Proposal - HourGlass Grant

Ampleforth Governance
1

Summary

The HourGlass team is proposing that the Forth DAO inflate and use a portion of the newly minted assets as a grant towards setting up the contracts so that FORTH DAO can borrow against the remaining assets (including the unclaimed FORTH).

HourGlass Introduction

A decentralized market place for convertible bonds. We’re building a decentralized marketplace where DAO’s can issue convertible-bonds and structured products against their treasury tokens. We are doing this with the help of the ButtonWood Contracts (rebasing wrappers + tranching). See the full details here. Unclaimed FORTH Proposal - Use as collateral for issuing DAO-bond

Forth DAO Benefits

  1. Non Dilutive Spending / No Downside Pressure associated with funding endeavors

The Forth DAO will be able to use HourGlass to fund future plans without having to sell FORTH from treasury to come up with the money, avoiding near term impacts of sell pressure and loss of ownership.

  1. Bringing adoption and awareness to rebasing + AMPL

We believe our partnership with the Forth DAO will bring a lot of positive attention to the entire ampl ecosystem and how the true power of rebasing tokens can be used.

  1. Enable earning fees towards the DAO treasury

The contracts can be initialized so that any free-market actors who borrow against their FORTH by issuing DAO-bonds will send a portion of it as a fee to the DAO treasury.

Purpose of Grant

Currently the HourGlass team is part-time, and the scope of the project has been expanding which has prevented us from solidifying a timeline. The grant will enable the team to go full-time for the next 4-5-months to deliver the product by Mid/Late-Q3. (deliverables schedule below).

Grant Breakdown

Proposed Grant amount: $150,000

  • $50,000 to support a full time dev (x3)

Deliverables

With the grant, we expect to deliver the following by Mid/Late-Q3.

  • Oracle + contracts for FORTH convertible bonds

  • Lending box contract to address Brandon’s concern about DAO being able to pay back loan (add link to comment)

  • Updated Front end for FORTH convertible bonds

  • Updated Front end for Investors

  • AMPL-Primes launch

  • Updated docs, landing page, etc.

  • Will be available to give updates during Ampl-office hours + Amplitheaters

Once the contracts are finished, the DAO can officially issue the bonds. While the team is completing the contract deliverables, we recommend that the DAO discuss & engage amongst itself to determine the best contract terms. HourGlass team can help facilitate that discussion if needed.

Once the updated front for investors is complete, the DAO will be able to point/direct their marketing to a dApp on the HourGlass domain where potential investors can buy FORTH-DAO bonds.

Distribution Mechanism

2022/Q3 and beyond (still being scoped)

  • Expansion to include other DAO’s

  • Integration to include Ampl-Stable coin in HG-convertible bonds

  • Partnering with ChainLink to facilitate other metrics for convertibility function

About the Team

https://test.hourglass.wtf initially started as a project for the 2021 ChainLink fall hackathon, where we won one of 20 Top Quality Awards, and the first prize for the Ampleforth Award. In as little as 1.5 months we went from idea to a proof-of-concept on testnet, while working part-time with limited dev-hours. In the 2.5 months since, we’ve expanded the scope of what the concept can support, as well as the benefit it can provide to the ecosystem.

Manny is our official advisor, we’ve been receiving his support as well as the rest of the PRL team (who’ve been responsible for building out the contracts that enable AMPL-stablecoin) in developing HourGlass to where it is right now. We will continue working with them moving forward.

Contact Info

16 Likes
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This looks very cool. Hope this gets funding.

2 Likes
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I like this idea. The only thing I would recommend is that part of the payment should be gated on the deliverable product, which could be approved by a Forth vote. Maybe 50% up front, 25% after 4 months, and 25% on delivery. That puts some skin in the game for the hourglass team to meet their proposed timeline.

4 Likes
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Agree, it is a good idea.

How we going to measure delivery? Don’t believe delivery of a product is really measurable.
And if you can measure it, original voters have to come back to agree to validate last 25%.

What will be the guarantee for Hour Glass team to receive last 25% when they deliver? (Don’t think you can secure this delivery part in a smart contract). So back at trusting each other ?

Maybe you can use a prediction market to decide if product is delivered, but then you probably need some incentives for participation.

Voting should be one time action?

Anyways just some thoughts, just wanted to respond to the “delivery” part. Interested to know how that would work.

1 Like
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It’s simple, they just include the remaining payment as a condition of their proposal for the Forth DAO bond when that goes for a vote.

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Edit: I deleted the post above as I replied to the initial post directly instead of to ducc as intended.

You’re suggesting this grant gets changed to 75k and then in Unclaimed FORTH Proposal - Use as collateral for issuing DAO-bond we just add the other 75k as something that happens upon a passing vote? I think that could be fine. Another option is writing a semi custom contract that has some kind of revoke function or a way to stop payments, but in this case where we have two proposals out already I think ducc’s solution is the most simple and straight forward. I myself like ducc’s suggestion, and will take it back to the team.

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Thanks for submitting the proposal @sunbreatherreather and HourGlass team!

The mechanics of treasury management today means there would be a second proposal for the capital deployment onto the platform, which would be voted on independently. Deployment of capital may also require lining up participants on the other side of the market (or generally, ensuring the market is mature enough), because that market determines the rates the DAO receives.

So I think the right way to approach the proposal to build out the HourGlass platform is: consider whether it has value irrespective of how that second proposal to deploy funds onto the system ends up.

I think HourGlass has value in both cases, so I am in favor.

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The signal vote for the FORTH HourGlass grant passed unanimously:
https://signal.ampleforth.org/#/proposal/0x4291067fb0c0a92c7b1b7014e5be68de7ab366f9d6c2483aaff42f28057bf6e7

The binding onchain vote to execute the FORTH grant is now ACTIVE!:

Reminders:
Quorum needed: 600K
Voting period: 3 days
Active from: 14618445
Endblock: Ethereum Block Countdown

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Super excited for this! The sooner we can get these bonds working the less Forth will have to be sold for labor. Inspirational team so let’s take the time to vote :white_check_mark:

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This has my support! I will be voting yes. Excited to see the HourGlass team build in the Ampleforth community.

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Hey all,

Just circling back to this. With the launch of the mainnet contracts back on Oct 31 Introducing HourGlass Convertible Bonds — DAO-friendly financing | by NimbleNavigators | Nov, 2022 | Medium, we’d like to propose receiving the remaining portion of grant. The HourGlass artifacts can be found below:

We’ve received positive feedback from members in the FORTH community as well as the ShapeShift community on the quality of the contract-code and front-end. Since launching, we’ve been identifying roadmap items that will help reduce complexities for users. For these items that will take longer to build out, we might do a raise - but it will help the team to receive the remaining portion of the grant in the meantime.

1 Like
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Hey Sunbreather and HG team

Congrats on launching the Hourglass platform! So cool to see a DAO grant come to fruition as promised.

Technically, the triggering condition for the remaining portion in the original proposal was “once the proposal for Forth structured products receives a passing vote.” However, given the uncertain timeline of this specific action, and also given how FTX has sucked a lot of engagement out of the space from other players, I think it’s fair to deliver the second piece now. While HG is not necessarily tested at scale yet, the platform is live and useable.

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On chain vote has been submitted and will begin in a few days!

1 Like