Bankless AMA with The Idols

Primer: The Idols is an NFT project that combines elements of DeFi, and they aim to be the guardians of Ethereum by securing and protecting the Ethereum network. How are they going to do that? Join Neptune, Artemis and Golden Calf, all founding members of the Idols as they get interviewed by NFThinker and JarisJames in an AMA session with Bankless DAO.

What is The Idols?

The motivation behind the project

• A project that combines both NFTs and DeFi together

• The founding team loves Ethereum and the Idols is about securing and protecting the Ethereum network

• Saw a lot of projects, specifically PFP projects, where the founders will sell NFTs during the mint event and the proceeds will go directly to the founder’s pocket

  

• In addition, the commissions of the secondary sales from the NFTs also goes to the founders

• This causes misalignment between the founders and the community

“And in a lot of ways, you know, our project is an experiment. My belief is that all of us will do better if all of us are aligned towards the same goal.” 

- Neptune

• Asked themselves if there is another way to do this, and starting The Idols is their response

Core features of The Idols

• Immutable treasury that is fully controlled by smart contract and nobody, including the founders, can withdraw funds from it

• 100% of ETH raised for minting the NFT will be staked with Lido Finance and the rewards will be given to Idols NFT owners

• Probably the first NFT project to provide sustainable long term rewards to holders that last forever

• 100% of the commissions from secondary sales will be shared with the stakers of their native token, VIRTUE

• The founders are compensated with VIRTUE tokens (15% of supply), and the ETH from NFT mints are not part of their compensation

• 100% of the allocation of VIRTUE tokens to the founders are vested along a bonding curve, which represents how much stETH has been bonded into the treasury. This means that the allocation is given to the founder team only accrues if the project is successful

• Idols contracts are fully self-sustaining from day one and there are no central dependencies in the Idols ecosystem

Keeping value within the system

• Saw that in all Web2 communities, they started off giving value to the community members

  • After a while, the relationships changes and becomes more extractive

  • E.g. Amazon competes directly with sellers in their system

“I think crypto is our one true opportunity to really distribute the means of production back into the hands of just everybody else.” 

- Neptune

• Neptune worked in TradFi and also at a DeFi fund for a few years before starting The Idols

  • Saw that a lot of projects are providing real value but the insiders are keeping all the revenue and the tokens are just ‘useless governance tokens’

  • This is one thing that irks him as an investor and he never liked projects where the token does not grant exposure to the actual success of the project

  • Wanted to start The Idols and create a token when the value accrual within the system also accrues directly to the token holders

About the Team

Founding team

• Heavenly waffle is Neptune’s roommate from college. Both of them work on the back end smart contracts for the platform

  • Worked in all the top Web2.0 tech firms before working on the project

• Laser bear is the friend of a friend

• Golden Calf and Neptune are long time friends. Neptune helped him as a DeFi user and is a big reason why he hopped into NFTs

  • Have a technical background and worked in corporate before joining full time

  • Says that Neptune is very passionate about Ethereum and really enjoys teaching other people about crypto

• Defidols had been working as a product manager in different companies

  • Very good at putting things together and making sure everyone is on track

• Artemis used to work in TradFi and moved over to get more involved in crypto. His experience is more on building out the business and growing tech and finance companies

• amazingsocordia is a long time friend of Neptune and Golden Calf

  • Good friend and developer

  • Built all the front end for the Idols

• S.H.Zay is a friend Neptune met in crypto and he is very involved in a lot of NFT communities

  • Helps to manage the Discord

Stella Advisors

• Have DCF god and Gabriel Haines

• DCF God has been very helpful in advising and educating them

• Tries to bring in people who are truly aligned with their vision

Regarding VC fundraising

• Neptune is against doing private VC fundraising

• They had lots of interest and people just wanted to write them a cheque but they do not want to go down this road to do pre-sales or private sales

• Neptune had put in a lot of his own money to pay for servers and audits etc to build up the project

• All the core team is working for equity

Partnership with Lido Finance

💡 Ethereum 2.0 is moving from proof of work to proof of stake. To be a node, that will require anyone to stake 32 Ethereum, which can be a hefty cost. Anyone can, however, allocate their Ethereum to Lido and convert it to stETH so that they can partake in the staking and get some of the rewards.

• Wanted Lido to be their core partner because they are the leader in the liquid staking space, having over 90% of all the liquid staked Ethereum

• Very professional team

• One of the only projects to launch fully as a DAO from day 1. This shows their emphasis on decentralization, which is the core tenant of The Idols as well

• To participate in staking Ethereum directly, you would have to

  • Run your own node and constantly update your Ethereum software

  • Make sure the uptime is 100%

  • Stake 32 Ethereum

• So using Lido helps to abstract away all the difficulties away

Keeper functions

💡 Keeper functions are needed in DeFi projects that require regular interaction to keep everything up to date and functioning. They also require a manual signature and incur gas fees.

• Only the distribution of stETH rewards after a Lido rebase requires inputs from outside

• The Idols only have one keeper function that does not have limited permissions, and can be called by anyone

• There is a 1% keeper function caller fee that anyone is allowed to call and claim

  • People are incentivised to call on the keeper function to keep 1% of the interest

  • The fees can go down over time but it is capped at a max of 1%

• This way, the gas costs will be incurred by the entire community and split amongst them

• No regular time is scheduled for the claim. Once a stETH rebase happens every daily, anyone is allowed to call the function to claim the keeper award

• Possible that at the beginning of the protocol, the function may be called every 2 to 3 days, but eventually it is expected to be called every day

Virtuous Cycle & VIRTUE tokens

• A flywheel that tied all the different players (Idol Treasury, Idols NFT holders, VIRTUE stakers) within the Idols together

• All the value is kept within the community itself

• Important parts of the cycle

  • Treasury pays stETH staking rewards to Idols NFT holders in perpetuity

  • 7.5% of each secondary trade of the Idols NFT is paid as commission to VIRTUE stakers

  • In order to acquire VIRTUE tokens, people have to bond stETH into the Idols treasury

  • This increases the amount of stETH in the treasury, so more staking rewards are given to the Idols NFT holders

  • Since the NFT will earn more rewards in perpetuity, their value will go up, which means that the secondary sales will earn more commissions to be paid to VIRTUE stakers

  • The cycle repeats again

• This is only for the Idols project but the team is going to have more NFT projects into the Idolverse, which is the Idols ecosystem

• Each NFT project will add more fuel and demand for the VIRTUE token, which will drive more bonding, increase the value of the treasury and so on

• The next NFT project in Q2 is tentatively called the Zealots. It aims to lock VIRTUE tokens forever, similar to how the Idols are locking away Ethereum forever

• Coming right after this in Q3 will be another project that is most probably going to come as an airdrop to both Idols and Zealots NFT holders. This project will be about burning the VIRTUE tokens

Liquidity pool for VIRTUE token

• Neptune is actually a big Curve guy and thinks that Curve has built one of the most aligned incentives

• The current plan is to join the Curve wars after the launch and to set up a liquidity pool on a secondary market for the VIRTUE token

• This offers another way for people to get VIRTUE tokens instead of bonding for it

• Best opportunity to acquire permanent liquidity for the VIRTUE token

• Expects the process to deeply involve the community

The Offering

• Mint event for the Idols NFT is called The Offering, and will happen on March 5th

• NFT holders will get stETH rewards in perpetuity

• There is a little bit of VIRTUE token involved for NFT holders who mint during The Offering. Watch out for more details coming soon

• The mint event will be on the website and the front end is like 99% built out with just minor tweaks here and there

Goldlist vs Whitelist

• Typical benefits of a whitelist are

  • Reserved a number of NFTs for those on the list

  • Offered at a discount to the public mint price

• These benefits are not aligned long term with the project as it encourages people to quickly flip for a profit using the rest of the community as exit liquidity

• The team still wanted to reward early contributors to the project in a way that is non-extractive and non-dilutive for the rest of the community

“In this way, if you're on the gold list, you truly have founder-like allocation in the Idols because you're getting virtue token at the same rate that the founding team is getting it. And also, that virtue token comes directly from our own founder allocation. It’s not coming in the form of a public mint price discount, so the value that you're getting is not coming directly from the rest of the community.”

- Neptune

• Decided to do a Goldlist instead

  • Takes 1 million VIRTUE tokens from the allocation to the founders

  • Split amongst everyone in the Goldlist

  • The 1 million VIRTUE will be vested in the same schedule as the founders

  • Will have its own NFT that is separate from the 10k Idols NFT

  • 888 Goldlist spots

• You can get into the Goldlist by being a good community member who is aligned with the project and is helpful in educating others

  • Can also be won through contests, giveaways etc

  • Start by joining the Discord

The Idols marketplace

• The Core benefit of having their own marketplace is that they can maintain the immutability and uncensorability of the project

• Do not want the project to have any central dependencies on anything, and that includes the marketplace as well

• The marketplace is fully on-chain, fully smart control controlled and does not require any inputs from any central entities

• Will serve as a source of liquidity for the Idols NFT

• Will also keep more of the commissions within the ecosystem because there are no fees paid to an outside marketplace

• However, the Idols will also be available to other marketplaces as well after the initial offering

User-owned ecosystem

• Neptune is a ‘seize the means of production’ guy

• Economic value in other non-crypto systems accrues mostly to capital owners

• The only thing that is breaking this trend is crypto

  • Crypto is the most equitable way where there are no barriers and anyone is allowed to participate

  • Anyone with projects and tokens that are well designed will be allowed to own a share of the things that are generating economic value

• Wishes every project and ecosystem will adopt this model

• The Idols is a passion project not just to create cool art and cool mechanism but also to showcase what is possible with crypto

  • Wants to create an ecosystem where everyone is aligned and everybody has ownership in the ecosystem

  • Hopes that it becomes an example for others to adopt the same systems in other projects

Transition to a DAO

• The ultimate goal of the Idols is to transition to a full on-chain managed DAO

• Even at launch, the Idols is very decentralized, with the founding team having very limited admin functions within the ecosystem

• The founding team will eventually want to completely remove themselves from the equation, and this is planned to be late Q4 or maybe Q1 next year

Art

• All the artwork had been fully done by Laser Bear, the artist

• An award-winning illustrator who had worked on games, comic books etc for over 15 years

• This is his first NFT project

• He was drawn to this project because of the idea of community alignment

• Fully generated from more than 100 hand-drawn assets

Thoughts about NFT

• Neptune thinks that NFTs are going to be very important and will be used everywhere in financial and non-financial cases

• In the real world, there is a lot of paperwork to transfer assets from one person to another

“I think the most powerful thing about crypto tokens and NFTs is that you can take people all over the world who aren't connected in a geographical sense and then you can organise and bring all these people together towards one common goal.” 

- Neptune

• NFTs can be a way to keep track of things on the blockchain and make the record-keeping way more efficient

Integrations with other projects

• Core identity is to secure the Ethereum blockchain by locking staked Ethereum forever

• Neptune grew up on video games and would love to partner with other projects to integrate Idols into other games

• Planning on doing Metaversal projects integration as well

  • To integrate with Sandbox, for example, they would have to create some 3D sprites, but it’s in their plans to do so

• Would be great to see their artwork used in games

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