On behalf of RND Inc, the Regen Ledger genesis org, and core dev team serving the Regen Network community and building the Regen Ledger blockchain, I wanted to get a conversation rolling about the criteria by which the community makes decisions about the currency allow list for the regen network marketplace for ecological credits.
I’d like to socialize some basic criteria and principles for our decision making as a community, and suggest that after this is discussed on common wealth, that we create a distillation of what seems to be the emerging consensus to be a governance signaling proposal about the agreed upon criteria for making future gov proposals and decisions for adding currencies to the allow list.
At RND inc we will be refraining form bringing any proposals about listing any currencies onto the allow list, and encourage community members, or representatives of projects/protocols/stable coins or currencies to bring those opportunities to the community.
I suggest there are three major criteria for the analysis of any token applying to the Regen Network community:
1- Is the token in question a currency
2- Is the token in question IBC compatible
3- Is the token in question liquid, stable and safe to use
Each of these criteria can be further discussed and defined, and we can make judgement calls as a community about specific instances
I expect healthy debate for specific currency allow list gov proposals to include questions like:
How much liquidity is enough liquidity,
What does safe mean,
Is censorship resistance more important than regulatory compliance?
My belief is that level of details is too detailed for this present part of the process, but should be judged case by case. Eventually we may even evolve a ministry or commitee using authz and the groups module for the community to elect representatives to make these
It’s great to see this topic raised. I will just add that in addition to the inclusion standards, a process be introduced to periodically reviewed and update that allow list. Projects evolve rapidly and our ability to “sense and respond” is important.
These are all great questions to help move this forward. It was helpful to hear your thoughts during the community dev call yesterday and I have a good sense of this to synthesize what is listed here and put a short doc together.
Actually, I see a ton of synergy with the thread and soft proposal I started here,
Taking this currency allow list as an example, participating validators could use the facilitated time to discuss and prototype the bones of a future proposal with enough detail, scrutiny, and community attention to quickly advance an on chain vote.
Hi all - I would like to chime in on behalf of Celo and Climate Collective. We are incredibly excited for being able to bridge Regen assets back and forth to Celo. This will allow the Celo Reserve to onboard regen eco-credits as collateral for Celo Stablecoins, as well as other use in applications and marketplaces. We see a deep synergy with cUSD/cEUR/cREAL/future cStables ad well as the native token CELO, and would like to ensure at least CELO and cUSD are taken into consideration on the Allowed Token List.
Is there any specific information that would help this discussion? Gregory alluded to the virtuous cycle in the original post, and I’d be happy to answer any technical, financial, or other questions.
I’d like to see Atom and/or Osmo, just for ease of use. But I understand the need for stablecoins.
What role of privacy tokens, if any? Shade is building on SCRT an algorithmic stablecoin, Silk, thats’ private by default. Its’ not built or anywhere near ready, but all else equal, are privacy tokens to be considered for allow list? Are there reasons to disallow such (KYC AML, tax reporting, PR/optics)?
I agree w/ Nirvaan, there do seem like obvious overlaps with Celo - I need to learn more about their ecosystem and assets. It’s not IBC enabled or compatible, currently? Would it be on Celo to make that happen first, should some signaling proposal by Regen be made to request such?
Greg, what do you mean by is the token a currency? Do you mean a stablecoin or some other coin? Or do you mean does the coin fall under currency vs security? If the latter, I don’t see how the community will not fall into a legalese hole trying to reach verdict on this criteria.
Agree that deep liquidity and IBC compatibility are important.
The five high level principals outlined above feel pretty good to me; I’m ordering the five terms in how I perceive them running from higher to lower nature (bolded the inner significance, points 1 & 5 relate to the range of outer potential in my view):
Ethical alignment (purpose)
Liquidity / safety (meaning)
Is it actually a currency (values/prompt)
IBC compatibility (ability)
Virtuous cycle with ecosystem (motivation)
Assuming consensus on the main agenda, which feels like we are moving towards agreement on - I’d propose the next step to be opening up the discussion scoping ourselves for now around what constitutes a currency (separate thread?) and liquidity/IBC compatibility. Before we get deeper into those topics (and beyond) I feel it’s important to settle on and consent to the framing.
I’m happy to do some thinking in order to outline my own perceptions of each point/term/domain but will hold off for now. For me personally the above agenda sounds good.
Personally, I would love to see ATOM and/or REGEN become a sort of schelling point for Regenerative finance.
In pursuit of this goal I think it would be great to have ATOM and REGEN, and perhaps an ATOM backed stablecoin (à la IST) on the list – even within such a value-aligned list it might be an idea to initially subsidise the use of REGEN (if that’s the schelling point we want to steer towards).
Even though I’m partial towards IST, I do believe that the long arc of decentralisation bends towards bioregional units of accounts (and the clearing mechanisms between them) rather than stablecoins.
I get USD stablecoins have huge product market fit but they’re also turning crypto into an extension of wall st and thats an existential risk. we need to pull our heads out of our asses on the finance stuff and figure out how to support real world commerce and local supply chains
This is certainly a perspective that we should keep top of mind.
The other risk worth keeping in mind is the power that stablecoin issuers have over the networks that depend on them.
For example, in the current state of things, USDC – a centralised stablecoin issuer – can arguably dictate Ethereum’s fork choice. To quote Lyn Alden:
I’ve seen a lot of people critique proof-of-stake but I’ve not seen many people point out that stablecoin custodians can basically decide the outcome of a hard fork for any blockchain that relies heavily on its DeFi ecosystem for its value proposition.
Note that even so-called decentralised stablecoins such as Dai are not immune from this influence.
Going back to Will’s original suggestion about user stories, I’d like to elaborate a bit on some things to think about from an end-user perspective.
From a “buyer” perspective (e.g. someone purchasing credits), we should be thinking about currencies that have an easy pathway to purchase (for potential buyers). Realistically, this means the currency should likely be listed on Osmosis with sufficiently deep liquidity (both points that @Gregory | RND INC outlined above).
From a “seller” perspective (e.g. someone selling credits), we should be thinking about currencies that have an easy fiat off-ramp. Many credit sellers may be project developers or earth stewards themselves. For these users (most of whom may be new to crypto), we should be making it as easy as possible for them to off-ramp their revenue to their local currency as often times credit sales are directly part of their project’s financial planning, and not something they are wanting to speculate on or keep in the crypto-market.
I don’t see an explicit mention of this in the criteria above, but I’d like to potentially add a 4th criteria to the initial 3 above around:
“does the token support a good onboarding experience for crypto-novices”
Expanding on user stories, from the perspective of both the buyer and seller of eco-credits, it’s also important to include tokens that have clear off ramps to fiat systems via centralized exchanges. Many of these users are not natively crypto, so the least number of conversions will support their successful engagement with Regen Network. It will be important to ensure that at least 1-2 of the tokens on the allowlist have simple on and off ramps for users.
example, on Coinbase → USDC, ATOM, Maker, DAI are supported (but not Regen, Celo, etc.)
Stakecito voted yes on prop #13. We are in full support of the major allow list criteria for the upcoming on-chain marketplace. Listing new currencies should be a governance-guided process and needs some principles relevant to the Regen community. We think the current criteria make a lot of sense and give a good direction.
Just a boost to @corlock and @Sarah Baxendells posts on the on/off ramps to fiat; this is one of the biggest UX hurdles faced by the web3 world… especially if the desire is to go beyond web3 as the experience is so fragmented.
It’s not a small hurdle to overcome either as to do so you need an integrated interface (multi-chain wallet) that incorporates centralised exchange features to tie into the legacy banking system.
I guess the question is; whats the path of least resistance? My sense is that its probably a rollup along the lines of Regen>Omosis>Axelar>USDC >Coinbase… (agreeing with @David Fortsons nomination of USDC as a ‘safe stable coin’ given the vast majority are pretty dubious IMO).
On the UX issue, rollups, and stable coins - Pillar.fi a multi-chain wallet with rollup SDK comes to mind as a potential development studio though they are not in the Cosmos world yet. Shellprotocol.io (v2) also comes to mind on the rollup/stables matter but again not a Cosmos team.
@willszal do you happen to know of any Cosmonauts writing such automation?
I’ve submitted an introduction to the e-Money EEUR token, and hope that the discussion will end up with me submitting it as a full governance proposal.