Decent DAO’s roadmap is live. The roadmap reviews the key milestones of 2022 and outlines the execution plan for 2023. Check it out below!

Note: We intend to update and release this roadmap on a quarterly basis—content may change significantly from version to version as Decent adapts to the ever-evolving market.

🧱 2022: The Foundation

💵 Raise Money

Why?

Venture studios require capital to operate. Generally, new ventures launched into emerging markets gain market penetration as loss leaders.

What?

We aimed to raise $7M from top-tier, crypto-native investors.

How?

• Pitch our transition from experienced development agency to venture studio.

• Identify a top-tier lead and negotiate a top-tier valuation.

• Close funding for 3+ years of runway.

Outcome: Decent raised $10M at a $56M valuation from industry leaders such as GSR, BlockTower, Cumberland, DCG, and 1kx just days before the crypto investing market unraveled.

🏗  Become a Venture Studio

Why?

As an agency, Decent was limited by the scaling constraints of a linear relationship between human capital and financial returns. As an accelerator, we suffered from the selection bias of working only with founders who saw value in outsourcing critical aspects of their businesses, and we received too little equity in return.

As a venture studio, we leverage our skills exponentially by creating many distinct venture opportunities—limited only by our own abilities—and reserve the lion’s share of upside for ourselves.

What?

We are becoming a venture studio, using our funds to incubate new protocols and guiding as many as possible to product-market fit.

How?

• Identify the operational gaps that must be filled in order to succeed as a venture studio.

• Define the responsibilities of those workstreams and onboard executive leaders to manage them.

• Expand our studio teams to support additional concurrent ventures.

• Reduce the cost to launch DeFi protocols and achieve product-market fit, increasing our throughput and probability of success.

🚀 Launch Our First Ventures

Why?

Though we are just laying the foundation for critical aspects of our studio, we must make progress towards our objective of launching protocols and guiding them to product-market fit.

What?

We are launching two protocols from our fledgling venture studio this year, generating two venture opportunities and field testing our new functions as an organization.

How?

• Onboard the necessary design and engineering resources.

• Activate our new Research, Protocol, and Marketing workstreams.

• Incubate, launch, and gain early traction and user feedback for two new decentralized protocols.

🌎 DAOify

Why?

Decent was conceived by two friends driven by a passion for decentralization and the promise of radical transparency and inclusion. We believe decentralization can be our venture studio’s defining strength, incentivizing a global network of builders with the opportunity to financially and creatively own the protocols they develop.

What?

We are dissolving Decent Labs’ former operating entities and will soon deploy Decent DAO and DCNT to the Ethereum network, empowering new contributors to onboard themselves to our community.

How?

• Take inventory of Decent Labs’ existing dependencies. If a dependency is still required in our new model, determine whether a decentralized alternative exists or transfer the dependency to an individual DAO member.

• Establish the Decent Foundation to serve as a temporary home for critical, real-world dependencies of the DAO that cannot yet be delegated or decentralized.

• Deploy Decent DAO via Fractal with the optimal governance structure for our venture studio.

• Seed the DAO’s treasury with a budget for 90 days’ worth of runway and funding for our first two ventures.

• Publish a bounty board and contributor handbook to serve as the genesis of autonomous contribution at Decent.

👑 Gain Clout

Why?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Our accomplishments still exist in relative silence in our industry. With our refined focus on DeFi, we must speak to and gain the admiration of the core crypto community more than ever before.

What?

We are developing a strong presence and active following across core crypto media channels, and positioning ourselves as thought leaders in the innovative fringe of our industry.

How?

• Define a clear brand and communications strategy.

• Develop a reputation of expertise for our DAO through published research and educational content.

• Establish the founders of Decent as thought leaders on crypto Twitter and mainstream outlets such as Coindesk and Decrypt.

• Drive contributors to our DAO through our Discord server and foster a loyal community to build, use, promote, and invest in our protocols.

🏃🏼‍♂️2023: The Execution

🔪 Penetrate the Market

Why?

Our venture studio will succeed over time through the commercial success of its individual protocols. The first major milestone to commercialization and liquidity for a protocol is to achieve product-market fit (PMF). For our purposes, PMF can be defined as a point at which additional capital resources are required to continue addressing the growing serviceable demand. PMF is where the journey of scaling and monetization begins for a protocol.

What?

We will achieve product-market fit for two protocols.

How?

• Build a wide variety of DeFi protocols to increase our swings at bat.

• Build a brand, early user base, and feedback loop to drive the journey to product-market fit.

• Validate multiple monetization options for each protocol, ensuring sustainability and user approval to forecast future earnings.

🎯 Launch More Protocols

Why?

While we will constantly seek to improve the chances of a venture reaching product-market fit, all else equal, there is a direct correlation between the number of opportunities we pursue and our chances of success. Most ventures fail, and it would be reckless to think of our studio projects as exceptions to this rule.

What?

We will launch six more protocols in 2023.

How?

• Improve project management efficiency across all Decent DAO workstreams to increase the output of more venture opportunities within our initial funding.

• Scale up the team to increase our total bandwidth for research, design, development, and marketing of new protocols.

• Front load as much customer research and product discovery during research to decrease the time to market and the risk to achieving product-market fit within budget.

• Challenge ourselves to explore new ways to reduce execution risk and cost of production.

🌏 Decentralize Further

Why?

To manifest our vision as a global, builder-owned cooperative, we are incentivizing the most talented and capable people, and severing our ties with fiat legal and financial infrastructure.

What?

We will make consistent progress towards intelligent decentralization.

How?

• Identify new audiences and contributor skill sets to bring into our community.

• Implement work-to-earn and reputation systems that reward builders with ownership.

• Continue to replace centralized and/or human processes with decentralized and/or automated services to improve contributor equity.

💰 Raise More Money

Why?

We raised pre-seed capital to fund 8-12 protocols. Our primary objective is to achieve product-market fit with as many protocols as possible. At that point, we will require additional capital to grow each protocol DAO and continue to build new ones.

What?

We will achieve a 2-10x valuation increase through a fundraising strategy centered around our protocols that show meaningful traction towards product-market fit.

How?

• Maintain positive investor sentiment through consistent communication.

• Construct a pitch centered around product-market fit indicators across the portfolio.

• Display an aggregate value as follows:

  • V = Protocols * Traction * Market Premium

• Raise funding to scale up our successful protocols and launch even more.

Thank you team members and community members for all your support and enthusiasm. Your builder prowess laid the essential groundwork. Together, we continue to accelerate the Decent vision for a decentralized future.

LFG 🚀