Sad Cat Response to YGG Proposal
Thank you Honey Barrel for this latest proposal.
Over the past 7 months, Sad Cat Capital has made a conscious effort to be as publicly active as possible within the Merit Circle DAO. Our public activism has included posting self-made Merit Circle content on Twitter, publishing proposals (MIP-6 and MIP-7) for the DAO, and even helping to moderate the unofficial MC Trading Telegram group. Our ongoing work with Merit Circle has led to Sad Cat Capital being added to the list of DAO Core Contributors.
We committed to this level of activism because we believe investors should seek to add value to the DAO, not extract it. Merit Circle will only succeed as the top Gaming DAO, if everyone within the DAO works together to make it so.
Our firm holds a strong belief in decentralization. The ability for the DAO to act in its own best interest, without being controlled by any single centralized authority. To date, this belief has been exemplified by the Merit Circle DAO, and we are proud of how far the DAO has come since its inception almost 7 months ago. Sometimes, the DAO will need to make difficult, yet important, decisions, to ensure the best going forward. We believe this could be one of those times.
Like many others, we have been glad to see the Accountability and Transparency posts from seed investors. We believe it is important that investors are transparent about their role in the DAO, and how they have contributed and added value. We enjoyed reading threads from Maven11, DeFiance Capital, and Mechanism Capital, about their contributions to the DAO and suggestions for the future. We hope other angels and VCs continue to follow your lead!
YGG
Unfortunately, we were also disappointed with YGG’s response, as it demonstrates how little value they have added over the past 7 months. We agree with Honey, that none of the 5 points YGG included in their response can be considered as adding value to the DAO.
It was correctly pointed out that there has been nowhere near enough social media activity from YGG for that to be considered as beneficial to the DAO. Likewise, anyone can become published in Yahoo Finance and Coindesk by using similar services to what Honey linked in the proposal.
Unless YGG can expand on “introduced Merit Circle to other helpful early stage investors”, then we also agree that this is far too vague. This could be due to the fact that there is nothing to expand on here, or no helpful introductions were actually made. We also do not consider ‘co-investing’ as contributing to the DAO, nor offering to lend assets which were never actually lent.
As projects and DAOs, the differences between YGG and Merit Circle are staggering. Merit Circle shares our love for decentralization, transparency and honor. Sadly, we cannot say the same for YGG, for all the reasons that Honey has mentioned. Today those traits, that Merit Circle embodies, will be tested to see how far the grasp of our DAO truly reaches.
Ultimately, as a VC firm ourselves, we take pride in the activism we do for projects that we love. The purpose of seed investing isn’t just to provide capital to projects - especially in the crypto space where there is an abundance of capital - it’s to provide ongoing support to ensure continued success. In our opinion, if a seed investor doesn’t do this, then they have failed in their role.
For that reason we will be voting YES to this proposal, and hope that we see continued efforts from all Merit Circle investors going forwards.
Signed with right paw,
Lord Leto
Sad Cat Capital
