Jupiter aims to build the everything exchange, push the giant unified market and help to accelerate the decentralized meta. JUP is the crucial resource and alignment mechanism at the heart of it all.
Whether from a product, adoption, or community point of view, we are extremely early in this journey. As such, if we are going to have any chance at all of achieving the lofty goals, building and maintaining the trust between the early stakeholders is a crucially important foundation.
The single most important factor in establishing trust within token based communities is the integrity of the token.
If the crucial stakeholders do not have conviction that the token is being properly managed and distributed in a highly net positive manner, or do not trust that each other have the best intentions, it is like trying to build a skyscraper on a giant pile of tofu.
It would not matter how advanced the skyscraper is, how pretty the massive solar panel windows are, how experienced the crew is, how much oil money is being funnelled towards building it - you simply cannot do it because the foundation is too shaky.
If you are worried about being instadumped on, you are not gonna be talking about the 10 year roadmap. Just no way.
With so many of the recent launches, it almost feels like there’s an adverse PvP relationship between investors, devs and even between community members - leading to a distrusting tension where the conversation becomes dominated by who gets what, who is exit liquidity, rather than making the project great together.
So how we build trust and PPP? As with so many things in life, the answer circles back to cats.
Over cat-decades of observations, I have come to believe that the best way to build trust within the community comes from 3 key aspects:
Without these key attributes actively being reinforced, it is far more likely than not that the community will fall apart from distrust.
And if Jupiter, it is crucial that we have a community and ecosystem that is as cohesive as possible, otherwise the possibility of us getting where we want to be becomes exceedingly low.
In this essay, we will review how we have tried to build in certainty, alignment and transparency since the genesis moments of JUP, how recent key initiatives have all been focused on trying to achieve this, and how we want to institutionalise key parts of the CAT pact moving forward.
From the moment of the JUP Genesis, we took an extremely comprehensive approach to making sure that the token provided as much certainty, alignment and transparency as possible.
Why the focus on getting it right at or before genesis? It is because the genesis moment is a crucial moment in time. For example, if there was no transparency at the point of mint, token accountability would become meaningless forever.
To recap, here’s what we did:
A best-in-class token minting ritual documentation which ensured that we are able to effectively track where every single JUP went, as well as offer it up for community audit in the coming months
Cold wallets being majority externally controlled by leaders in the ecosystem to ensure that the team will not be able to use it for sale or for voting without preceding public statements
Setting up a simple 50/50 tokenomics to articulate the need for clear alignment between the team and the community
One of the most inclusive, and widely distributed airdrops with close to 1M wallets who used Jupiter pre-announcement gave us a base of holders who are already intimately familiar with Jupiter
Making sure no cats who were part of Jupiter were left behind including great community contributors, compromised wallets as well as Mercurial holders, handling their inclusion in a way that most new token holders would likely agree as being net positive
Extremely transparent single launch pool with tokens for sale with zero side deals ensured a very fair initial sale process
Keeping the vast majority of the USDC in the launchpool and incrementally withdrawing over 3 months
Meticulous documentation and live explanations of the key processes along every step of the way
I have no doubt that these hyper transparent steps, widely distributed drop, and publicly scrutinized nature of the entire launch was a crucial reasons why we survived the FUD, the rocky markets post launch.
Most importantly, these steps also laid the clear foundation for the very high level of trust in the community and active participation in the DAO.
To continue to bring certainty, alignment, and transparency to our community, we have embraced two vital principles in our daily operations:
The 50/50 philosophy is the essence of how we think about alignment between the team and the community.
Tokenomics reflect the ethos of a project, and our key ethos is as simple as it gets - For Jupiter, there needs to be an equal weight between a focused entity able to constantly recruit world-class talent, build product, and execute strategy, and a wider community able to fact-check, counterweight, and help to course-correct.
When we first announced it, it was cute in theory, but it was unclear how it would play out in practice. 6 months in, we have some clarity. And, as always, it comes back to trust.
The community needs to trust that the team will be judicious, using the part managed by the team in ways that are net positive for the Jupiverse.
At the same time, the team needs to trust that the community will independently grow its own leadership and have the good judgement to make crucial decisions that have a huge impact on the future of the protocol.
And after all many trials of fire, we now have the world’s largest and most active DAO, with extremely dynamic debates happening over every single vote, big or small.
This sets us up really, really well to tackle some really big topics, which we shall see in a bit!
CEF is our signature effort to provide a high level of certainty to the community and holders that there will be no supply shock or lingering harm from the team allocations, and that the team is fully committed to executing all proposed plans over a long period of time.
As a quick recap:
The team is committed to making sure that our interests are 100% fully aligned both with the community as well whatever plans are being proposed.
Community eats first, chefs eat last
From a certainty, alignment and transparency point of view, why is is so important that the DAO votes on key measures like token reduction, future Jupuaries and ASRs?
First off, these proposals affect the community portion of the tokens, so it is crucial that the community has the final say over what gets distributed eventually.
Secondly, and more subtly, if key processes that have a very material impact on the circulating supply of the token like Jupuaries are executed without sufficient debate and attention, there is a strong potential of creating a massive amount of misalignment between the team, users and holders, allowing a potential PVP situation to emerge.
For example, the camp of those who believe in Jupuaries to spread JUP far and wide might come into violent conflict with those who wish to prevent emissions at all costs.
To avoid this PVP situation - with all of its in-fighting, FUD, and pain - we need to bring the conversation into the open. By requiring a vote, we create the space for a massive debate on the pros and cons of each action. In the end, the decision will have legitimacy precisely because everyone had a chance to make their opinion heard.
In order to avoid a civil PvP war, we must have a civil PPP debate.
To provide a high level of transparency for the community, we did the first live community audit for JUP with the goal of accounting for every single JUP that left the genesis wallets.
We believe that this is the first such public accounting ever done in crypto, and we will continue to do this regularly as our pledge for maintaining the core integrity of the JUP token.
It is our observation that empty promises and unmet expectations and constant moon yearning results for a very large part of mistrust and disillusionment in crypto today.
We adhere to the zer0 philosophy, which means zero promise, zero expectations, but 100% commitment and determination.
We know where we want to go, but we will not pretend we know how to get there. We will experiment and push our way there.
We believe that JUP is the most valuable resource that we have, and we are committed to making sure that there’s always a very high level of trust involved in the integrity of JUP.
As such, we officially commit to the boomer CAT Pact:
This is a draft pact, but we expect to formalize it over the next few weeks. Ideally, this will serve not just as a useful guideline to us, but also to all teams who wish to build more trust within their own communities.
In this essay, we have outlined the very elaborate measures we have taken to build in more certainty, alignment and transparency, with the end goal of building more trust within the Jupiter community.
So where does the idea of PPP come in? Simple.
When there is no trust, PvP will happens. When there is trust, PPP can happen.
With the right mechanisms, communications and safeguards in place, I think we stand a good chance of becoming one of the most PPP communities around.
And that will be so great, because nothing will make me happier than trying to get to the decentralized meta with everyone.
End of the day, regardless of the outcome, it’s just so, so much more fun when we do it together as one cohesive community.
Let’s try ya? I will do my best too.
<3 M
PS: I promise i did not come out with the C.A.T deliberately, i was just thinking about the core things needed, and boom, CAT just came up. I swear sometimes life is indeed super circular.