Portfolio update

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I recently joined the Dash Retreat 2023 in Salt Lake City and gave a presentation on the state of affairs at the DIF. If you weren’t there, here is a recording:

It begins with a quick recap of the reasons for establishing the DIF, its early history and organizational structure. For everybody following us for a while, the more interesting part starts around 10:50 min – an update on our assets.

Maya Liquidity Pool

We helped kickstart the Dash liquidity pool on the Maya network on Sep 20, which absorbed the majority of our liquid assets. The funding transaction is here:
https://www.mayascan.org/tx/869A2B12B31B107C45DB31F105FB0A08E414963E92E098CED634AD0D32C07A79

Since then we rode up the phenomenal price increase of the CACAO token, which went from ca. $0.10 at the time of our funding to $0.93 as of today. Because of the way liquidity pooling works and since Dash itself didn’t see quite the same rise, the Dash side of our pool went from 950 to 2532 Dash to keep the total value balanced. As of writing this, our funds on the Maya chain are worth about $174k:
https://www.mayascan.org/address/maya1wkqtc78fwgpdne3janvyay8gywhn9yy0gs0mgq

That’s an excellent result so far, but keep in mind that this is a very volatile market and the numbers could easily reverse just as quickly. There is also not a very liquid market for CACAO, so even trying to cash out would likely incur significant slippage. Since the DIF is not in the trading business, we’re looking at this as providing a service to the Dash network and will keep the pool going in the foreseeable future.

Investment Portfolio

Here is the overview table from the video at 36:47 min:

InvestmentsAt cost (USD)Estimated
88i392,053640,000
Bitfy150,000150,000
Coinroutes149,973149,973
CrayPay / Ionia300,0151,760,000
Crowdnode11
CTX11
Edge Wallet300,000300,000
Quadency100,000100,000
Ready Raider50,0000
Valkyrie100,000167,000
Total1,542,0423,266,975

I’m going over several of these listings in detail in my presentation, especially those where we observed updated valuations in later financing events that allow us to provide a more up to date estimate of our own share value. I’m not going to repeat everything here, if you want to know the details, including if and how we may divest from Ionia and Valkyrie and much more, please watch the video.

Suffice to say at this point, the estimated total value of our assets as of my September presentation is about $3.35 million. Compared to the current USD value of all the Dash we have ever collected from the treasury of a bit over $400k, this represents a growth of over 8 times.

Again a word of caution, this is unrealized gain. At what value we will actually be able to exit our holdings remains to be seen and it could differ significantly from the numbers presented here. In any case, we are proud of our achievement so far and have all reason to be optimistic about 2024!

Supervisor Election Results

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After a long delay, the DIF Supervisor election finally concluded at the end of February. We had four candidates running for (re)election. We used the DAO proposal system for the election, so each candidate had an application page on Dash Central:

The voting cycle ended with superblock 1827760, the voting deadline for which was on Feb 21. The deadline is important because Dash Central keeps tallying votes even after the deadline passed. Some votes did come in late and show up on DashCentral, but didn’t affect the results as mined in the superblock. MNOwatch is a better source for the results: https://mnowatch.org/leaderboard/analysis/?20230221223001

All four candidates had a net-positive vote count and were therefore confirmed as supervisors:

Sven446
Jared375
Justin271
Rodrigo234
Vote results of 2023 supervisor election

As explained in our Call for Applications, Michael had a two-year term and and will remain on the supervisor board for another year. The top three candidates – Sven, Jared and Justin – won a two-year term this time around, while Michael and Rodrigo will stand for re-election next year if they choose to run again.

In the run-up to the election there was apparently some controversy regarding our request for 2 Dash fee reimbursement. I already addressed it in the Dash Forum at the time and as it turns out, my reasoning applied. Even though it looks on Dash Central, due to late-vote counting, as if two candidates broke the 10% threshold, in reality only one candidate did and triggered a payment, as can be seen on any block explorer. The treasury payout transaction ID is f8690dfa5f5ee5fa98a50e750a9833fa583fdb4dc49ebb4e7a818cf93de75077, here it is in block 1827760: https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?47264970.htm. The DIF payout address is Xvwp4u7CRZpzoU7ryk2Q66Jgo92ejCvb3K. So we paid 4 Dash in proposal fees and received 2 Dash in reimbursements for a net loss of 2 Dash. I don’t think anyone can complain about the DIF trying to profit from the decision proposals this way.

Congratulations to the new supervisors and welcome on board!

Election, Take 2

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I know many of you have been wondering what we’ve been up to lately. You probably noticed we haven’t posted a funding request in a long time. And in August, we called for supervisor applications, but as of today, no new supervisors have been added to the board. What happened?

Funding Requests

We decided to suspend funding requests after the Dash price dropped to the $50 range last year. We felt at that price it would simply take too long to accumulate a significant investment fund. We also don’t want to add additional sell pressure to the Dash market. Since we’re holding our liquid funds typically roughly in a 70:30 split, we would have to sell a large amount of Dash into the bear market.

We realize that in reality the sell pressure is not much reduced due to our stepping back because the budget is typically taken up and mostly sold to fiat by other proposals. DCG is standing out among those and as far as the DIF is concerned, that’s fine. Before DCG started posting supplemental proposals, I had a call with Quantumexplorer to discuss the DIF leaving more room in the budget for DCG. We didn’t need much convincing. There are a few voices who say DCG should cut more, even stop work on Platform. To say it with Steve Jobs: “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” Just swap Apple for Dash. Having funds left for investments is a luxury that we can’t currently afford. We want to see Platform released. We want to see the developers work full steam ahead. We don’t want to see more layoffs mere yards from the finish line.

Supervisor Election

Unfortunately, our call for applications in didn’t yield enough candidates. We extended the deadline in September, but even so, we had to figure out how to deal with a situation where the number of candidates does not exceed the number of available slots. An election wouldn’t make much sense if every candidate is guaranteed a slot.

At the same time, without fresh funds to invest, we reduced our meeting schedule to once per month, which means slower decision-making.

Ash and Glenn also chose not to extend their terms beyond the original election time frame. Both resigned in October. Glenn took on a new job where he had a potential conflict of interest and Ash needed more focus on his own company CTX. We parted on very good terms, but the added workload on the remaining supervisors (Sven, Rodrigo, Michael), who all already have other external priorities and commitments, and then the holiday season led to more delay.

However, we still want to fill the open supervisor slots and so we’re having a second go at it and decided to change the election method. We plan to hold a DAO proposal-based election counting both Yes and No votes. The treasury 10% threshold rule for funding proposals will not apply. The simple balance of Yes minus No votes determines the election result for each candidate. Candidates with negative balance are not elected and the slot will remain vacant for the time being. This adds transparency and gives the community a say over which candidates become supervisors (basically a veto right) and gives us a vote ranking to determine next year’s two-year vs. one-year terms.

You will see these proposals, one for each candidate, posted to the DAO in the next few days. As it looks, we will have two existing supervisors standing for re-election and two new candidates. Michael was elected for a two-year term, so he will extend automatically.

Funds are Safu

Some people were asking about our assets, since you haven’t heard from us for a while. We will publish an annual report for 2022 in a separate post. For now, I’ll just say that almost all of our funds are invested in equity, so we have only limited exposure to the whims of the crypto market. At least two of our investments have developed very well and our portfolio looks strong. More to come.