June 13th, 2024
Hello everyone, I'm Bruce, the co-founder of LXDAO. The community invited me to write a commemorative and summary article for our two-year anniversary, for which I feel greatly honored and grateful. Although this article is written by me, the content was completed together with LXDAO community members, to whom I also express my gratitude for their past efforts. This piece will talk about some events that happened in LXDAO and our achievements over the past year, hopefully providing you with a distinct perspective on observing DAOs.
Let's first take a look at how LXDAO has changed from last year to now through a table!
LXDAO is a research and development DAO dedicated to sustainably supporting valuable Web3 public goods and open-source projects. Public goods are non-exclusive, non-rivalrous, and open-source in Web3, and anyone can directly use them without authorization or access control. This includes decentralized organizations, permissionless public blockchains, smart contracts, as well as related codes, documentation, and knowledge. LXDAO combines governance mechanisms, smart contracts, and token economics in an attempt to create a perpetual motion machine supporting Web3 public goods. With research and development at our core, we firmly believe in the value of public goods and have invested human resources and funds to support their sustainable development.
LX means conscience and integrity. It is the acronym for “良心” (liangxin, meaning conscience) and the consensus foundation of our community, and also reflects the qualities of public goods and open-source builders. More than half of LXDAO's community members are developers with strong technical backgrounds, along with many long-termists and idealists focused on supporting digital public goods and open-source projects in Web3.
Looking back from the perspective of our two-year anniversary, our values and mission has not undergone any major changes. Our understanding and depth of insight into the whole matter have become more profound, thus giving rise to some new contemplations, such as cyber socialism, the LX Protocol, LXDAO's core roadmap, and other novel narratives and concepts.
At the outset of LXDAO, the co-founders and a group of friends pooled funds to establish a small treasury for operations, envisioning a runway of about one year. As time went on, thanks to external grants and other contributions, we managed to sustain operations for over a year. Adhering to the principle of not freeloading, our early income could not keep up with expenditures, and the treasury funds gradually depleted.
In response, we mobilized a fundraising team to bolster our finances. We prepared a deck and related documents, and then reached out to VCs extensively, but the majority of the responses were negative. This is understandable – given the bear market of 2023, alongside a DAO dedicated to supporting public goods, it appeared challenging to achieve easy profitability. For VCs, their primary objective is to generate returns, with LPs providing the capital for their operations. Unless the LPs adopt a long-term or idealistic viewpoint, making such investment decisions would be challenging.
We spent a lot of time and effort on fundraising, but the actual results were meager. Fortunately, we later received support from some individual angel investors, finally raising around 30+ WU, which temporarily alleviated some economic pressure and allowed us to extend our runway to explore paths towards sustainability. Subsequently, we also obtained around 8 WU through the retroactive airdrop from OP, further relieving our short-term anxiety. Through effective increasing revenue and reducing expenditure, we estimate being able to sustain operations until the first half of 2025. Currently, we are continuously increasing revenue through collaborations, affording us more time for exploration and output. For a DAO and community, diversifying and sustaining treasury sources is a crucial topic.
Despite the industry's bearish trends in 2023, the LXDAO community thrived. In August alone, more than 50 community members received financial incentives for their contributions, with even more minor contributions going untracked.
Over this year, we hosted 81 online events and 25 offline events.