Announcing GalacticaDAO: A Community Space Bank

Space: the final frontier. It’s something many of us aspire to experience in our lifetime. Whether it’s the chance to view the curvature of our planet, travel to the moon, or visit Mars. Yet it’s also a luxury most of us can never imagine affording.

GalacticaDAO aims to change that. We believe the fate of space should not solely be determined by billionaires and nation states. Nor should space travel.

Our vision is to create the first Community Space Bank that gives people a seat at the table in determining the future of space, while also making space accessible to all humanity. As a community bank, we will grow deposits and give back a portion to our community. Five to ten percent of annual revenues will be used to subsidize ticket costs as well as purchase free tickets for GalacticaDAO’s members. The larger our treasury grows the more tickets we will purchase each year, enabling more people to experience space.

As we become a large buyer of space flights, we will be able to negotiate discounts with space companies such as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others. We will be able to pass on these discounts to our community as a function of how long they staked their tokens. Space companies will have strong motivation to work with us as we become their largest customer, and represent a passionate community for space travel (plus we have relationships with senior leaders in those businesses). This will give us influence to have them accept our token as payment, enabling our token to become the reserve currency for space experiences.

Plus for every space flight with a passenger onboard that uses our token to purchase their trip, we will buy offsetting carbon credits. We will be the first space organization that seeks to actively protect our environment. This will motivate environmentally conscious space travelers to purchase their flights through us, solidifying GalacticaDao as the reserve currency for space.

In addition to space travel, the token can be used for other space-related experiences such as Zero-G weightless experience, satellite services, and eventually futuristic experiences such as a vacation at a space hotel or visit to the moon. If you ever dreamed of traveling to space, GalacticaDAO is your ticket. Just don’t forget to bring your $ROCKET.

How does GalacticaDAO work?

Our goal is to build a one-of-a-kind community of space, crypto, art, and gaming enthusiasts. Because community is so critical, we are developing a proprietary merit system, which will be combined with our utility token and NFTs to reward free and discounted space experiences, plus much more (see details of our token’s utility below).

When members want to purchase a space experience, they need to use GalacticaDAO’s tokens ($ROCKET) as the utility token to receive a discount. The discount they receive as well as the order in which members receive free space experiences will be determined by the merit system, using the following criteria:

1. Proof of effort: This will consist of unique contributions by members that make our DAO successful. We will automate this using a proprietary system that tracks and manages contributions and applies a weighting to each. Examples of contributions include assisting with creatives, marketing, design, development, and making NFTs.
2. Proof of stake: Members that stake the longest and never sell any tokens will receive higher proof of stake scores in our merit system.
3. Wallet activity: Our $ROCKET token will have multiple utilities, as detailed in the next section. The more utility, the more natural demand for our token. We assign higher rankings in the merit system when members spend $ROCKET within our DAO’s ecosystem (NFTs, metaverse, etc) as it drives revenue and token demand.

Growing our bank’s deposits

In order to make space accessible to as many people as possible and achieve influence in the space industry, it’s critical for GalacticaDAO to build a large treasury and own our liquidity. For this reason we’re using the now familiar bonding and staking mechanism invented by Olympus DAO that enables protocol-owned liquidity.

However we do not believe the Ohm mechanism in itself is sustainable, or at least in a way that allows for long term token price stability or appreciation. This is because there is little incentive for token holders to stake long term given the inflationary nature of the Ohm mechanism. Also competing on yield and bond discounts is a slippery slope to oblivion. It becomes zero sum as the same investors rotate to newer Ohm projects with higher yields.

On this basis we have a core hypothesis: the Ohm mechanism can only thrive long term if it has a profitable business to grow the treasury plus a token with compelling utility beyond staking and APY

Let’s discuss each, starting with how $ROCKET offers utility in five ways in addition to APY, which will create demand and a stable upward price trajectory for the token:

1. The reserve currency for space experiences (already discussed above).
2. Key component to rank highly in our merit system (i.e., staking and not selling) which determines who receives free trips and other benefits.
3. Provides access to exclusive in-person community events to meet our network of space leaders that include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and astronauts who can share personal experiences in space (note: to be clear these leaders are not currently associated with our DAO, but we are connected to them through our network). Only individuals who rank highly in our merit system will gain access to these events.
4. Required to mint our NFTs. Our first NFT collection will be 3D space avatar NFTs that will be released soon. Minting any of our NFTs will increase ranking in our merit system plus assign initial Discord roles. In our Discord we will ask you to connect your wallet to verify your NFT.
5. Currency in our space metaverse. We are implementing a space metaverse that ties into the governance of our DAO. It aligns with our desire to offer an educational and fun way to explore space while waiting on a ticket to visit real space. We are applying NASA’s astronomical database to create a Decentraland-like 3D mapping of the universe where participants can build communities, buy or sell virtual property on planets/moons/asteroids/comets, build space cities, battle other communities, and visit new worlds. As new planets, moons, comets, and stars are discovered by scientists, they will automatically become available in our metaverse. Any $ROCKET spent in our space metaverse will be credited to our merit system. So playing a game can earn you a trip to space and invite to events with space leaders!

As it should be apparent now, the merit system is the cohesive hub that tracks contributions and wallet activity for all the core components of our DAO.

The following is how we will generate revenue and build a long-term sustainable business:

1. Reserve Currency revenue: As we become the reserve currency for space experiences, our revenue growth will be correlated to aggregate dollars spent on space experiences. Since we own our liquidity, demand for our currency will increase trading volume, which in turn will grow revenue (this is how owning our own liquidity and having compelling utility for token will drive compounded revenue growth).
2. NFT revenue: We will earn revenue through minting and resale of our space NFTs. The space avatar NFTs will generate revenue prior to launch. We will later release NFTs through collaborations with artists. We have relationships with successful artists that create amazing space-related art. One of these artists recently generated tens of millions in revenue from their space NFTs. We will also ask our community to create their own space NFTs that can be used to build our treasury. The winning NFTs will receive a higher weighting in our merit system.
3. Space metaverse revenue: We will generate revenue from purchases and sales tied to our space metaverse. When considering multi-million dollar sales of virtual real estate in metaverse platforms such as Decentraland, the opportunity is significant.
4. Merit System as a Service: We are building powerful automation with our merit system that would be beneficial to any DAO. Most DAOs must manually and haphazardly track who contributes, creating a process that is inefficient and subjective. GalacticaDAO is building a framework that can be licensed to any DAO to automate this tracking and designate benefits to specific wallets and/or Discord IDs.
5. Business to business (B2B) revenue: Most Ohm projects only target retail investors, but we expect any businesses or community can leverage our Space Bank (who doesn’t want to give employees or community members a free trip to space). There are also non-crypto communities that are already working to make space more accessible. We want to help those communities benefit from our currency, discounts, and purchase of carbon credits. The opportunity in space is large enough where it doesn’t need to be zero sum. We will provide a B2B framework that runs parallel to the merit system so non-retail partners can participate in the same benefits. The more capital that’s staked in GalacticaDAO (and the more our currency is used), the more space travel we can buy for everyone.
6. Investments: We will invest our funds in stablecoin strategies as well as compelling space businesses. Along with making space accessible to humanity, we will use our capital to invest in space projects that improve humankind and solve environmental issues. Examples include cleaning up space debris, exploring new innovations to counter climate change from space, reducing cost of communication through satellites, and protecting earth from asteroid strikes (which history has shown can be devastating).

Lastly, we will make changes to the Ohm mechanism itself. There are aspects of the protocol we will change so that our token supply is less inflationary to start, and deflationary over time. We will outline details in a later post when we discuss tokenomics.

Rockets and the environment

As noted already, a critical challenge when sending people to space is the damage to our environment. As a good citizen, we plan to purchase offsetting carbon credits.

Our competition and competitive advantage

There are other entities that desire to make space accessible such as Space for Humanity and MoonDAO. We value these communities and will embrace them given our shared vision to make space accessible to citizens of the world.

One key differentiation is that we are building a long term sustainable business where other communities rely on grants and charitable donations. Our reserve currency will be a competitive advantage, and at the same time a benefit for these communities as they gain access to free and discounted flights plus offsetting carbon credits. Why wouldn’t they want to use our currency as a way to give more to their community for a lower cost?

The GalacticaDAO team

The team will remain anonymous to allow focus to be on the DAO and our mission (Bitcoin showed how well this can work). But to give assurances to our community, we will KYC ourselves to a third party to mitigate any concerns. Here are some details about us:

• Consists of a member that has significant experience in finance, traded derivatives for two major Wall Street firms, and studied finance at a top 3 business school.
• Two members have significant crypto development expertise, including founding and developing two well-known NFT projects.
• One team member has built startups for over 20 years with 2 significant exits, and over a hundred million in capital raised from institutional investors including Goldman Sachs.
• One member previously launched space projects including one that sent an NFT to space and was sold for charity.
• Finally our advisors have significant space experience as well as personal relationships with astronauts and leadership in space businesses we will partner with (i.e., Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson). We will announce some of our advisors in the near future.

Odds and Ends

• Galactica DAO will have its code audited by a third party prior to launch.
• Treasury funds will be protected with Gnosis multi-sig.
• Team’s allocation will be vested and linearly unlock over a 1-year period.

What’s Next…

We will be launching the GalacticaDAO avatar NFTs and our discord soon. Follow us on Twitter for updates. Also stay tuned for more details on our tokenomics, presale / whitelist, and launch.

We are excited for you join to us in our space journey. We assure you that we understand the challenges and frustrations many experienced in other DAOs. We are being deliberate and careful to learn from those mistakes. We are building a DAO that you can look back on and be proud to have joined early. All we ask is you to bring your own $ROCKET!