Proposal [Cloud Utility Ideas]

$CLOUD
1

Most governance tokens are useless. Why?

  1. Token supply skews heavily in favor of whales who dominate votes
  2. Voting opportunities are infrequent and poorly communicated, further disincentivizing participation from smaller token holders
  3. There is usually no monetary incentive to vote
  4. There isn’t anything interesting to do with tokens except vote for wall-of-text proposals or hold and hope number go up

With that framing in mind, below are some ideas that could help $CLOUD avoid this common fate and emerge as the rare DeFi token that is actually interesting, useful, and rewarding to hold.

1. $CLOUD is the gateway to Wonderland. The goal of Sanctum is to greatly expand and democratize liquid staking on Solana. To take a page out of Jupiter’s playbook, stake-weighted voting with $CLOUD should be the mechanism for onboarding new LSTs into Wonderland. Jupiter offers a nice roadmap here with how they have built the LFG product and used that to educate the wider community about new token launches. Strongly encourage Sanctum to add generous rewards pool in $CLOUD for the first year for folks who actively participate in voting and other $CLOUD related activities. Financial incentives are extremely powerful.

2. Structure Wonderland to be an LST League, with $CLOUD at the center. Wonderland offers great value to LSTs by giving them exposure to a wider audience. To ensure there are aligned incentives, create a structure whereby only the top 20 LSTs get to have exposure as one of the Sanctum LSTs. How to find the “top” LSTs? Measure it by delegated $CLOUD stake (not point in time, but average amount staked per day over a defined length of time). This gives LST projects two options: buy $CLOUD to vote for themselves and/or market their LST to the community of $CLOUD holders. This could create a fun, competitive environment for launching and learning about new LSTs. And it also gives $CLOUD hodlers something to do besides vote on technical proposals; we get to put our $CLOUD behind the projects we feel most strongly about staying on the leaderboard as a top LST on Solana.

Edit: Importantly, this means that Season 1 Wonderland projects with pets would not be grandfathered in. Otherwise, you’re just elevating projects that were chosen prior to the community having any say in the matter. If projects want to stay in the spotlight and accrue the benefits that come from that exposure, they need to play ball and align more strongly with Sanctum. That’s how you win and let win. LSTs that don’t want to mess with that may walk, but that will create more space for LSTs that want what Sanctum can offer them, and will create a much more engaging and fun atmosphere for holders.

3. Tie $CLOUD delegation to staking/MEV rewards. I’m not sure how this could be enforced, but it could be encouraged. This offers further financial incentive to delegate $CLOUD to various LST projects and partcipate actively in governance/Wonderland. Nothing would change for the LST project, expect that rewards would flow more strongly to $CLOUD stakers than non-CLOUD stakers.

I expect the outcome of the above approaches to be:

  1. Increased engagement on Wonderland platform, primarily driven by financial incentives to participate (via future $CLOUD rewards, possible boosted rewards from LSTs)
  2. Increase in number of LSTs that would be incentivized to launch in order to take advantage of the access to engagement and capital that Wonderland will provide
  3. Increased demand for $CLOUD from prospective LST projects, existing LST projects (who need to cover $CLOUD staking requirements or persuade $CLOUD community members to delegate $CLOUD), and general community members eager to participate in a rewarding governance scheme

Much of this needs to be fleshed out further, and is certainly inspired by Jupiter which has set the tone for governance token utility, but the general idea here is to make $CLOUD a centerpiece of this ecosystem that helps to increase engagement, fun, and financial incentives to participate among all stakeholders.

Thank you for reading!

-Thesis

18 Likes
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Really like the 2nd idea!

5 Likes
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love this, all wonderful ideas and sound logic

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2nd idea is :fire: What I really like about it

  • If projects need to stake their own cloud, it’s a capital outlay for them, but if they entice community to stake there is no initial cost to the project
  • Projects can entice community cloud stakers with promise of future rewards, for example vSOL with vault points

:cloud:ヽ(*・ω・)ﾉ :cloud:

2 Likes
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yeah there could be more fun votes for jup too, clearly people like voting more often. sybil is the enemy of fun in crypto tho, lets say you have a novelty vote and depending on how people vote is what nft they get like pokemon, people will multi-account if they think money is involved regardless of what is asked. trustless systems have that issue.

4 Likes
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@fplee 2nd idea… really cool to implement but it might be at a cost to an infinite future.

Tho it creates demand for the CLOUD utility tokenomics and incentivises projects to hold CLOUD. I would say that is fair considering if you’d like to be part of the more exclusive club…

@Alkine might have his own thoughts on the matter but would love this feature to be included as part of tokenomics…

2 Likes
7

I think the dcaSOL, especially if its highly configurable would be a good fit for requiring some sort of CLOUD.

X amount Locked for the duration of the mint

A fee of x amount to open the LST w the fee either burned or distributed to Cloud stakers in governance like JUPs model.

A 50/50 split of the fee burned & distributed

Idk the exact best way right now but it needs to be not prohibitive as to not dissuade utilizing the service & frictionless.

Meaning if they don’t have the $CLOUD then it’s a fee that is converted on the back end abstracted away.

Then take the same model and apply it to teams looking for a specific brand of SOL LST

3 Likes
8

Really like the second idea

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9

I’m in alll the way.

The governance in the end is an excuse to hold the token for most users so yeah, should focus on the Cloud token to do something with it. Second idea sounds good !

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10

Great proposals.
I would love to stake my CLOUD :+1:

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This is defs the strongest point you have made and the one id support the most. Hopefully it comes to life! Sanctum is an excellent project and big things are coming ! :slight_smile:

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All great suggestions, 2nd/3rd are the best. Multiple uses for cloud in the future will be key to gaining & keeping new community members. Allowing LSTs to compete for cloud by incentivising the community is a great idea, another by product is forcing users to learn about all the new LSTs so that they are more informed. Thanks for the post!

4 Likes
13

Something to consider @fplee

3 Likes