Hello Merit Circle DAO frens, and gm!
I’m Michael Tant, Co-founder and general partner at CitizenX Crypto Ventures. CitizenX is a crypto-native thesis-driven venture fund that participated in the MC DAO seed round.
I’m writing this post on behalf of our fund for the sake of transparency and accountability to the MC DAO. This comes after several governance forum posts called for each of the investors to provide updates to the community regarding our involvement in the DAO.
Firstly, some background on me and CitizenX. As an individual investor and advisor, I have been in the crypto space building on Ethereum since 2016, and have focused on investing in DeFi protocols, DAOs, and crypto gaming. CitizenX deployed its first early-stage fund over the last year, primarily with our own capital, and we are currently in the process of closing a second fund to continue to invest in the best founders and teams in the space. As a fund, our foremost goal is to be the best investor on the cap table of every team or protocol we invest in. One of our primary focuses as a value-add for portfolio companies has been token design, where we help teams design tokens and DAOs from the ground up.
Transparency: Diamond-hands
We are long-term investors who make sure we have the highest conviction in teams and projects before investing. This gives us the ability to align ourselves with the long-term interests of the protocols we invest in and thus, in market downturns, diamond hand our liquid positions and in some cases double down on them. In light of this, we will be staking our tokens in alignment with the DAO.
- You can find here our already public Ethereum address which holds our $MC tokens: 0x7fA32E98C5f3C8594DE1785e23905FB0C74bcCd7
- Alternatively, you can always search for our public ENS connected to this address which is citizenx.eth.
Accountability and Value Added to the DAO:
Over the last 7 months, we have had daily contact with Merit Circle’s founding team, most regularly with Mark. Some of the ways we have added value include:
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Deal Diligence/Advisory: The Merit Circle team consults with us regularly on many of the deals the DAO invests in, and we help vet and diligence those deals. The MC team has told us directly that we have been one of the most valuable and involved investors on the cap table, which is feedback we are honored to have and very grateful for.
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Investor Introductions: We have provided at least a dozen introductions to very large institutional investors and partners who have been interested in working with and supporting the DAO directly. More information on this will be forthcoming over the next several months.
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Multi-Sig Signer: We are a signer on the multi-sig for the DAO and sign transactions for the DAO when the DAO needs it. This responsibility on occasion requires time-sensitive transactions to be approved, and we have made it a priority to be available to sign TXNs even at odd or otherwise busy times.
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Deal Flow and Negotiations: We provide unique and quality deal flow to the MC DAO on a nearly weekly basis. Since the launch of the DAO, we have introduced 25+ different deals to the MC DAO. Of these deals, the MC DAO has invested in at least 10 of these deals, with many unannounced and some still pending.
- In addition to simply sharing deal flow, we have been strong advocates for the MC DAO in rounds that we are in and made room for the DAO even in rounds that were closed.
- On multiple occasions, we negotiated for MC to have more room in a round that was heavily oversubscribed, and in other instances have even negotiated discounts to the rest of the round for the DAO.
- One example of this that we can reference given it was recently made public is the scenius.xyz seed round, which was extremely competitive and oversubscribed even before we introduced the MC DAO. Despite this, the MC DAO was able to have one of the largest checks in the round due to our strong advocacy.
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Advisory Allocations: On top of this, we have also directly negotiated large advisory token allocations for the MC DAO in at least 5 projects, in some of these cases with the MC DAO possessing the largest advisory allocations possible. Whenever we find a crypto gaming project we are excited about, the MC DAO is always our first introduction to teams we find interesting and our most highly recommended possible investor and partner.
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Co-investing in MC Deals: In addition to bringing deal flow to the DAO, we are regular co-investors and advisors to the projects the MC DAO invests in or incubates. We have invested in at least 6 deals that the MC DAO has shared with us including Arcade, Azuro, and several unannounced deals. We have made it our goal to provide as much value to those projects as we can. This includes things such as introducing them to other funds or angel investors in the space we think might be good fits, writing Twitter threads on the project, connecting projects to NFT figureheads and influencers in the space for PR, doing token/mechanism design, helping with DAO governance, connecting them to other launch partners, and providing product feedback. Our contributions and investments in those projects result directly in more value accrual for the MC DAO itself. In fact, one of our first official governance posts was several months ago in relation to our funding of the first ever Merit Circle DAO incubated Sub-DAO project called Seed Words which you can find here. The Seed Words project is still being built, and governance discussions are ongoing around the DAO’s investment, but it’s our intention to invest alongside the MC DAO in the first incubated MC DAO project.
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General Advisory: In addition to the areas above, we regularly discuss and provide feedback on MC DAO product design, long-term strategy/vision, MC DAO investments, NFT strategy, and partnerships, to name a few.
Looking Forward:
As long-term strategic partners of the MC DAO, we plan to continue doing what we have done over the past 7 months–working hard every day to create and drive value back to the DAO. As we close our second fund, expand our team, and grow our brand, we envision ourselves continuing to partner with the MC DAO as co-investors in and partners with many of the best gaming projects in the space.
We will continue to connect with the MC team daily and think creatively about ways the DAO can grow and improve. If anyone ever has any questions for us, feel free to shoot us a message on the forum or on Twitter.
Cheers!