Aurora is building a community-owned decentralized financial infrastructure that focuses on the education vertical within web3 space.
Aurora aims to create a robust and community-driven treasury that focuses on delivering services, apps, and dapps related to education.
While industries like gaming, arts, supply chain, and finance are setting the pace in the web3 space, education has yet to catch up. This gap is a perfect gateway to onboard new users on this next iteration of the internet.
This vision is evolutionary, so we want to create a new narrative rather than ride the old one.
Aurora is devoted to making an impact by facilitating knowledge sharing and innovation with the community at the core of its value creation.
More in-depth explanation of our short-term goals, mechanics involved, and all you need to know below!
Current Status
The founding team behind the MyEduCompanion[1] platform, along with subject matter experts, will guide the DAO during its infancy phase. However, when the mechanics go live, Aurora and its initiatives would operate with complete transparency and in accordance with the regulations set by the DAO. The present and future projects will also be directly governed by the DAO, regardless of their (online/offline) nature.
Upcoming initiatives (To be later proposed as part of AIP 001)
· MyEduCompanion: Establish web3 compatibility, rehaul the entire UI and initiate on-boarding to the eco-system using rewards/staking mechanisms which are to be decided at a later stage, as part of V2.0 update.
The upgrade will introduce personalization of learning resources and incentivization for end users. We aim to give a percentage of the revenue generated by the platform back to the user in the form of a native token.
Till we prep V3.0 update, the web2 and web3 components will co-exist to make the experience as seamless as possible for the end-user. However, the aim is to shift over to a completely decentralised infrastructure with the V3.0 update.
· Edu-Academy: The Premier Educational Institute in the Metaverse. One of the overarching visions of Aurora is to promote knowledge and innovation while breaking down the barriers of accessibility. We are a few steps away from the inception of the academy while it remains one of the primary goals of Aurora. Currently, the tech needed to make this a reality is not easily accessible to the common masses, and that is precisely what we aim to solve as we grow. More details about the project are to be ironed out as part of epoch goal setting.
· Alpha Particle: A community driven event where the DAO will decide its initiatives for the forthcoming epochs by inviting ideas and innovations. These projects will not only help the DAO in successfully realising its core objectives, but such projects will also have the autonomy to evolve by being independent in what they do. The investors of Aurora will also reap long standing benefits from projects that are birthed/supported by the DAO.
What are we doing?
We are building a community-owned decentralized financial infrastructure for equitable value creation and incentivization of all stakeholders by focusing on delivering apps and services that caters to the requirements of the community.
Knowledge, as we know, fosters innovation. We will concentrate on delivering within the education vertical in the early stages. However, as we grow, there is no threshold to what we can achieve together.
Why are we doing this?
The conventional system is broken. Through our journey in giving birth to an ed-tech start up and trying to abide by the systemic regulations we realized that most value that is created in the community gets usurped by the bad actors at every level of administration, finance, and other rigmarole. Our vision of creating an ecosystem for efficient dispersion of knowledge and resources seemed impossible to achieve within the bounds of traditional sphere. As a result of which we decided to embrace the fundamentals of web3 and give power back to the most important actors in this eco-system, the value creators, and the end users.
How do we aim to do this?
There are a few key components that will be critical in helping us achieve our goals:
· DAO
· Treasury
· Investors/Backers
· Value creators
· Builders
DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)
The gods at Olympus introduced us to a sustainable governance and transparent financial infrastructure. Soon enough there were multiple DAO’s, absolute copies or otherwise, on several chains and the narrative soon became “How much APY?”
“The current paradigm of DeFi governance and community participation is centralized and has a low ratio of volunteers to output.”
What we claim instead is, functioning as a DAO gives the Community an absolute autonomy to evolve.
The backbone of this new form of digital economy has been derived by the Internal coordination theory:
“OlympusDAO is the first organization to realize and implement a very significant shift in the application of economic theory. This shift can be expressed in the following way: in digital economy, the economic forces of demand versus supply are generalized into forces of internal coordination versus price coordination. Supply and demand pertain only to price coordination, while entrepreneurship/self-organization (which falls outside neo-classical price theory) pertain to internal coordination. The framework of internal coordination theory is able to explain economic productivity and intrinsic value within digital economy, as distinguished from the more specific materials economy.
Internal coordination is still underappreciated as a form of economic productivity, with particular relevance to digital economy. Internal coordination is separate from the forces of supply and demand, and is what equilibrates or regulates supply and demand. Thus, it is what motivates natural self-correction and self-governance by market participants themselves from within the market. The market requires a human being, an entrepreneur, to recognize and solve existing coordination problems, outside of the price mechanism. This happens through the negotiation of social norms. The market is only self-regulating and self-correcting to the extent that common sense norms are negotiated and shared by everyday participants, through internal coordination.
Internal coordination theory represents a distributed demand-side economics, or a supply-side self-governance, as opposed to centralized governance.” [2]
The future of transparent governance is on-chain. Web3 and the development of decentralized finance have led us to an opportunity where we will witness the biggest redistribution of wealth and power ever recorded in human history. We intend to utilize the foundations laid out by Olympus DAO and build a community-owned decentralized financial infrastructure.
Treasury
Most often overlooked but absolutely the most vital component of this new age economic infrastructure is the treasury. In the words of the OG:
“Treasury (reserve backing): The money from the bond sales goes into the treasury reserves. These are the reserve assets that back the value of each $OHM token. The Risk-Free Value (RFV) is an amount of stablecoin that backs each $OHM token that is minted and sold through bonding or through rewards distribution. The treasury must contain this RFV amount of stablecoin for each $OHM token it mints into circulation. The Market Value of Backing per Token metric, is the treasury reserve backing that is made up of other treasury assets besides stablecoins, which therefore may have more volatility.”
The current narrative is providing immediate gratification for the early investors in form of unsustainably high APY’s or more technically the “reward rate”, as explained here:
“Reward rate*: This measure determines the amount of new $OHM that is minted for stakers. The percentage of $OHM that is staked then determines the APY. The amount of bond sales together with the reward rate determines the rate of supply growth. Every $OHM token that is minted must be backed by one unit of risk-free value. The reward rate combined with the percentage of total $OHM supply staked, gives the APY, or annual percentage yield. The APY is the primary internal measure of internal coordination. It is the inverse measure of the health of the DAO. When the DAO is doing well the APY will be lower, because the reward rate will be lower (which means the protocol has been in existence for a longer time), and there will be a high percentage staked (which means that there is long-term internal confidence).”[3]
Often projects with no vision or goal (ultimately no revenue) will either run out of assets in the treasury to mint new coins to give out those insanely high APYs or the projects originated of malicious intention will end up in a rug pull before they can ever reach stability.
We need to change the narrative. If digital economy is to become the norm, then it needs to have much less unpredictability and volatility. If the protocol strives long term sustainability, then the reward rates are essential to be tweaked according to what the DAO’s overarching vision is and instead be utilized accordingly.
A balancer/management ratio set algorithmically would ensure that the treasury always maintains a ratio in its reserve value dedicated for the purpose.
For the sake of convenience let’s call it “BALANCER INDEX” or BI.
BI would be directly reflective of the ratio of assets allocated by the DAO for its initiatives.
For example,
Aurora aims to maintain a 3:1 ratio in the treasury reserves during its inception phase (first epoch) where 75% of available treasury will be used to reward the stakers and the other 25% would be directly invested or instantly made available for the DAO’s next value creation initiative/s. A higher proportion on the rewards side can be used as a lever by the DAO during its initial phase to invite more investments or if the DAO decides to do so. Gradually the DAO will look to stabilize at a BI of 1:1
Ideal BI in such case is of 1:1, however if the need arises, DAO will have the power to make gradual alterations to this value and provide for it.
Within the documents Olympus DAO have explained the three aspects to its ruleset:
· Staking (internal coordination)
· Bonding (price coordination)
· Treasury (reserve backing)
And this ruleset is governed by three main levers:
· Rewards rate and APY (internal measure of internal coordination)
· Bond control variable (internal measure of price coordination)
· Premium over RFV (price measure of internal coordination)
Let’s understand BI as one such internal measure for price and internal coordination.
A ratio of 1:1 will mean that Aurora treasury is giving out as much percentage of its revenue as staking rewards, as it is investing in value creation and innovation.
Implications of having a BI regulated rewards system:
Relatively lower APYs during the initial phase of the DAO but the ROI’s grow as the DAO prospers and introduces new use cases and derivatives!
An Investor protection measure: Even though the infrastructure provided to us by Olympus is pretty robust, we believe another lever such as BI would make sure that the absolute value of the DAO never goes to zero (highly unlikely!) and there’s always room for innovation and reviving the treasury health.
Investors/Backers
The advent of digital economy has given birth to a new breed of investors. Investors who understand the value on display and then choose to invest or withhold.
“We can think of digital economy as a market for focal points. And this is hardly the same as a market for memes, or virality. It is actually quite the opposite. The meme is defined by mimesis- how effective its imitation, simulation, and copying. The focal point, by contrast, is defined by originality- how effective it grounds absolute, unique shared organization in the absence of ability to directly communicate. Focal points are the origin of memes; the latter are temporal derivatives of the former.”[4]
A nascent market is easily manipulated with the meme. However, as the market matures so does the investors. Digital economy is at the verge of mass adoption and the entire space will mature at an unforeseen pace. For an economic infrastructure such as we envision; a reasonable & literate investor who understands that the game theory (3,3) is much more than just a meme IS an absolute must. These are the backers/ liquidity providers/ believers who bring the much-required value with them and bootstrap the protocol to get things moving.
An implementation like Aurora will keep the treasury strapped up to keep relatively consistent reward-to-innovation ratio. The investors in this situation are getting constant staked rewards while securing their interest in any future DAO derivatives/ initiatives.
Value creators
An eco-system such as we aim to create puts value creation to its core. Using the mechanics of on-chain governance we aim to make it as frictionless as possible.
To quote another pioneer in the space ROME who are taking on chain governance to newer heights:
“The current paradigm of DeFi governance and community participation is centralized and has a low ratio of volunteers to output. We‘re running a grand experiment in gamification as an attempt at making governance both fun and engaging.”[5]
We introduce the Pillars of Aurora:
· The Council of Elders (Policy and Strategy)
· House of Innovators (Research and Development)
· House of Builders (Infrastructure and Technology)
· House of Creators (Content, Marketing, Curriculum, Arts and Culture)
· House of Justice (Legal and Treasury)
Building on the idea ROME introduced, we call upon the community to align themselves to the houses and self-assign themselves the role they feel most comfortable in. Each house comes with its own set of benefits and can be considered a Sub-DAO.
The Builders
No matter how ambitious a vision be, it can never be achieved without the talent that can give it a reality. It is the Visionaries and Pioneers among us who continuously redefine the boundaries of what possible is. Such endeavors need fuel to feed. A treasury that is thriving and self-sustaining is absolutely the tool that can fuel the needs of tomorrow. A true (3,3) where a positive flywheel takes a whole new meaning.
We also invite the ideas which would not get funded in the conventional sphere and give them tools to add value to our ecosystem of innovations. Eventually, all the stakeholders reap benefits of such derivatives and future initiatives.
Aurora is building an eco-system where knowledge and innovation thrives. The advent of web3 and de-fi principles have led us to a point in our history where value creation is not bound by arbitrary regulations and systemic culpability. Let us use the opportunity to come together and shape the future for generations to come.
From,
Table of the Elders
Aurora social handles:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Aurora_defi
Discord: https://discord.gg/wjZHnnyUXF
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/auroradao/
References:
[1] https://myeducompanion.com/about
[2] https://docs.olympusdao.finance/main/whitepapers/economic-productivity
[3] ibid
[4] https://docs.olympusdao.finance/main/whitepapers
[5] https://rome.gitbook.io/romedao/campaigns-and-houses/houses-of-romedao
