Badger DAO Q1 24 Review

General Discussion
1

Badger DAO Q1 Review

It is an exuberant time for Badger DAO. After a long wait and patient conviction the eBTC protocol has been set free into the wild by the Badger Association. This launch is a huge milestone for BadgerDAO after retiring the vault system and refocusing efforts on a novel way to drive decentralized access to Bitcoin on the Ethereum network. This post will review Q1 actions from the Badger token holders, Badger Community Council and Badger Treasury Council. The goal of this review is to provide information to investors and community members to the best of the knowledge of the Badger Community Council of the DAO’s happenings in Q1.

The DAO

Governance: BADGER Token Holders

BADGER token holders, facilitated by the Badger Community Council, voted on 9 Badger Improvement Proposals (BIPs) in Q1-2024. Each of these BIPs is related to extending the Restitution program enacted after the December 2021 hack. The topic was broken down into these 9 individual votes to allow for granularity in the implementation details.

It’s important to review these decisions as they impact token holders as well as the DAO’s Treasury over the coming year.

This reiterates the importance of token holders driving the DAO’s path forward as well as the collaborative working relationship with and support provided by the Community Council.

In summary, token holders voted to:

Approve:

  • Allocation of 1 million BADGER tokens from the treasury to the restitution program
  • Limiting withdrawals from the program
  • Restitution reward vesting and withdrawal schedule
  • Completion of the restitution program if the program is able to return the original loss in USD ($) using the 4-hour TWAP of the BADGER token
  • Reinstating one entity who withdrew early from the original restitution program and held his Badger position

Decline:

  • Minting 1 million new BADGER tokens to continue to replenish the Treasury in support of the ongoing eBTC product roadmap
  • Removing the restriction on the Treasury spending more than 10% of uncirculating BADGER supply without a BIP
  • Reinstating a second entity who withdrew early from the restitution program and sold his positions

The BIP details are found below:

Governance: Treasury Council

As a reminder, BIP 89 established the Badger Treasury Council and a policy for managing Treasury assets and the role of community governance. The purpose of the BIP was to, “Balance inflows versus outflows into the DAO, and offset any differences to enable the DAO to continue in a financially sustainable manner.”

BIP 89 established 3 key wallets:

  1. Treasury Vault: Long-term Holdings
  2. Treasury Ops Wallet: Short-term Holdings
  3. Badger Payments: Contractor / Contributor Payments, Expenses, Bounties, Etc*
    4.Note - with the establishment of the Association, this multi-sig has been deprecated and the Association has created their own multi-sig with a separate body signers.

Further, BIP 89 requires the Treasury Council to provide:

  • Treasury Inflows
  • Treasury Outflows
  • Treasury Holdings

It further requires that, “No investment should be made that cannot be properly valued.”

In Q1-2024, the Treasury Council approved the following Treasury Council Decisions (TCDs):

*waiting to be finalized and published

Governance: Community Council

BIP 93 formalized responsibilities of the Badger Community Council including:

  • Governance
  • Checks and balances
  • Council structure and responsibilities
  • Budget and incentives

In Q1-2024, the Badger Community Council passed the following 5 initiatives, resulting in the 9 BIPS listed above, transfer of Discord to community ownership, hiring of a Discord administrator to improve security and operations, funding of rewards for a Brand Voice Survey and oversight of a new Badger X/Twitter operations team. The specific decisions are listed below:

The Treasury

Overall Treasury Position

The Treasury ended 2023 with $27 million in assets. This improved to $43 million in assets at the end of Q1-2024. The change is attributed to the bullish nature of BTC, ETH and BADGER token holdings during this period. There was no material revenue.

BADGER Token

The Treasury held 3.43 million BADGER tokens at the end of 2023 and 3.15 million tokens at the end of Q1-2024.

The BADGER token closed 2023 at 3.96 and rose 80% to close Q1-2024 at $7.14. This increased the market value of Treasury holdings by $8.9 million, from $13.6 million to $22.5 million when accounting for spent tokens.

This improvement in the financial position is reduced by $7.14 million to a gain of $1.76 million when accounting for the restitution payment approved in Q1-2024 but not yet transferred out of the treasury.

1.4 million BADGER tokens are allocated to liquidity positions leaving ~1.95 million liquid tokens. Of these liquid tokens, 1 million are allocated to restitution and 300k are allocated to be lent to a market maker. Accounting for Association and Council Badger payments, the DAO is forecasted to end 2024 with 212k liquid BADGER tokens, or $1.5 million at the Q1-2024 closing price of $7.14.

The Restitution Program

Badger established a restitution program to compensate parties who lost funds in the December 2021 hack. There has been no progress on identifying the culprits or recouping additional funds since the program was established.

The first restitution program ended in February ‘24 and the community asked for a vote to extend the restitution program while also adding 1 million additional BADGER tokens. The extended program and additional tokens were approved via BIPs and the program will be implemented in Q2-2024.

The Product (eBTC)

eBTC Initial Launch

It is easy to say that eBTC’s launch has been a fantastic success for the DAO. At the time of writing there is already $1.3mil of staked ETH collateral deposited into the protocol. Given that the contracts are only a few days old this shows great confidence in the integrity of the development process. It will be exciting to see new deposits as confidence continues to grow.

You can interact with eBTC here: https://www.ebtc.finance/
Block analytica delivered a fantastic dashboard for the community and broader public to monitor eBTC’s status: https://ebtc.blockanalitica.com/.

The Service Providers:

  • Badger X/Twitter (Impact3)

  • Discord (Koma)

  • The Badger Association

Impact3 / X

The Badger community Twitter was transitioned in Q1 to be run by Impact3 who have extended experience in the DeFi marketing arena. They plan to bring a fresh look to Badger’s brand voice and will push to grow the community. They will work closely with eBTC’s marketing team to help amplify eBTC’s message and connect it back to the Badger brand.

Koma / Discord

The Badger community discord is now being managed by Koma. Koma has performed a security audit on the discord, implemented anti-spam bots, rationalized roles, archived and cleaned up the channels. Koma is now maintaining the discord as an admin.

The Badger Association

The Association Transparency Plan

Below is the breakdown of the Association Q1-2024 transparency plan’s key elements:

  • Quarterly ‘State of the Association’ report that’s similar to the ‘State of the DAO 5‘ which has been published since 2022 with updates and performance commentary :x:
  • Quarterly town halls with the greater community :white_check_mark:
  • Monthly builder updates from tech and product (first one coming soon) :x:
  • Public eBTC dashboard (to track TVL, positions etc.) :white_check_mark:
  • Public eBTC code :white_check_mark:
  • Public eBTC multisig repo :white_check_mark:
  • Public Association financials :x:
  • Quarterly budget with milestones across product, tech and ops :white_check_mark:

As per the last point above, the Association recently received approval from the Treasury Council for Q1 funding 10, which includes the milestones outlined in this post along with the GTM and cost drivers to deliver these outcomes.

Q1 Product and Tech Milestones

Service providers contracted to the Association aligned to one core goal, the launch of eBTC.

Below are the technical and product goals with milestones across Web2 and Web3:

Technical development milestone - Launch eBTC

Web3

  • Launch new testnet for release-0.6 :white_check_mark:
  • Complete continued external review of release-0.6 :white_check_mark:
  • Launch initial Eth-variant Zaps (enter/increase/exit collateral positions in native ETH, WETH, stETH, wstETH) :white_check_mark:
  • Go live with pre-launch bug bounty (last official audit) :white_check_mark:
  • Launch Guardrail monitoring services :white_check_mark:
  • Execute multiple incident response drills pre launch in accordance with the IR plan :white_check_mark:
  • Merge final audit recommendations :white_check_mark:
  • Launch eBTC protocol on mainnet :white_check_mark:
  • Go live with official post launch bug bounty (Immunefi) :white_check_mark:

Web2:

  • Release eBTC SDK :x:
  • Support new testnet deployment in eBTC.finance dapp :white_check_mark:
  • Build, launch, and run all bots (liquidation, MEV, etc) :white_check_mark:
  • Integrate dedicated incentive program into eBTC.finance dapp :white_check_mark:
  • Support ETH variant zaps in eBTC.finance dapp on mainnet :white_check_mark:
  • Deploy Reward distribution engine in eBTC.finance dapp :x:
  • Launch eBTC.finance dapp with mainnet contracts deployed :white_check_mark:
  • Launch & support eBTC tracking dashboard in collaboration with Block Analitica :white_check_mark:

Product development milestone - Launch eBTC

  • Finalize launch plan to manage risk and protocol execution (in collaboration with Block Analitica and Steakhouse through the BALCO) after public community feedback :white_check_mark:
  • [Design and execute seeding plan in collaboration with Treasury Council to bring eBTC to market and ensure a stabilized launch :white_check_mark:
  • Execute the marketing launch plan and establish baselines to grow engagement (PR and influencer engagement, establish a pre/post launch baseline on content performance) :white_check_mark:
  • Design and launch new incentive program with eBTC going live and a new partner :white_check_mark:
  • Finalize and support 2 new eBTC protocol integration partners to go live shortly after launch :x:
  • Establish and start new BADGER token push in Asia with service providers across influencer, content, contests and social media marketing in conjunction with eBTC launch. :white_check_mark:

Be relentless. Be Badgers.

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awesome summary @vipes, thanks a lot!

especially useful for community members that dont have the time to check all announcements, tweets, threads, etc. :slight_smile:

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