard crypto benchmark (e.g. ETH). How far is the token from his ATH / ATL? What is the fully diluted market cap (FDV) and how does that compare to peers (both in absolute term and in relative terms, i.e. multiples of TVL and revenue).
Liquidity: Where is the token available for trading? What is the average daily trading volume and how does that compare to the total liquidity? Those are important considerations to understand if we should expect good volume for the pair if we market-make on FIN.
Sanity-check: Any back-of-the-envelope calculation that you can make based on the data you found. This is the “What do we need to believe'' analysis, the goal is to see if the current valuation makes sense.
Final Notes: Based on your research, what are the merits and the risks you identified for the opportunity, and what is your general opinion. If you get to that stage, it is likely that your opinion is overall positive. One important skill when doing due diligence is to be able to identify bad opportunities early on in the process and stop wasting time on research as early as possible.
Sources for due diligence: Whitepaper/docs (this usually contains most of what you need to form a quick opinion), website, blog posts, Telegram/Discord channels, GitHub (there is sometimes useful info in there, even for non-devs). Start by consuming all the public data, then, if there is any gap in our research, search on Discord/Telegram and ask the team/community directly if you cannot find something.
Example: Here is a “Project Review” deck for Jackal Protocol that Pragmatic Monkey put together in the early days of MantaDAO. It is probably not reasonable to expect people to prepare such decks for every project they bring to the community, but the ones that do will certainly come out stronger.
Step 2: Pitch the deal to the community in the Biz Dev channel
Based on your research, you should be able to clearly articulate (i) why you believe conducting a token swap deal is a compelling opportunity for the DAO (this your summary of step 1), and (ii) present the proposed deal structure.
The default deal structure is a 1:1 treasury swap based on 10d TWAP, but there are cases where a different structure might be appropriate. For example, if we are not comfortable with the current valuation, but are still interested in doing a deal with a partner that has expressed interest, we can explore asymmetrical swaps (e.g. a 2:1 swap).
There are plenty of other possible structures, people in the community are welcome to come up with some original ideas. The deal structure should also include any additional commitments, e.g. for our deal with Sommelier, we committed to acquire $50k worth of yieldETH and market-make the token on FIN as part of the agreement.
Step 3: Assuming support from the community, assemble a sub-team (2-4 people max) and put together a proposal deck
At this stage, it is fine to have “soft” support only, (i.e. just based on general positive feedback on Telegram), but if things get more concrete, it will require a governance vote. The sub-team might include the person who identified/originated the deal (step 1 & 2); maybe someone from the community that has a good access to the team or some prominent community members/governors on the other side; and your are encouraged to include Pragmatic Monkey to handle the proposal deck (and later on the governance proposal) and help with the discussions, and Vlad to handle the technical part of the on-chain operations and help with the discussions.
You are also welcome to do everything on your own, just be mindful that, as an ambassador of the DAO, you owe to other members to present professional looking proposals, lead conversations in a mature way, and demonstrate high integrity at all times. If you are ever in doubt, just ask for guidance from experienced community members on the biz dev Telegram channel.
Example of proposal decks – White Whale.
Step 4: Reach out to the team on the other side, or some active community members/governors
Pitch the proposed deal, address concerns, negotiate. Get their support or drop. We have found that getting public support from the team and/or from some prominent community member is key for success. Without buy-in from the other side, there is no spirit of partnership and it’s better to stop the process at this stage rather than pushing for a governance vote which will most likely fail.
Step 5: Assuming support from the team/governors, post an official governance proposal on the community forum.
Example of governance proposal – Osmosis: https://forum.osmosis.zone/t/mutual-token-swap-between-osmosis-and-mantadao
Step 6: Engage with the community
Engage with the community on their most active community groups (Telegram or Discord); mention the TLDR of the proposal with a link to the governance forum. Be active on the various channels to answer community questions/concerns. Get a Tweet out from the MantaDAO Twitter and try to get the core team on the other side to reTweet to increase community awareness and engagement.
Step 7: Engage with validators
In parallel, start reaching out to any validators we have a relationship with to get their feedback on the proposal and answer any questions.
Step 8: Put the proposal up for vote
Put the proposal up for an on-chain vote, only if we have gathered sufficient support from both the Community and the top validators. If there is no willingness to partner from the community/validators, then better stop the process now than going to a vote that will likely fail.
In some cases, we might be dealing directly with the project Team/Foundation instead of requesting funds from the Community Pool. In that case, no governance vote is required, but it’s good practice to notify the community ahead of executing the deal.
Also put a governance proposal up for an on-chain vote on the MantaDAO side, you haven’t done so already.
Step 9: If the vote is successful, execute the on-chain transactions.
Step 10: Periodically monitor the performance of the deal and report to the partner team and community.
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