TL;DR: AGAINST. I think we could consider becoming a minor strategic investor in certain early stage opportunities where 1) there is extreme strategic alignment and 2) Badger takes a minority stake in the round alongside a proven DeFi fund.
Do we really want Badger to become a seed investment vehicle? This is a pretty big slippery slope in my opinion. We could fund hundreds of seed opportunities that seek to benefit the DeFi ecosystem in one way or another.
Regarding the specifics of the investment.
- Opolis currently has an additional $1M of committed funds
- $1-2M in in funds allocated from BadgerDAO
- BadgerDAO will work with Opolis to fill out a round of $3-4M.
This sounds like Badger would potentially become the lead investor here. It shouldn’t be our job to lead seed-stage rounds. Badger is not a venture capital DAO. I could maybe get behind a modified BIP where Badger is a minority participant of an investment round where it is an extremely good fit to Badger’s mission of bringing Bitcoin into DeFi.
If people really want to get behind this, at least I’d propose to reduce our commitment to $1M, or even $500K, and add a provision to make our investment conditioned on the overall target being reached. I’d also feel more comfortable with Badger investing alongside a proven DeFi fund, such as Paradigm, Polychain, Parafi, Nascent, Variant, etc. Some of these are Badger investors, and I actually wonder how they would feel about this.