Proposal: Invoice Payment Artis Market Making - September

Shutter DAO DAO Proposals
5

For starters, apologies for not getting back here directly. I have been really under the weather.

I appreciate the concerns raised and coming to this post for actual discourse. I invite you all to think along about the situation we find ourselves in and how we got here in the first place.

We would like to start by clarifying the situation and apologize for the limited amount of information provided in the Decent proposal. The proposal covers payments for work that was already voted on, approved, and most of it completed, but out of courtesy, no payments were requested earlier as the impact was still being assessed. Now, we are simply seeking the payment for that work as originally planned.

We recommend proceeding with this proposal as the economic parameters and transactions remain the same. However, if the community feels strongly about it, a new proposal can be raised, though it would result in the same economic terms and outcomes.

I will attempt to link through to as many of the relevant materials as possible. I have left the pre-LBP advisory out of it, but know that we have been awarded a SHU allocation and haven’t touched that since.

Artis as a market maker

This was the discourse post to tackle the intricacies of the initial agreement between 0x36 and Artis:

TLDR: 6 months of initial term at $5,000.00 a month.

And here is the Snapshot vote that was voted in favor of Artis being enlisted as a market maker once the LBP had concluded: https://snapshot.org/#/shutterdao0x36.eth/proposal/0x3a0396a8e018250455d600c31f3e6e26161b8dca9338a6fd477d408503b185a5

the following is a quote from the proposal: ‘A post-LBP market maker will help Shutter DAO 0x36 transition from the LBP to market liquidity by creating DEX pools, securing listing on CEXs, provide liquidity for efficient trading and minimal price impact, and other related services.’

From that perspective, we have never held back in helping out with providing any of these services except for active back-and-forth trading of the liquidity pool. The premise was to cover the liquidity pool until we could swiftly get on a centralized exchange to fully focus efforts there and keep arbitrage between the different venues to a minimum.

on-chain activity

  1. We executed a shielded deployment of the liquidity pool right after the LBP concluded:

The above was also communicated in the Telegram chat where a lot of positive comments came through.

  1. Swap USDC for USDGLO
  1. Redeploy the liquidity from the V3 Swapr pool
  • We deviated to a ‘cheaper’ alternative pool from the main V2 Uni pool in active discourse with the DAO
  • We have made ourselves available for the following premise that is still ongoing: Decent
  1. Ongoing attempts to connect with a reputable CEX for SHU listing
  • The current CEXs that feature SHU for trading are all free listings and not something the DAO has ever paid a penny for (or really had a say in preventing it from being listed).
  • We leveraged our contacts at CEXs in order to come to the stage of a proposal for a listing but we ran into the recurring issue that no CEX (that’s worth pursuing) is willing to openly commit to a pre listing announcement on a forum such as this and put a price next to it.
  • This limited the options we had to get SHU listed in decent time after the LBPs conclusion. We have been helped by someone closely connected to the DAO to start with activity on BingX, which actually yielded some results and we were happy to continue this route until we can get a party like Gate to commit to getting a proposal on a forum. This is still very difficult because they don’t have a publicly known amount of cash that it would take to list on the platform. Gate serving as an example of how this generally works for their tier of CEX and up.
  1. Let’s call this miscellaneous:
  • I am seeing comments about a lack of transparency where instead we have always been available for input and our general help (we spun up a Telegram for that, and no one has ever gone unanswered). Our commitment to being above board should be reflected in the fact that we organised a call with literally anyone who cared to listen in to make sure everything is clear from the start.
  • the advisory surrounding general token health and sustainability through the slow periods and general best practices on market has all been readily available to folks such as Brainbot employees
  • Coingecko applications and more importantly maintenance thereof has gone through us
  • we have chipped in on the parameters and suggested paths for both liquidity pools as well as the ongoing conversations there were around the treasury management for 0x36.

Reports

We have attempted to keep the DAO up to speed by providing weekly updates here:

That also covered the balance from week to week which we have in our custody both on chain as well as eventually on CEX.

For perfect clarity, Artis currently holds:

  • on chain: 80,000.00 USDC and 399,978.00 SHU (in the wallet we doxed to the DAO: 0x108769199a98c65e68d2b9b5edc8d9464853a729)
  • formerly on BingX: 21,712.44 USDT and 306,382.00 SHU → this has been withdrawn to JLH’s custody in light of the hack that took place on BingX

Current Situation

The Decent proposal served as a continuation of our service, which had once been greenlit already. We just did not want to assume payment of that yet as we felt there was no significant upside to adding high-frequency trading to the mix. That is to say, not just Artis but any market-making effort that would be focused on trading would have been a waste of time and funds.

We did not feel comfortable cashing a check for that as we are also in this for the long run. There is no point in us draining funds from the DAO and leave with a bad taste after 6 months of initial term. That is the only reason we have not charged beyond the first month.

As we have entered the final quarter of the year in a market where everyone is at least optimistic about what this sprint has to bring (especially after BTC’s record-breaking September), we want to dive into the proper trading side of things as it will be to the DAOs benefit.

This means that we are also going to be receiving payment (under the exact same constraints and parameters as the initial agreement). Absolutely nothing has changed except for moving the date of engagement for Artis to September.

At the end of everything that was said and done both on Telegram as well as here, it looks as if payment has now become optional instead of mandatory. Artis simply wants to continue what we have been doing and adding the trading on top for the pre-determined monthly retainer distributed to us each 30-day servicing period.

If the DAO is firmly against this then we part ways here and the 5 months that went without payment should then be straightened out between us. That is not because I firmly believe this is the right way to go about it, but that is under the premise of enforcing a previously approved contract we engaged in.

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