Term: March 1, 2025 - February 28, 2026
Summary
This proposal seeks to renew the Tokenomics Workstream for a full-year term, reinforcing the DAO’s financial resilience, governance efficiency, strategic innovation, and community engagement. Over the past year, ProfMcCarthy has led substantial improvements in treasury management, revenue optimization, governance transparency, cross-workstream coordination, and FOX tokenomics visibility across public platforms.
Motivation
This renewal focuses on:
- Strengthening Treasury Stability – Enhancing stablecoin reserves, liquidity, and financial health.
- Optimizing Revenue Streams – Refining fee models, expanding DeFi integrations, and maximizing protocol earnings.
- Strengthening Governance – Hosting biweekly vote meetings, ensuring timely decisions, and publishing briefs on governance outcomes.
- Expanding Partnerships & Token Utility – Establishing new collaborations and launching innovative tokenomics experiments.
- Managing FOX Token Data & Market Positioning – Owning all FOX circulating supply, emissions, and economic data to ensure it is presented consistently and compellingly across all public-facing platforms.
- Broadening Community & Educational Outreach – Amplifying ShapeShift’s presence through social media, marketing initiatives, and FOX Academy leadership.
- Facilitating Community & Contributor Engagement – Helping with ShapeShift Ops Sprint on Mondays, ensuring cross-workstream collaboration, and creating and leading the ShapeShift Praise Hour, reviving FOX Props to celebrate contributors and strengthen community ties.
Abstract
Under ProfMcCarthy’s leadership, the Tokenomics Workstream has:
- Treasury & Governance: Rescued stablecoin reserves from <$300k to $2.6M, ensured timely execution of multisig transactions, and conducted regular vote meetings.
- Revenue & Operational Efficiency: Implemented fee model refinements and DeFi integrations that improved DAO revenue streams (growing monthly fees from $5k-10k in late 2023, to $60k-300k in early 2024, and then had a setback to our current $40k-70k monthly fees in late 2024).
- Process Overhaul: Revamped internal systems, creating a comprehensive financial tracking framework to ensure accuracy and accountability.
- Governance & Transparency: Held nearly 100 biweekly vote meetings, maintained detailed agendas and minutes, and introduced plans to publish vote briefs.
- Ownership of FOX Supply & Tokenomics Data: Took full responsibility for tracking FOX circulating supply, emissions schedules, token burns, and incentive distributions, ensuring that all public data remains consistent, accurate, and compelling.
- Community & Marketing Engagement: Worked directly with marketing to align FOX tokenomics messaging across discord, social media, shapeshift.com, coinmarketcap, coingecko, and elsewhere on the internet
- Educational Leadership: Developed and maintained FOX Academy and ShapeShift documentation, ensuring that contributors, investors, and community members have access to the latest economic insights.
- Facilitated Cross-Workstream Coordination & Contributor Morale:
- Started and led ShapeShift Praise Hour to celebrate contributions, boost morale, and revive FOX Props in governance calls.
- Spearhead Engineering Leadership Hiring Process, ensuring a smooth, efficient pipeline that meets everyone’s expectations as we see if different engineering workstream leader candidates are the right fit.
- Dashboard Maintenance Overview: I actively maintain key dashboards that provide critical insights into ShapeShift’s financial and operational health. These dashboards support data-driven decision-making for the DAO and are accessible via ShapeShift’s Notion workspace and Flipside:
- Runway Dashboard – Tracks operating expenses, funding, and burn rate.
- Revenue Dashboard – Monitors all revenue streams and trends, including wallet sizes of different swaps, where we are getting our fees from (in terms of swap sizes), how many free trades are we giving away (and their volume).
- LP Dashboard – Analyzes liquidity provisioning, adds and removes, across chains.
- Swap Volume Dashboard – Analyzes the different swaps on the platform, what size wallets, what size transactions, how much volume Shapeshift is getting vs affiliate peers.
- Treasury Dashboard – Provides a real-time view of treasury assets and transactions.
- CRM Dashboard – Tracks user engagement, bps paid, free trades, high-volume trades, high-fee trades, and shapeshift users’ interactions with other affiliates.
Specifications
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – 2024
Operational KPIs:
DFC Training Process: 50% (Goal: 100% | Δ: +50%)
Multisig Training Process: 100% (Goal: 100%)
Consistent Stablecoins for Payroll: 100% (Goal: 100%)
Meeting DAO Obligations: 100% (Goal: 100%)
Partnership Evaluation (within 6 meetings): 100% (Goal: 100%)
Goal KPIs:
12-Month Stablecoin Runway: Achieved 15 vs. Goal: 12
(125% of target; Δ: -3)DAO Obligations: rFOX distributions were days after the 15th planned (but before the 30th due date) twice due to technical issues.
Revamping Multisig Team: All SAFEs (EVM & Solana) are migrated. Thorchain & Cosmos still in migration.
(75% of target)Protocol-Owned Liquidity (PoL) on Arbitrum: $54k vs. Goal: $200k
(27% of target; Δ: $146k short)Protocol-Owned Liquidity (PoL) on Mainnet: $1.77M vs. Goal: $3M
(59% of target; Δ: $1.23M short)
Not Met Goals:
Yield Management: Deliberately avoided risky yield strategies to preserve capital.
Goals for 2025
Treasury & Financial Health
- Maintain stablecoin reserves above $2M.
- Extend financial runway to 18 months by December 2025.
- Liquidity Goals:
- Mainnet: $5M
- Arbitrum: $150k
Revenue Optimization
- Increase realized revenue to $100k/month (Stretch Goal: $150k/month).
- Expand DeFi strategies to generate at least $50k/month (Stretch Goal: $75k/month).
Governance & Transparency
- Host 12+ DFC meetings per quarter, creating agendas, presenting, and following up on items related to DAO Finances.
- Publish briefs summarizing major votes and decisions.
Ecosystem Partnerships & Token Utility
- Evaluate 1 DAO partnerships per quarter (Stretch Goal: 2).
- Launch 1–2 token utility experiments per quarter.
FOX Token Data & Market Positioning
- Maintain accurate FOX supply and tokenomics data, ensuring clear and up-to-date reporting across all DAO content.
Community & Contributor Engagement
- Sustain and expand Praise Hour & FOX Props to keep community engagement high.
- Facilitate cross-workstream collaboration
Budget & Compensation
Discretionary budget (travel for conferences, money for transcription software for meeting minutes, other tokenomics related things that are small and monthly in nature ($5,000 USDC)
Rayyyk budget (for maintaining dashboards): $10,000 spent in $100 /hr increments, 50% FOX, 50% USDC
ProfMcCarthy (Workstream Lead, Full-Time)
- Compensation: $17,000/month (Paid 100% in FOX tokens)
Annual Total: $219,000 total; $209,000 (in FOX tokens); $10k in USDC
Key Notes on Compensation:
- No stablecoin burden: This renewal does not impact the stablecoin treasury, as all compensation is in FOX.
- Competitive DAO market pay: Compensation aligns with market comps. ProfMcCarthy has taken the same pay since he started this role ($14k) with no pay increases during the year and a half since he’s led the Tokenomics workstream. This increase reflects expanded responsibilities taken on by both the tokenomics workstream as part of the DAO and Profmccarthy in leadership.
- Long-term DAO alignment: Since compensation is FOX-based, incentives are fully aligned with the DAO’s success.
Benefits
- Strong Leadership in Governance: Leads twice-weekly DFC meetings, ensuring structured discussions and decision-making.
- Efficient Vote Management: Spearheads DFC votes, drafts agendas, and ensures follow-ups for seamless execution.
- On-Demand Treasury & Tokenomics Expertise: Provides real-time answers to DAO members regarding treasury and tokenomics.
- FOX Tokenomics Data & Market Positioning: Maintains accurate FOX supply, emissions, and economic data, ensuring consistency across all platforms.
- No Stablecoin Burden: Compensation is 100% in FOX, preserving the DAO’s stablecoin reserves while aligning incentives with DAO success.
Drawbacks
- FOX Fund Allocation Concerns: Some may question whether this is the best use of DAO FOX reserves.
- Ambitious Targets: While key goals are outlined, execution may require additional resources or partnerships to ensure success.
- High Responsibility Load: The wide scope of responsibilities may raise concerns about workstream bandwidth and the need for delegation.
Vote
- For: Approve the Tokenomics Workstream renewal for Q2 2025-Q1 2026.
- Against: Reject the renewal, discontinuing the Tokenomics Workstream.
- For with Changes: Approve the renewal with modifications.
Cast your vote as “For,” “Against,” or “For with Changes.”