Lucidao Budget Management and Progress Update | May-October 2022
Dear Community,
a lot has happened on all fronts for Lucidao and its first dApp, Altr, in the last six months, and we are excited to share what we have been up to. We hope you will be as pumped as we are after this comprehensive progress update.
First and foremost, we are very proud of what the team has accomplished in these last six months despite the market conditions and various challenges we have successfully navigated. While this has delayed our initial launch plan as per our original roadmap, we are now far better equipped and set up from tech and legal perspectives, which was one of the main drivers of the delayed launch.
Altr Platform Reveal
In saying this, we would like to announce the first public reveal of the Altr marketplace website here at preview.altr.trade.
Here you will find a preview of the platform design, UX, and some visuals for the marketplace. We hope this excites you about what the team is currently building.
This current website iteration is a preview of the platform and does not include any core functionality just yet. Core functionalities are still underway, including final testing and debugging before the launch of these functionalities.
As you will notice, many items are marked as “coming soon”. We plan to gradually reveal more interactivity, product launches, collections, and oracles in the hope of building excitement and demonstrating our progress towards the end of the year!
Budget Management
You can find a detailed breakdown of expenses during the last six months on the Lucidao Governance Forum, and in the bullet points below, we wish to highlight our key areas of focus with the spending and the thought process behind them:
- Our ambition for Altr is to create a visual identity that best serves the brands and products we are targeting to sell on the platform. The final goal is to create a luxury brand in the web3 space that represents the luxury physical assets traded on the platform. We want to create an apparent equivalence between traditional businesses (offline) and their digital counterparts (online). To accomplish this, we must have an equally strong brand identity to welcome top-tier brands, partners, and oracles. We are already in talks with top-tier firms in the space, and we realize that they require exceptional visuals and brand alignment to build these partnerships.
- We approached an exceptional web design agency based in Australia and a world-class 3D design team based in Berlin to create an experience like no other. This cost has slightly exceeded our expected budget because of the quality talent we have working on them — but the quality speaks for itself, and this is a worthy investment for the platform.
- As we unveiled the possibility for users to access fractionalized collectibles and use NFTs, backed by physical assets, to provide collateral for loans, the legal fees rose above the initial budget forecasted for a buy & trade platform. Thanks to our close collaboration with MME legal, we now have certainty about the legal framework around the different functionalities of the platform and a robust contractual framework for the relationship between vaults, Oracles, and users of Altr.
- Still relating to legal matters, the Core Team is ensuring that Lucidao and its dApps are being built with full integrity and respect for the regulations currently in place. The LCD token is a utility token, and to ensure that it remains classified as such we had several consultations with MME legal specifically on this topic.
- Last but not least on the legal theme, MME legal provided the DAO with a draft for the creation of a legal wrapper to reflect DAOs into the physical world; this would take the form of a DAA (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) under Swiss law. Creating a DAA would allow Lucidao to conduct off-chain interactions that wouldn’t be possible without a legal entity (i.e. activate contractual relationships with partners, file for tax rulings in CH, and open bank accounts for FIAT management).
- The core team has continued essential marketing efforts internally to maintain an online presence and engagement with our community. In saying this, the team decided to reallocate marketing expenses more effectively to prevent our efforts from falling on deaf ears during these unfavorable market conditions. The delayed launch of the Altr platform allowed us to reallocate marketing spending in the past months.
A portion of the marketing reallocation went to an event for our Oracles, which helped build relationships and strengthen our partnerships. Oracles are vital to the platform’s growth and are essential in helping us onboard world-class brands. Some additional expenditures arose under the same heading, such as the Plan B Summer School sponsorship in Lugano and the marketing strategy for the upcoming first dApp launch with the leading WEB3 marketing firm Serotonin. - A private 2-day event was organized with industry leaders in the crypto space, car and watch collectors, auction houses, and prospective oracles. The event’s purpose was to gather experts in this space, present the Altr platform features, and educate them on our vision of how disruptive blockchain technology can be in the luxury collectibles segment. That event was a great opportunity to reinforce Lucidao’s brand in the minds of potential Oracles and partners and create/strengthen trust-based relationships with them. Oracles were also able to showcase some of the luxury collectibles that may feature on Altr soon. In addition, some team members traveled to attend various events and meet potential Oracles, which allowed us to develop some key relationships and provide them with live presentations on the tech, legal & operational aspects of Lucidao and the Altr platform. While this led to higher than budgeted travel costs, we are now in the position to propose PLPs to onboard some incredible Oracles, in the car and watch space, who have bought into our vision and are excited to work with us. We will share those proposals with the community in the next couple of weeks.
For further detail, specifically on the dApp progress and tech, please refer to this medium post which provides some additional insight into key milestones in Q3.
Focusing on Q4 and onwards, the next proposal (PLP) will be proposed to the community in the coming days to ensure all stakeholders are aligned on the LUCIDAO roadmap and on how the budget should be allocated to keep developing Altr. We will be highlighting key dates to get hyped about and will be selectively rewarding those who participate in the PLP with some brand new Altr merch, which looks fire if we say so ourselves!
In the meantime, please feel free to reach us on Discord for any questions or comments you would have.
We are very excited about what lies ahead and while we are beyond laser-focused on building, we will also do our best and improve on keeping our community more in the loop on developments as we approach the launch date later this year.
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