Prime Rating - Northstars & Milestones

[Lavi]

Prime Rating Northstars & Milestones for 2022

Introduction

Prime Rating is the first product of the PrimeDAO product suite that went live in 2021. This forum post is a means to look back at what was achieved in 2021 and to define some objectives and north stars (ultimate long term goals) for Prime Rating, going into 2022.

These goals should serve as guidelines and orientation for the community and PrimeDAO, to facilitate decision making regarding priority setting and budgeting. Further, it also sets a basis for discussions. It is important to have a set of shared goals to work towards and to unify the community in our efforts to become the number one rating protocol in DeFi and beyond. However, we want to review these goals at least every quarter and hence, these goals can be subject to change, should a review show that they need updating.

Looking back - Where do we stand today?

Below is a list of some achievements by Prime Rating in 2021.

• Community of 10-15 active raters (total of 27 raters participated in 2021)
• 6 full/part-time contributors (Mayank, Thomas, Jan-Lucas, Marc, Lavi, Luuk)
• 2 Rate-athons and 1 Season held
• Season 2 + Rate-athon 3 in planning
• New web-app frontend ready
• Backend in development and close to being beta ready
• API in beta and interest to test from 5-6 entities
• Over 90 protocols rated and 56 rated fully (FA + Technical)
• Official partnership with DeFi Safety
• Unofficial partnership/working with DeepWork
• 3-5 potential partnerships in initial discussion phase

Looking forward

On a high-level, the following objectives are what we want to put extra focus on in the coming months (no specific order):

• Decentralise Prime Rating
• Community growth
• Product improvement & additional offerings
• Financial self-sustainability

1. Start to decentralise Prime Rating

Northstar: Prime Rating becomes a self-sustaining, self-governing DAO/sub-DAO

Objectives for 2022

• Increase autonomy of the community
• Hand over operations to community
• Establish a robust governance framework

Milestones

• Have a governance framework + guidelines and instructions in place for report and non-report related decision making and consensus finding
• Create a treasury multi-sig and have at least 2 signers from the community (for paying rewards)
• Handover RXP minting from Luuk to treasury multi-sig (or backend if possible)
• Have the majority of voters with high influence (200+ RXP) coming from the community
• Have at least one case study or strategy paper written, to explore feasibility + tokenomics for own Rating token ($RATE)
• Have functioning trustless backend connected to frontend, ensuring no human interaction is needed for the report creation & acceptance process

2) Community Growth

Northstar: Become the go-to place for talented analysts and researchers in DeFi

Objectives for 2022

• Have a strong community of well-educated raters capable of writing high-quality reports
• Grow the community
• Expand offering for raters (additional topics, research, survey, learning material, etc.)
• Simplify participation & onboarding
• Extend the Prime Rating team with SPOCs/ guild owners

Milestones

• Grow the community to at least 50 active raters and at least 25 raters with 100+ RXP
• Create learning material for raters (video, articles, webinars)
• Establish a proprietary database with information on protocols only accessible to raters (or provide exclusive access to data providing websites)
• Establish marketing/growth strategy targeted towards community growth

3) Product Improvement & additional offerings

Northstar: Become the best-in-class rating protocol in DeFi

Objectives for 2022

• Improve report template to V2.1 & 2.2
• Expand the rating scores beyond fundamental and technical to also include a quantitative and financial score
• Expand coverage beyond DeFi to Metaverse and Stablecoins
• Expand Prime Rating offering by adding rate-on-demand service
• Gather feedback and insights for product improvements

Milestones

• Have a governance process for updating the fundamental report template in place
• Establish a working group focusing on automation and have at least 10 questions/metrics automated
• Establish a rate-on-demand or research-on-demand product offering and implement required infrastructure & tools
• Support PrimeLaunch in protocol curation via rate-on-demand for protocols in pipeline
• Hold at least two contests dedicated to Metaverse tokens
• Have at least 30 Metaverse protocols covered
• Have at least 150 DeFi protocols covered, i.e. fully rated (technical + fundamental)
• Finish first version of stablecoin framework
• Hold at least one contest dedicated to stablecoins
• Have at least 10 stablecoin protocols covered
• Integrate two new partner/data service into Rating (e.g. Forefront, Tokenterminal, DFP, DeepDAO)

4) Increase Financial Self-Sustainability

Northstar: Become a financially self-sustained protocol used by relevant stakeholders

Objectives for 2022

• Build up partnerships
• Start marketing the product to users and clients
• Explore demand and best product-market-fit
• Decrease financial dependency from PrimeDAO

Milestones

• Have 5 additional partnership agreements with other DAOs, service providers, or clients
• Establish an analytics team to measure website traffic and indicate ways to improve
• Explore & experiment with business model(s), covering tokenomics, revenue streams and cost structure
• Conduct at least 2 market researches/ surveys to find out needs & must-haves for the product
• Explore at least 3 ways to decrease dependency from PrimeDAO towards financial self-sustainability (e.g. grants, sponsorships, paid offerings)

Conclusion

In summary, Prime Ratings objectives all lead to further decentralisation of the product, to enable a community-led (sub-)DAO, increase adaptation and usage of its services, expand and improve the product offering as well as its partnerships. And finally, start exploring business models best suited for the product and furthermore, explore how a dedicated token & tokenomics would benefit the community and the rating service.

[ataberk]

Thanks for preparing this! I wanted to give some of my thoughts about the roadmap.

• I think a big missing component of ratings is the integration of automated ratings based on quantitative metrics. Without this, I am not sure how a rating about a protocol that was done 6 months ago can still remain relevant.

• Speaking of which, another thinking point I see absent in this roadmap is finding a way to keep the rating scores relevant. How will a rated protocol be updated? Can there be specific incentive structures to encourage this sort of up to date reporting? Not sure if any of the ratings for Aave for example includes Aave Pro, Aave Arc, or Aave v3. What will Balancer’s rating be when veBalancer is implemented? How can people be encouraged to maintain an open library. What can be learned from already functioning open libraries on the internet like Wikipedia?

• Does Prime Rating participate in Gitcoin rounds? Since it is a public good, I think it is legitimate to try tapping into that community.

• A big component of Prime Rating in my opinion should be transmitting the produced knowledge to the crypto ecosystem. I see it not being touched upon with emphasis. How will the produced knowledge be shared? How can it be used to invite more participation/voluntary fixing? How can reports be compiled to offer a meta view over the relevant sector or analysis?

• Are there any partnerships or strategies being developed to tap into different communities for more involved participation in ratings? What is lacking for a momentum to pick up for turning Prime Rating into an open library that everyone can build together- Wikipedia 3.0?

[Lavi]

Hey Ata, thanks for your inputs. This is great feedback.

1. We definitely want to add quantitative & real-time scores to flow into the overall rating! This has been on our to-do list for months and it’s also in the forum post above! The reason it hasn’t been done yet is simple: Lack of personal with the right expertise taking ownership and executing it. Further, there are tons of product improvements we can think of besides quant score (financial, credit risk, addition of stables, metaverse, L2s, etc.). It essentially comes down to prioritizing features, which should be informed by demand. As of now, demand seems to be higher for adding financial scores and credit risk worthiness, and for on-demand rating (e.g. by Launch). With the very limited FTEs we have, we need to prioritize product development, while still allowing for experiments.

2. I think the point of keeping the scores relevant is part of the overall product improvement plan. The process is rather simple, we can change curation of projects-to-be-rated, so that updating older reports gets higher priority (we currently do this with reports that had the DFS Rating, but not the fundamental). However, at this point we don’t know, which range of ratings we need to put emphasis on. Whether its enough to cover bluechips / top 100/ top 200 or the full longtail. That’s part of exploring demand, which will influence the updating process.

3. No, but I agree we should. I hope that @maerg.eth or @LuukDAO can help out in this regard. Any support is welcome, so feel free to help out creating proposals for grants wherever you deem it a good fit or see a good chance for Rating to get accepted for a grant. We def. thankful for community support on this.

4. These are great questions but I don’t have an answer right now. Feel free to chime in with your ideas or even take ownership of a specific topic. I suppose for now we will focus on developing a Twitter presence and strategy. But keen to hear other inputs for how we can better communicate and share knowledge

5. I think for now we have a good amount of raters (see Season 2 participation). We couldn’t handle much more with the current setup. We need to allow the community to grow and raters to level up, before we can enter a next growth stage on the rater side. However, we should def. establish partnerships BD-wise and for the benefit of the community (e.g. Nansen for raters, research on demand for DebtDAO or Porter Finance, sharing of expertise/research with Bankless or other service DAOs, etc.). In this area, the network of other Primers is highly valued and we’re thankful for every lead or ideally specific offer for partnerships.