fwiw, I am with my good friend @tjayrush - burn it all and let us get back to better uses of our time than debating idiots, who will just bring the conversation down to their level and beat us with experience.
We do not currently have the tools or coordination here to handle elegantly any of the other options presented.
âthe fate of our project has been put into your hands.â
I donât think thats really a rational way to put things, especially with no governance in place. Without governance, its just market capitalization that is in Gitcoinâs hands, the path of the project can be independent from the tokenâs price. Theres really no onus on Gitcoin here.
However on a separate topic, assuming funds are effectively liquidated, I think that there should be some consideration made towards establishing a MetaCartel style venture DAO that participates in the early funding of open-source projects coming out of Gitcoin Kernel.
Gitcoin has unique access to the best new talent and projects in web3, the previous two cohorts each with ~10-25 projects eventually funded. If the concern is the perpetual funding of open-source community goods, significant returns are required for this funding to mean anything on a long term basis.
With a venture DAO, Gitcoinâs community multisig (or whatever it becomes) would then have access to these potentially high r/r opportunities, have projects coming out of Kernel with aligned incentives, and without LPâs to pay out, have the ability to sustain this funding perpetually.
There would definitely be questions as to selection processes, etc., so Iâm unsure how realistic this is in comparison to just throwing the funds into some protocol, however its clearly a step that would lead to growth across all of the web3 community, and leaves a clear route for open-source funding beyond hope for continued Gitcoin Round matching.
Edit: This took awhile to get approved/posted so apologies, conversation may have moved past it.
Edit 2: It had in fact moved past it, with the context of vitalik specifically saying this is meant to fund gitcoin grants rather than gitcoinâs overall mission statement, Iâd likely put my vote into throwing funds into yearn and perpetually funding grants that way.
Edit 3:
If we go the yearn direction, I would STRONGLY add the suggestion that profit be calculated on an adjusted basis. If the funds yield 15% APY, one should only be able to withdraw and contribute 10% of that 15% to gitcoin grants in order to ensure the value of funds are retained over time and not lost to inflation.
There are some super interesting ideas in this thread so far, thank you all for helping guide us here. 
Like @owocki Iâve been listening + digesting the conversation and trying to get a sense of all the options the community has in mind. I truly believe thereâs potential for a positive-sum outcome here as in all things crypto, and we should strive towards that.
So far from the discussion, Iâm noticing a few key options that I want to try to distill down:
1) Sell a fixed percentage of tokens and burn/hold the rest
This option seems to be the most popular, but it seems like thereâs a lot of variance in how much people want to sell. Some folks like @cupOjoseph think we should sell everything while others like @relic want to keep the number closer to 5%.
On average, it seems like most people in the thread are on board with somewhere around 10-20%. As I think most people in the thread know by now, Vitalik ended up burning around 80% of his SHIB so thereâs some interesting precedent here but that doesnât mean itâs necessarily the right decision.
In terms of how to sell, @HelloShreyas mentioned a few strong options above, for example finding an OTC provider, drip selling into the market, or setting up a Gnosis auction. Other folks like @Crisgarner have even suggested some kind of buyback program.
2) Hold the tokens and use them in collaboration with the AKITA ecosystem
@omnianalytics and @Enrique have both suggested that we simply keep the funds but dedicate them to bounties, and specific quadratic funding rounds that benefit the AKITA ecosystem, the idea being that the most valuable thing here isnât the money but the community. Others like @papa_raw and @castall have suggested that we could hold the tokens but distribute them as part of the matching amount to grantees.
All of this feels very positive sum, but as @isaac and others mentioned there are opportunity costs and maybe even potential risks to putting our energy behind AKITA.
3) Do nothing, send the funds back to Vitalik
As always the empty set is a subset of every set. As @tjayrush and @cryptowanderer have suggested, we could simply send the funds back to Vitalik or burn them entirely to move on to other things. This would allow us to avoid taking a side, and minimize opportunity costs, but at the cost of funds that could go towards Ethereum public goods.
A Suggestion on how to move forward
I noticed that @coopahtroopa put together a great template. No matter which of the options above (or others) we want to move forward with, I think we need to really clearly articulate the reasons why and consider both the potential, the downside risk, the second order effects, and so on.
Do we have any folks that would be willing to take a shot at drafting some proposals and posting the final drafts here for the community to review?
agree 100% on it isaac .
isaac
I will address each of your concerns.
Was SHIBA forced to compete to get their community back? I donât think youâve gotten past the first part of the problem yet. How do you liquidate your prize without cannibalizing a community?
Each token liquidated is value taken out of our communityâs hands. No one asked for this. We took a project that was dead and build it up from nothing, with our own personal funds.
#2. âFreedom to send half your supply to a single person. freedom to donate them towards a community funding public goods. freedom for that community to sell them, or do whatever it determines is the best use of those funds for itself. freedom to collaborate on ideas too, if anyone has any creative and novel suggestions.â
Yes if the Gitcoin community is willing to do that to our community sure, the power is yours.
#3. âThis is very important. What is that plan?(Establish governance and funding for our community project) Can anyone show anything to us? (Our Github repos are public) code?(Our Github repos are public) design documents?(What kind of design?) if we consider this an investment in a roadmap, then where is it?** ( Here https://www.polarfox.io/docs ) can we review it, critique it, improve it? (Sure) are the devs dedicated enough to that vision to lock up their own tokens in a vesting contract? (We have paid for this out of pocket thus far so , sure.) how about the community, will they lock up in a vesting contract?( Iâm sure they would) you seem dedicated, will you lockup your funds like you are asking gitcoin to do?(Yes) are we assured devs are capable of managing a project with many millions of $ of gitcoins funds on the line? (Theyre only gitcoins funds if you choose to kill our community) what is their track record like, can we trust them? (We have gone public from a telegram group, we are a new team. ) Do they share the same values?â (I personally do , but why does this matter? )
Vega5 posted a link whilst i was writing. Seems like they are making a dex on avalance? (Yes we are) and one sentence about decentralized social media?(Iâve written many sentences, but the decentralized social media wont be built until we have governance and our dex up)
Details would be great⌠Looks like another uniswap fork?(Yes, it is cloned from pangolin/zero/uni) why is it called polarfox?(Why are you called Isaac?) Why is there a separate $fox token for governance, and how does it relate to akita? (We dont have access to the AKITA contract, so we will stake AKITA with PFX to yield a governance token) why is the git repo empty?(Its not) why did you choose avalanche over other chains? ( Avalanche is an underrated blockchain with a team of really smart people, Avalancheâs consensus model is winning awards in computer science, Avalanche is already a next GEN L1 blockchain. Room for growth. )
I joined the discord but it seems people are only talking about the token price and exchange listings, as i kind of expected. I am surprised how little conversation there is about gitcoin being sent 50% of the supply⌠why hasnât an announcement been made to the community? (Yes the community has been well informed.) honestly, it looks like the usual pnd token,(really the usual 1B market cap PND token huh) like the hundreds of other cloned tokens.(right all of those other ones ended up on gitcoin forums fighting for their lives) I really donât get why we should be supporting this." ( You should be supporting this because this is what decentralization is supposed to be. People coming together from many places to do one thing. We were literally rugged, and a team formed. A team of like minded people that wanted to fix a situation together. Why would you not want to support us? We are real people, have become friends over the past 5 months. This is a part of our lives now. We are part of Ethereum history whether you like it or not.)
âWe can fund hundreds of projects, toys, hackathons, using the tokens that have been donated to us. Or we could fund akita? Just asking questions before we give up a lot of money for a meme.â ( I kinda feel how iâd expect a person experiencing racism to feel, the âfor a memeâ line is kind of played out. Weâre working hard, we made our identities public, we are really funding this ourselves, I just find this really offensive, probably because I have actually worked hard. Sure you can fund hundreds of projects, by killing the one that actually worked to get where they are without funding, how ironic.)
âThere is no authority but yourself 
â
and Isaac apparently.
Thank you for helping us move forward. I have posted my proposal.
I still have open questions about it. Please help me answer them, and I will amend the proposal as needed.
Hey, lead dev in the AKITA team here.
Feel free to ask any technical questions if they need an answer.
Iâve seen many people in this thread complain about the AKITA Telegram not being serious and only discussing the price. What do you expect of a group with 35,000 people?
You can check Polarfoxâs Telegram here to see more interesting conversations and that people are actually interested in the project.
Our code is public and can be accessed here. We are open to any suggestions.
Gitcoin as an organisation is coming across as a person that picked up a wallet with $$$ and someones ID card in it, so they know who it belongs to. The person that lost the wallet is asking for it back, but Gitcoin claims they can spend the fund in said wallet better? They know what the right things to do is but they are trying to justify their actions.
Vitalik did a token burn with the Shiba Inu he received, if Vatalik didnât send Akita to Gitcoin what would he have done? He wouldâve burned the tokens if you were looking for an answer.
Isaac, I think you need to take a second to zoom out a little bit, all you are doing is trying to justify your actions by rug pulling a crypto project because you feel itâs just a meme coin, Ever heard of Doge coin, itâs a meme coin in the TOP 10! Now Akita has to justify themselves to you, are you actually being serious right now?
Why was 50% sent to VB in the first place? It was sent to him as a token burn wasnt it?
The only reason VB sold some Shiba and made the mistake of sending Gitcoin the AKITA is because ETH couldnât handle the traffic the meme coins were bringing to the network so he had to do something to bring down the gas fees. He has since burned most of the Shiba tokens, so you have to ask yourself what would he have done with Akita? He wouldâve burned it as well wouldnât he?
The only way I see this is you picked up a wallet with money and an ID card in it, the owner on the ID card is asking for his wallet back. But you already saw the money in the wallet and thought of all the million ways to spend it, even telling the owner that you would be able to spend his money better unless he can somehow convince you otherwise?
At the end of the day we all make our own decisions, and we have to live with ourself afterwards.
PS - I see there is only 104 comments so far, should I bring some of the Akita community over to state our case? Since they have been kept in the dark what you want to do with 50% of the tokens.
Above, Scott mentions me as the primary proponent of the âSend it back to Vitalikâ path. I wanted to expand a bit on my position.
First, this suggestion is in no way a remark about the value of or lack of value of these particular tokens. My suggestions is 100% in support of the future viability of Gitcoin.
Second, a thought experiment: assume GitCoin does not get rid of these tokens and instead tries to stabliize or even maximize the value of the tokens because they want to use them as future funding. How many other new token will do the same thing in the future? None? One? Thousands? What happens to GitCoin when thousands of new tokens try to use it as a source of legitimacy? One thing: GitCoinâs legitimacy goes to zero.
Third: Getting rid of the tokens as if they were toxic waste is a metaphor. Are the tokens actually toxic waste? Who cares. There is no outcome where keeping them benefits GitCoin in the long run. Thatâs the only reason I say get rid of them.
I am absolutely befuddled by the recent responses here.
âGitcoin as an organisation is coming across as a person that picked up a wallet with $$$ and someones ID card in it, so they know who it belongs to. The person that lost the wallet is asking for it back, but Gitcoin claims they can spend the fund in said wallet better? They know what the right things to do is but they are trying to justify their actions.â
What in tarnation. This is a donation that was given to a nonprofit entity for a specific purpose.
Doing anything else with it other than fulfilling that purpose is completely ignoring the intention of the donation and moreso is against the ethos of web3 as a whole. This isnt Gitcoins money to decide what to do with. This was Vitalikâs and he already decided.
Its not up to Gitcoin to determine whether they should use this for Gitcoin grant funding. Its up to gitcoin to determine the most effective way to do so.
Pretending Gitcoin would be rugging a project in doing so is a ridiculous platitude that ignores the intent of the original allocation to Vitalik.
The only question is whether the akita community has a proposal at the table that maximizes its value.
If they do not, its then up to Gitcoin to sell the token in the most efficient manner possible.
There isnât really much room for debate there unless the Akita devs and community themselves can identify a way they or their project are currently able to bring value and fulfil the intent of the donation.
I strongly believe Gitcoin should liquidate the resources and put them to work.
Unless someone can explain how AKITA is going to fund public goods Iâm all ears.
@JTraversa I am also absolutely befuddled with your responses.
I quote:
âThis isnt Gitcoins money to decide what to do withâ (read the last quote it gets better)
âIts not up to Gitcoin to determine whether they should use this for Gitcoin grant funding. Its up to gitcoin to determine the most effective way to do so.â
This is my favourite one - âThe only question is whether the akita community has a proposal at the table that maximizes its value.â âIf they do not, its then up to Gitcoin to sell the token in the most efficient manner possible.â
I stick with what I said before, Gitcoin is just trying to justify their action and hiding behind Vatalik is sad to see.
Why did AKITA send the tokens to Vatalik? They sent it there to be burned didnât they?
So we just have to assume he sent it to Gitcoin so they could carry out the burn.
This was the original reason why 50% of the tokens were sent why is Gitcoin trying to change the narrative?
Solely from the position of a community member of the Akita Network, I need to chime in here. What many of our experience has been has been the ability to experience a pivot in action.
Stated clearly, Akita was formed as a MEME coin, a shit coin if you will. Whoever made the coin, abandoned it somewhere down the line. As the story spread around forums and Telegram rooms, it became even less clear. The creator also apparently made a bone-headed decision to send half of the coins to Vitalik, creating the very unstable foundations where we stand today.
HOWEVER, we as Akitans have seen many things beginning to brew, and I will say that our core is optimistic. We have seen some community members be drawn into active roles in the project. Self-funded. Without a definitive answer on what will be done with the donated Akita. The dev team provides consistent updates, and often asks for input from the community. Updates, even though theyâve been subjected to a never-ending barrage of questions about the project on Telegram. And while this project may not yet be packaged up and marketed into what many at GitCoin would like to see right now, that doesnât make it any less valuable. This is the value, itâs the evolution of the project.
What our community craves is certainty. We ask that both sides come to the table in good faith to bring the maximum amount of value from the donation AND the community. There is much good we can do together.
Very curious. What gives you this impression?
There is nothing that provides a basis for this claim. If they wanted them burned, they send them to the universal burn address. Like every other project that burns does. Any tokens sent to Vitalik were simple marketing. Thats it.
Using mental gymnastics trying to validate some distorted perception of ownership and of charity isnât necessary. Weâve been told what to do with the tokens.
On calbears comment:
âWhat our community craves is certainty. We ask that both sides come to the table in good faith to bring the maximum amount of value from the donation AND the community. There is much good we can do together.â
Yes. This is the only path. The question is whether the Akita community has any proposition at the table to do this.
If they do not, why is the onus being placed on Gitcoin. There is no logical chain of thought that would result in that conclusion when there has already been established intentions.
The Akita community expecting others to create value is pretty ridiculous given the context that there hasnât been a single proposition from their community other than âDont sell the tokensâ or âGive them backâ. Neither can be classified as good faith nor maximum value.
Hello my name is Sahputra and i too am from the AKITA community, i write this from a personal standpoint as a mid-late average joe investor because its actually kinda scary and frustrating reading some of these comments here
Firstly i really dont understand how selling the 50% supply off quickly / most efficiently and damaging / hindering the akita project in the process is even up for debate for a community like Gitcoin. I think most of you havent even understood the first problem that comes to mind
Dont look at the investors, screw them (me)âŚ
Whoever invests into a crypto / meme coin should know what heâs getting into, at least most should. The price can go up, sideways or straight to hell and its a risk investors should be able to deal with on their own.
But atleast do look at the people who got hurt by the initial roots of akita then took that dead project into their own hands, funded it themselves and made it public again, with decent success i might add (price wise) and even their path and vision of what AKITA wants to become is (for me) interessting and something to look forward to
Secondly I understand that the Gitcoin Community doesnt owe AKITA anything, I understand that sending the 50% supply to Vitalik was a publicity stunt yet not one that relic and his team made, but also from my understanding its Gitcoins mission to help build / fund the open web like stated by Mr owocki, not destroying something thats in the making.
Whats been given to you is essencially not Hard Cash to use but a crypto currency, now i dont think i have to explain how cashing these in like some members on the board suggested would impact Akita, im sure everyone in here is smarter than me.
So infact whats been given to you is power over the work others have done so far, you may destroy it, set it back, help it or even leave it be but I really dont think funding projects you deem better justifies destroying / hindering a selfunded project and is not in line with Gitcoins mission at all
Finally all said and done im not even here to suggest any solution, of course i would love to see the communities come together, work together and build together. But if i do itâll just be stamped as âoh hes just another investor afraid of losing his money or maximize his profitsâ in most peoples mind and im not smart enough to even imagine how to do this
If anything from a neutral standpoint, if you believe that the AKITA project is unworthy of funding/helping/working together or just another meme coin or whatever then just leave them be, but dont put the hammer on them and waste the work and money they put into the project just because you have a bag of money infront of your eyes.
The most neutral suggestion i read here was from Mr.Tjayrush;
Just send it back to Vitalik see what he does ,let AKITA fight it out again if he decides to send it to someone else or maybe he even burns them like we(AKITA) wish he would do. Gitcoins hands would be clean, reputation and ligitimacy intact, and everyone can just move On from this messy situationâŚ
After all Gitcoin has been doing just fine if not great even without the money they could gain from this donation
After all Gitcoin has been doing just fine if not great even without the money they could gain from this donation
Its not about Gitcoin. Its about open sourced funding, the donation is specifically meant to fund Gitcoin grant quadratic funding matching. This is a completely separate entity from Gitcoin itself.
And I appreciate the sentiment of this comment. But the difficulty is that as you said, none of this proposes any solutions whatsoever other than to ignore the intent and act like Vitalik donated on accident?
Theres kind of an issue there.
Of course its not in Gitcoins best interest to just 100% dump the coins either. That doesnt maximize their value.
But Iâm sure at some point Akita devs have to either propose something reasonable, or Gitcoin needs to commit to a given sale scheme, whether internally or publicly.
Hello Mr.JTraversa,
I dont really understand how it is not about Gitcoin when the whole Gitcoin community was asked what to do about the donationâŚ
I understand its for funding public goods in grants, i never meant to say that it would go into Gitcoins personel pocket
The difficulty is actually way more complex than what you present, if you read my comment or even relicâs its already mentioned that the supply was sent to vitalik not by relic and his team but by the original developer of the AKITA token who then dissapeared to lord knows whereâŚ
No one who argued on AKITAS behalf here or even relic himself asked for this, i wouldnt even be writing here making a case if they did
Relic and his team picked up the pieces of what was left of AKITA and rebuild with their own funds, time and energy not even imagining that the supply sent to vitalik would actually even be touched or looked at by him (a blunder yes but everyone makes one)
Now letâs be real, even i as an investor do think that vitalik doesnt know anything about AKITAâs history or rootings at all, heck i dont even know the whole story behind it and i put money in itâŚ
All i know is people have been lied to and left with a dead, broken and unkown project. Relic happened to be there and instead of crying how unfair the world is he build a team with some if those people and rebuild AKITA into a mooning token within 4 months (wtf is there to not frikken respect pls, i am sry but i had to say it)
Vitalik probably looked at the token, the price, the listings, the marketcap and amount of holders did a quick math thought about power over people he did not want and donated it (washed his hands)âŚ
If he knew the whole story i doubt we would be here debating, so rather than an accident you could say Vitalik send the donation to Gitcoin without fully knowing what happened with AKITA but trusting it was in good hands with Gitcoin
I am not saying that it isnt seeing as veteran members and other members in this forum have been respectfull with their replies towards this issue, its just that when i see people like you and others (no offense meant) talk about not 100% selling everything at once since it doesnt maximize value, most efficient way of selling and internal selling scheme it makes me think a little wether it actually is, seeing as you and others are still treating this as a bag of money ignoring anything related to it and quite frankly some comments in here sound like a bloodfest that everyone would enjoy and the public would benefit from
Also i never said none of this will solve anything i only stated that i personally cannot bring anything informative to the table to make our communities work together, i did give an example of a neutral solution tho and the reasons as to why to reject the donation were also already mention by Mr.Tjayrush who originally proposed it so i dont have to repeat them i hope
Sry i write much
Please try to have a rational discussion or just go somewhere else⌠an entire post railing on a shadow of a position and calling people communists adds nothing. (the irony is great in the context of the akita community calling 1 personâs (vitalikâs) money âtheir communities moneyâ)
But to respond to the only thing you mentioned, if I were to send you $10000 dollars purposefully, would that be me âburning the moneyâ. Or would you now own it?
Or even more pointedly, if the creators of the coin wanted to reduce the overall supply by 50% on inception. Its as simple as putting in a number half as large as the total supply. There is no logical train of thought that results in one burning funds by giving them to another party.
But beyond this semantic game, Iâll just reiterate a third time. It doesnât matter what moral ground any party wants to take.
What matters is the current situation. And the situation requires the Akita devs either propose something reasonable which provides values to both parties, or Gitcoin commit to a given sale scheme.
First point - because itâs so typical and obvious, it begs to be touched upon - telling me to go somewhere else because you donât like what I have to say. Is this not 100% typical and representative of communist cancel culture? Censoring and suppressing the opposition? Cancelling dissenting voices? Eliminating the battle of ideas because your ideas are bad.
Please. Just step outside your position for two seconds and look at that.
As has already been stated, sending tokens to VB for safekeeping was a commonplace attention-getting marketing strategy used by many of these dog meme coins, and others, at that point in time. All of these projects sent coins to VB for safekeeping - not one expecting the super-billionaire to touch them or rug his own communities. And not one of his actions yet has suggested that VB would ever purposefully do that. It is only you, and those like you, who are suggesting you do that with the coins VB sent your way.
Is it rational for you to pretend these coins werenât sent to VB for safekeeping?
Youâve done it multiple times now. As if anyone is actually buying that! It amazes me how such self-proclaimed smart people canât see such a simple thing - but again, typical.
Or would it be more rational for all of us to see that you are simply in a position to benefit from these coins, thus explaining your âdifficultyâ grasping this simple concept, which has already been iterated to you through numerous comments, and proven to you via screenshots of the website itself?
Wouldnât it also be rational for us to assume that had you been an Akita holder, you would be in quite a different position from where you are now, and would not want your investment plundered by others?
It is rational to deduce that it is only because you are NOT in that position that youâre cool with plundering Akita. And every word you have to say in justification of that action is just plain spin control.
â:the act or practice of attempting to manipulate the way an event is interpreted by othersâ
Pretending that these coins were ever meant to be spent by VB is a transparent and pathetic argument. No one actually believes this, besides the few of you with corruption in your hearts - those of you willing to destroy your brother for your own benefit. So even though you may believe your own BS, good luck getting anyone else to - and thatâs all that really matters for Gitcoinâs future reputation, in this regard.
This has already been proposed. And again we can all clearly see that it is only you, and those like you, who are having trouble grasping a proposal that benefits both parties, as you continue to push for a âsale schemeâ that benefits only you.
âKeep 5%-10% of the coins you have - donât dump them - use them to set up funds, pools, etc. Burn the other 90%-95%.â âŚas has been stated numerous times, JTraversa.