How should the token be used?
(for initial thoughts see What will the token do? How will governance work?)
Everything we design should aim to hit one or both of the two “North Stars”.
I think that there is too often a rush to design clever “token sinks”. At the end of the day, the best reason for users to hold token is that the protocol is
- worth a damn,
- growing rapidly,
- changing the world.
Everything else is secondary. You can have all kinds of “utility” like gauges, bribing, clever ve-locking mechanisms and so on, but none of this will fix a stagnating protocol. With that in mind, I’m really interested in discussing how tokens can be used as a valuable strategic resource to grow Sanctum. How should we best use token to acquire world-class talent? Which key partnerships should we secure? How can we bring in 100x the users into the Solana economy? and so on.
People hold token because they want to be part of a good and growing project that’s changing the world, and price is a good distillation of how much a project is doing that. But looking at price alone is missing a key dimension of why people buy and hold tokens. Tokens are symbols (see Symbols and Gods, $ocial): people hold it to feel good vibes, to belong to something greater than themselves.
Sanctum tokenholders should accelerate the infinite-LST future. I want tokenholders to vote on future LSTs to launch on Sanctum, similar to how JUP DAO votes on new projects to launch on LFG. We have a ton of inbound interest for new LSTs and eventually we want all of these LSTs to launch permissionlessly. However, we cannot spotlight/support all of them. Which ones to spotlight? This is an easy usecase for token governance.
We should explore nonfinancial rewards for tokenholders. People care about price, but also status, belonging, mission. I think this is very underexplored. We should recognise and publicise key token holders. How would this look like? special Discord roles, early access to new features (e.g. Sanctum Mobile), being able to talk in weekly community calls? Can we use Wonderland in this? I would love suggestions on this.
The token should eventually also control key parameters like fee switch, which LSTs to whitelist in INF, etc.