Introducing: JADE’s Hyper-Growth Fund

Our treasury will kick your treasury’s ass.

Most forks of OlympusDAO have no utility besides… being a fork. These projects amass a giant treasury, and then use that treasury in the same way that Olympus does: to create a “backed currency.”

Zero innovation. Yawn.

We have no interest in JADE becoming another “DeFi currency” — there are plenty of projects doing that.

We’re going after a monopoly. We want to have first-mover advantage in an untapped DeFi market (more on that in a bit).

Let’s be real: most crypto projects will fail massively.

Just like the dot-com bubble, there will be a crypto bubble that pops once the masses realize that the majority of tokens don’t actually do anything. And if they do have a utility, then they’ll likely fail on execution.

Why will they fail on execution? Because crypto is all about ‘selling the dream.’

Don’t get me wrong, we are great at selling the dream. But we have something that sets us apart from every other crypto project out there:

We built a system that allowed for hive-mind data collection; quick iteration; and a community that supports innovation.

We launched two massive ecosystems in less than 60 days (SMRTr/JADE) that grew to a collective market cap of nearly $400 million dollars. This is considered a “unicorn event” in crypto.

Have you ever seen a crypto community like ours before? A community that openly encourages iteration/testing? We haven’t.

Unfortunately, most projects aren’t willing to iterate quickly and double down on community.

They opt for an approach that looks good on paper, but fails in reality.

How to get rich as a crypto founder without actually creating value:

Step 1: Write a long, convoluted whitepaper. Throw in a bunch of complex formulas, and create a ‘paradigm-shifting’ solution that has <.01 chance of working in the real>

Step 2: Don’t test the idea. That would be bad — it might invalidate the hypothesis! Instead, raise money from VCs to create a public signaling event. “Omg, did you hear?! Polychain just invested into ______ token!! Moon baby!”

Step 3: Spend years “building” the project in the dark while the token openly trades on the market as investors speculate on how epic it will be when it launches *cough* ADA *cough*.

Step 4: Slowly dump your team tokens on your users and swim in your massive pile of cash. At this point it doesn’t matter whether or not you actually ship a working protocol. The token has appreciated massively in value, and whether or not you fail on your vision, you still made generational wealth. Good job, crypto founder!

Do you see a problem here?

What’s the solution?

It’s not as sexy as “selling the dream” and catering to moon-boys.

The magic solution to creating something bubble-resistant:

Iteration.

Intelligently testing the idea in the real-world and then iterating based on new information.

^ That’s the secret to a successful project, folks.

Short-term, fast iteration, helps build something that stands the test of time. Holding space for big vision, while not being afraid to make mistakes in the short term.

It’s the only way to win.

When Thomas Edison was asked how he invented the light bulb, he replied:

“I have not failed 10,000 times — I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

Without testing, failing and iterating it’s impossible to create real value. The version of Google we all use today wasn’t built in a day.

Our founding team is made up of start-up folks that have built companies to over 100+ employees.

Personally speaking, getting to that point required dragging my balls across broken glass for years. It didn’t happen from one magical idea that worked flawlessly.

It requires long-term thinking which is damn hard.

Real wealth is created through long time horizons. Unfortunately, in crypto, most people have trouble seeing beyond Friday. Be better than that; your future self will thank you.

At this point, I hope you’re sold on the idea that real-world testing and iteration are the only ways to make something magical.

This brings us to the JADE treasury.

Imagine not using this money wisely?

The power of strategically using ~$90m (and growing) is staggering.

Using it to simply create a ‘backed value’ for the $JADE token is an idea so boring that just typing it makes me want to nap.

It’s also an idea that has publicly failed at bringing new people into the ecosystem.

SnowBankDAO used $6m from their treasury to create a “Resilience Budget” that bought back tokens when the price dipped below the floor.

Boring.

The result?

I’ll let the number of wallets created in the last 24 hours speak for itself:

Jade: 4175
Time: 1875
Olympus: 311
Snowbank: -81

Simply buying-back tokens to maintain a price-peg is honestly… lame. It also does nothing for the growth of the protocol.

So, what does work?

Marketing. Which is why 15% of our treasury is dedicated to marketing.

We are marketing wizards, and dedicating a portion of our treasury towards those efforts is why we are currently the #1 fastest growing rebaser in the world.

The power of spending money strategically

Question: What’s going to cause JADE and the FLF to blast off further into the stratosphere?

Answer: Utility.

Real fuckin’ utility.

What if the JADE treasury was a war chest (with a public ledger) specifically deployed to test our utility hypothesis?

Now that’s an intriguing idea.

Enter: The Hyper-Growth Fund.

But first…

If you’re out of the loop, here’s our utility vision for $JADE:

We want to create a Decentralized VC Fund. We want a DAO that uses its treasury to make carefully placed bets, some of which will rocket in value, thus benefiting the entire ecosystem.

Think of it like Y-Combinator, except the rewards go to the community — not just the select few ‘partners.’

In order to achieve this vision, we need to aggressively test the idea. Not every idea will work, but that’s where iteration comes in.

We’re deleting the idea of a “backed currency” — the money in the treasury will be used entirely for sustainable growth.

In the coming weeks, we are going to start testing this — and we’ll be using on-chain voting via Snapshot proposals.

We will propose the best ideas we have to the community on how to use portions of the treasury to test our utility-hypothesis.

Your votes will determine the fate of the funds.

We’re kicking things off right now…

Introducing JADE’s very first on-chain Hyper-Growth Fund vote:

Use 15% of the treasury to fund, grow, and allow our team to go full-time.

Our developers have been stretched thin. We’ve seen the results of that in some of our previous flubs.

We want to aggressively grow our dev team and hire the best in the world, so we can deploy and iterate even faster.

We also want to hire the world’s best economists; fund-managers; game-theory experts; and more. The only way to do this is with capital.

Jade Protocol did not launch with a team allocation of tokens. We didn’t take any outside capital in exchange for tokens either.

We did this on purpose.

Team allocations historically have been used to fund a project and pay employees. Unfortunately, this means teams are forced to sell their native token in order to make money.

Most team allocations are around 20% of token supply. When these teams sell their tokens on the open market — it creates FUD and destroys the project’s chart.

Luckily, we don’t have to do that. Our treasury consists of millions of dollars of non-native assets.

To put it simply, we don’t have to sell $JADE to pay ourselves and grow our A-player team.

We have devs that are still working their day jobs. Let’s give them a reason to quit and go full-time with us.

Like I mentioned, most teams have a 20% allocation of the native token supply that they then liquidate on public markets.

Instead, our #smarter solution is to use 15% of the treasury to fund/hyper-grow our team without impacting the $JADE market.

Win/win.

To recap — you, the JADE community, will vote on whether or not 15% of our treasury is used for these benefits:

1. Aggressively growing our team — we want to continue bringing in geniuses from all around the world. Priority #1 is expanding our dev team.
2. Allowing our team to quit their day jobs — several devs still have a day job and some are even running entire businesses. Incentivizing them to go “all in” with us will require capital.

All uses of the Hyper-Growth Fund will be on a public ledger. A link will be posted on our Gitbook.

If this vote passes, it will have a significant positive impact on the JADE ecosystem. More genius developers we can hire; a full-time, committed team; and zero negative impact on the price of $JADE from “team selling.”

The price-impact of this decision is incredibly bullish. We’re thinking about the 10+ year future of our ecosystem. Having a reliable way to attract the smartest people to fully commit is critical. Dedicating 15% of our treasury is our solution.

(We’ve also got to keep making sure our beloved Jon Ray gets paid. He needs a new computer. Badly.)

Finally… the vote.

Click here to participate in JADE’s very first, on-chain vote to determine how 15% of the Hyper-Growth Fund will be used.

At 5:14 PM PST on Sunday, Dec 12th the vote will end.

And lastly, want some free money?

Of course you do.

We want our community to read everything we put out. Having a deep understanding is critical to building the best community in crypto.

For that reason, every time we release a critical medium post, we’ll also be giving away $15,000 in $BUSD.

We’ve created a short quiz that will test whether or not you’ve read and understood this medium post. If you pass the quiz with a 100% score, you’ll be entered into a raffle to win the cash.

5 winners will be selected on Sunday, December 12th, each getting $3,000.

Getting paid to learn? Not bad :)

The quiz is below:

Anyone caught sharing their answers on Twitter/Discord/TG will be added to our naughty list — so don’t do that.

That’s all for this update. We’re super excited about the future of creating a hive-mind “hyper-growth” fund.

We’re all making history here.