Hi RoboFam,
As we draw near to the end of Roadmap 3.0, our team has spent a lot of time discussing and evaluating the best options for Roadmap 4.0 — these include AR (using the 3D models), merchandise, content creation, derivative art, and many more items.
While some of the community may not agree, we as a team have always believed that the true, resilient value of Solarians is in its historical significance and highly complex art, and so we had tailored Roadmap 3.0 to strengthen the creative narrative of this value.
That being said, we have also received a lot of feedback that all the community would be interested in and would be willing to support is the launching of staking and tokens to distribute passive income to holders, and we have seriously considered how we can cater to this demand.
The key questions we focused on are as follows:
- Would passive income be a sustainable and meaningful value proposition and ultimately positive for the long-term success of Solarians?
- What utilities can we create for the tokens to generate sustainable and significant demand for them to sustain value in the long run, and avoid it becoming a short-term pump and dump and effectively bankrupting the project/DAO’s resources?
- With staking and tokens, passive income would inevitably become the main value proposition of the project — would it be beneficial for the project in the long-term if the community eventually consisted mostly of passive holders just waiting for passive income?
- How can we structure the implementation of staking and tokens (with the key objective of providing holders with passive income) in a compliant way such that the project’s longevity will not be jeopardised?
To this end, we ran extensive brainstorm sessions and also obtained professional advice from a US legal team.
Ultimately, the outcome of those efforts led to 3 possible scenarios:
- If we took guidance from the specific cases where the SEC deemed the project’s tokens were purely utility tokens, it would eliminate all possibilities of the tokens to become sources of passive income (thereby losing the interest of the community).
- And even if we said “#%&$ it, let’s just do it and give our holders passive income”, the team lacks the resources to build the Solarians ecosystem to one that is big enough to have sufficient utilities (internal and external) for the tokens to be a sustainable driver in the long run.
- And if we said “#%&$ it, let’s just do it anyway”, we know that the likely outcome will be a short-term pump and dump and bankruptcy of the project and DAO.
As such, I personally do not believe that the team should work on the “passive income” narrative as there is simply no potentially acceptable outcome here.
However, it is also clear to me that we cannot continue to build in opposition to the community, and I genuinely do not want to be a blocker for the direction the community seems to want to pursue.
Members of the community have previously asked me to consider handing over the project to the DAO, and I do think that it is a good time for me to step down and to start officially discussing a handover while the team wraps up Roadmap 3.0. This should give the DAO ample time to organise and structure itself before the handover to ensure a smooth transition.
For the remaining items of Roadmap 3.0, the team will continue to finish Canvas (likely 2 weeks away) and 3D models (likely a couple more months). Regarding the Solarian Enforcers, just before we intended to drop the 2D versions, we noticed that the artist (Cryptonic) had actually used stock images for the backgrounds. We told him that this was not acceptable and he agreed to rework the backgrounds, but in the end he disappeared and has not responded to multiple attempts to reach him. We’ll see if FUX is able to update the art, and if so we will likely pass the artwork to the DAO to decide how it wants to distribute them.
In addition to that, other pending items include the last 100 Solarian mints, and the Changing Room’s 2nd item drop (artwork almost completed), which we will leave to the DAO to decide how they would like to proceed.
While I have made this decision, I do not want to downplay how very proud I am of what the new team managed to accomplish over the past 6 months.
During this time, we have:
- Resolved many of the token issues which were the result of Solarians starting mint before the Metaplex standard, such as launching “Solarians Swap” with the help of levi and ExiledApe, updating the metadata of the OG tokens that allowed the collection to be listed on OpenSea, and completed the Arweave migration
- Relaunched an entirely new website
- Launched multiple utilities, such as Changing Room with “Spare Parts” feature, GIF Generator, and soon Canvas
- Worked on Content Creation, such as publishing the first official Solarian Lore and creating the first Solarian Song
- Worked on not 1, but 2 different 3D collections (sneak peeks will be available soon). One collection would be purely for our website gallery (they’ll look very similar to their 2D counterparts and include background scenes), and the other collection would be used for metaverse and game integrations, with the arms and legs being replaced by generic ones (due to practical considerations).
I believe that we resolved many of the issues this project has faced since last year and set the project up with a more solid foundation for the future, with more possibilities and opportunities for the DAO to pursue if it wishes to.
The future is still as glorious as it has ever been.
The new team’s members have been amazing to work with, and my only regret during my time as Team Head is being unable to remunerate them reasonably while they gave this project everything they could. Like myself, they were passionate community members who loved the project and wanted to do more to help it grow. They stepped up during the most difficult time of our history, and have never wavered in their conviction on our vision for the project, even though they often received misdirected hostility over the previous revshare debacle that they were not a part of. We would likely never come across anyone who would love Solarians as much as they have, and I would encourage the DAO to consider retaining them to continue efforts in further building out the project.
For myself, it has absolutely been an honour and pleasure to have worked on this project all the way from Community Member to Community Manager and then to Team Head, and I look forward to seeing the DAO come together and take this project to greater heights.
There is a lot more I wished to say, but I wanted to prevent this from being longer than it needs to be — I’ll be happy to have an AMA soon to answer any questions that the community may have.
Wishing all of you the very best,
OhMe 🤖
