Money for the Interchain
Designed as a store of money and distributed to loyal Juno Network contributors in February, all the NETA is owned by the Community. It was distributed to JUNO stakers, with significant bonuses going to those stakers that participated in governance proposal votes and a small bonus to those that delegated outside of the top twenty in the JUNO validator set.
All-in-all, only 32,950 NETA were created, 31,886.4 were claimed, and 1,063.6 unclaimed NETA were burned.
You can pair your NETA with JUNO on the JunoSwap AMM and earn incentive rewards in RAW tokens. You can also pair NETA with OSMO on the Osmosis AMM and earn incentive rewards in OSMO tokens. Annual Percentage Rates (APR’s) for these two farms are lucrative, at 75% and 57% respectively. Staking for NETA has not started, yet.
Since both automated market makers have active liquidity pools, you can swap for NETA, if you would like to own some now. Based on typical market forces with early hype and excitement, subsequent tumultuous waves up and down, a large scale liquidity departure, and now an overall negative macro market sentiment, NETA has followed these trends with a consistent decline in its trading price (see the price chart in the picture below).
The NETA DAO
The Neta Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) has formed and numerous fruitful discussions have taken place to set-up its charter and develop ideas for its future. The front-end dApp for the DAO has to finish development and when launched, community members can be a part of securing NETA’s future as a store of value, initially by staking NETA at the DAO, and subsequently participate in governance proposals to shape the future of the NETA DAO and its treasury.
The mission of the NETA DAO consists of:
- Facilitate community accelerators, which create and distribute value to the members
- Facilitate community generators, which are ways to encourage participation in the DAO
- Facilitate community cultivators, to create tools by the community and for the community to foster engagement, participation, and retention
- Secure Neta’s use case as a store of value.
The DAO has published a Guidance statement (see the picture below).
Benefits to the Community
Initially, securing NETA’s use cases as a store of value is expected to kick-off with the staking of NETA, when the DAO front-end launches. Based on the conversations in the Community on Commonwealth, it appears that NETA stakers will earn rewards.
Extensive discussion initially revolved around a new token, JUP, to be used as the rewards, spend, and utility token for various endeavors that will be developed by the Community, in the future. I have linked the Commonwealth pages for the NETA DAO, which contain the discussions, proposed projects, use cases, and possible tokenomics for this new token.
Following the weekly discussions, it is unclear to me whether the JUP token will actually be introduced. The Commonwealth proposal includes an impressive tokenomics section and if implemented, I believe that this token could be an important utility driver for transaction processing, preserving NETA as the governance token and store of money. It would also open up additional use cases in itself, as JUP could support spending on transactions for projects launching under the umbrella of the NETA DAO.
What is clear from the discussions however is that the NETA DAO Community is passionate, engaged, and excited about developing value accruals for NETA. Benefits to the members may consist of access to dApps, airdrops, NFTs, and whitelists for NFT minting events. Let’s take a look at what is likely to be the first of these: NETA Trooprs.
The Inaugural NFT Collection
The NETA Trooprs NFT collection is expected to launch on the Passage Marketplace soon. Communications with the Passage Team have indicated that it is a priority for the NETA Trooprs minting event to be conducted, after several unforeseen delays. It is still to be expected that there will be a minting price of 6 ATOM, excluding fees. In order to mint NFT’s on the Passage Marketplace, the ATOM tokens must be deposited on the Juno blockchain. This is as easy as depositing them from JunoSwap and all the IBC transactions to move them from the Cosmos Hub to the Juno Network will be handled automatically in the background. Alternatively, you could just swap to ATOM from another token on JunoSwap. Minting transaction fees will be taken in JUNO; therefore, you will of course need some JUNO in your Keplr wallet, as well.
Here is another sample from the NETA Trooprs collection (see the picture below and the one at the top of the article).
Passage3D is a company that provides an immersive three-dimensional experience to the users of its technologies. Current use cases include virtual worlds, video conferences, video presentations, streaming events, and even e-commerce. The Passage Marketplace on the Juno Network has already conducted its initial event, minting the collection of Strange Clan NFT’s, which are currently trading with a floor price of 49 ATOM. See the links in the Sources section below for more information.
Working Groups and Proposed Projects
Besides launching the NETA DAO front-end, starting the staking of NETA, and minting the NETA Trooprs NFT collection, the DAO has a large number of initiatives it is kicking off.
The Community has proposed to break out into the following working groups:
- NFT’s and NFT Collaborations — work with artists and bring exclusive NFT collections to the NETA Community
- Branding and Marketing — introducing the NETA brand to the world
- Exploration and Ventures — explore real world use cases for investment opportunities and participation
- DAO Validator — launching a validator for the DAO
- DAO Constitution — develop a constitution and a framework to deliver on the DAO’s mission statement.
Besides the aforementioned projects, there have been several exciting projects proposed by the Community. One member, HODLer, has developed a proposal for a NFT game app, designed around a role playing game world with financial elements to add value to NETA. I have provided a link to this super interesting and creative proposal in the Sources section below. The amount of detail in the proposal is exceptional and the imaginative elements worked into the proposal are phenomenal. There were even some art renderings for the game presented in the proposal (see picture below).
There has also been discussion of a dividend style ETF with NETA and other Cosmos tokens forming a fund with yield generating features. Other proposals include DAO members providing a proposal verification and vetting service, as well as developing a casino and lottery style gaming app.
My Two Tokens
I have been following NETA’s evolution for a couple of months and I think that the time to implement the ideas put forth by the Community members has arrived. The key will be to attract the required resources to bring all these ideas into the fruition. Future development and subsequent implementation of all these great ideas will unfortunately be dependent on the ability of the NETA DAO to build a war chest of treasury funds. It appears that this first phase is on the cusp of kicking off and I look forward to playing a small role in its success.
The proposed NFT projects are clearly excellent drivers for Community involvement and excitement. However, I also love the ideas that have been offered up by the Community to bring in elements of DeFi. Creating an ETF, supplying NETA as collateral to a money market and being able to borrow against it, launching a second token, and tying financial income generators to games are all excellent ideas. Using the JUP token as a utility token to pay incentive rewards, interest on supplied collateral, and transaction fees could be an important element to preserve NETA as a store of value.
I have also seen other projects utilize some innovative concepts surrounding these areas of DeFi. Both Nebula Protocol (under development) and VegaX on the Konstellation Network blockchain offer index based strategies. With clusters or baskets of digital assets, these investment strategies track popular sectors or categories, including for example those with a blue-chip, stablecoins, DeFi, or ecosystem centric focus. Mars Protocol will re-launch its money market and leveraged yield farming strategies on Osmosis. Derivatives strategies that protocols like Levana and Prism have developed are full of promise and have not been deployed on the Juno Network, yet. Imagine refracting NETA into its principal component pNETA and yield bearing component yNETA!
For the Community, by the Community
Of course, these are all just my thoughts, from the perspective of an enthusiastic participant. The stones have been laid and the foundation is almost complete; therefore, I think that NETA DAO is perfectly positioned to build from here and leverage some of these exciting technologies. More importantly, once the front-end has launched and NETA Trooprs NFT’s have been minted, the DAO could evaluate partnerships with some of these other teams to introduce more NFT, Gaming, and DeFi opportunities to the NETA Community.
Regardless of the actual direction and subsequent projects coming off the ground, I am looking forward to the developments of the coming months and a fruitful implementation of many of the ideas presented by the Community.
Tot ziens — Opa.
Sources, References, and Further Reading
Neta Money Twitter — @NetaMoney
Neta DAO Twitter — @NetaDao
Community Accelerator discussion on Commonwealth
