Background
ForceDAO was conceived as the product of multiple conversations I had back in early 2021. At the time, yield farming was at its peak and DeFi really felt like the epicenter of a massive renaissance. At the same time, many of us knew “yield” had to evolve beyond farming.
And that’s what we set ourselves out to do with ForceDAO; make yield in DeFi sustainable.
Our hypothesis was simple. Start off with yield aggregation, do well, and then explore investment strategies in the world of options, swaps, derivatives and structured products. I think we’re just now starting to see many of these products flourish with Ribbon (auto option calls), Ondo/BarnBridge (tranches) and Volmex (volatility), to just name a few.
Status: We Failed
Unfortunately for us, we never got to that point.
Looking back, ForceDAO never really recovered after the exploit. Despite our team’s most earnest intention and desire to turn the project around, an exploit that seemed like a stone in the road, became an unmovable boulder.
In any case, we continued with our roadmap. We went multi-chain, new vaults on Ethereum, then Polygon, then Avalanche. However, this time around we had no traction. Our key metrics were dead and we knew ForceDAO had failed.
There isn’t one specific reason for its failure, but multiple, which leads to valuable lessons on leadership, risk and how to (not) restart an operation. But bottomline is this, if a DeFi project suffers an exploit, the team has 48 hours to turn it around. Otherwise expect to become irrelevant.
Next Steps
Closing down
Today we’re officially winding down ForceDAO’s operations.
We recommend any users who are still investing in vaults, to please withdraw any remaining funds. We will continue to offer dedicated support on our community discord channel for the next 3 months, and frontend assistance, if required.
GTC Redistribution
Our project was initially bootstrapped with a campaign named “Force Prize”, which we held on the Gitcoin platform. When Gitcoin released their airdrop (summer 2021), most “Force Prize” donors received a matching amount in GTC. The ForceDAO treasury was also eligible for claiming GTC.
Today we’re distributing ForceDAO’s GTC to users and supporters who were disproportionally impacted by the project’s failure.
This redistribution is our teams way of fulfilling our obligation to the community and closing the project while making everyone whole.
Any remaining funds in the treasury will be used on a new venture, compensating the original “Force Prize” donors for their support.
Redistribution
Methodology
Gitcoin Donors
Despite the GTC airdrop compensating many donors for their contribution, some donors slipped through the cracks, being left ineligible for GTC and thereby enduring losses.
A proposal was created in Q4 2021, to retroactively compensate users who were not able to claim GTC due to an error. Unfortunately this didn’t go through.
This redistribution aims to cover these donors’ dollar amount lost. More information can be found below:
Rekt Long-term Holders
There’s a multitude of accounts on-chain which purchased the Force token sometime between launch and Dec 28th, 2021 — and held throughout the decay of the project.
This distribution aims to cover losses to wallets that got disproportionally rekt holding Force long-term. To help achieve this, we built a suite of tools to reconstruct users trading histories in order to identify how much each individual lost. The general methodology was:
- Start of analysis: Oct 1st, 2021 at 12am UTC (block 13330090).
We consider this to be the last day our token, project and community were active and healthy. Major activity died down over the next few months. - End of analysis: Dec 28th, 2021 at ~12pm EST (block 13895603).
- Investigate all user’s trades and transfers — numerically determine dollar amount lost trading Force (if a loss occurred at all).
- From here, we took the dollar amount lost and assigned a proportional amount of eligible GTC for that user to claim.
- The minimum amount lost required for an eligible claim: $120 USD.
The list of eligible claimers and their corresponding amounts will be deployed into a Merkle distributor and made available via an airdrop in the coming days.
Thank you to the entire team that poured their hearts into ForceDAO and all the people in the community who believed in me and the project. ForceDAO is no longer here, but the Force remains with us all.
Alberto and the Force team
