Ekubo, Inc. Vision

Ekubo, Inc. is the company that built Ekubo protocol, the most powerful automated market maker protocol ever. Ekubo, Inc. also bootstrapped the Ekubo DAO in May 2024, which quickly became an exemplar of decentralized productivity: over 95% of total supply distributed, 60% staked, and 8 proposals passed in its first 2 months. Now, we would like to outline the company's role within the DAO for the foreseeable future.

Background

Ekubo, Inc. is a Delaware based C corporation that built the initial version of Ekubo Protocol, as well as the indexer, interface, governance contracts, and API. We are currently a company of one founder (Moody Salem), one advisor (Sonal Tolman), and a few contractors / former contributors, including especially strollinghome and Selma Haveric.

Our total fundraising as of July 2024 is a grand total of $150k in YC SAFEs from our founder, and a ~78 ETH grant via devonomics, which we sold in January to pay for audits of Ekubo Protocol. Of this total, only ~$40k remains. In other words, we are completely bootstrapped.

We are proud of what we have achieved with our limited resources. However, the protocol's growth has slowed even with millions of STRK in incentives distributed by the Starknet Foundation to Ekubo Protocol users, via Starknet DeFi Spring. In order for Ekubo Protocol to thrive, there must be an ecosystem of well funded and incentive aligned companies working on the protocol. We bootstrapped the DAO in such a way that Ekubo, Inc. could be the first of many such companies. The Ekubo DAO received the largest Starknet Catalyst Program grant in recognition of our efforts to further the state of the art for protocol development, token distribution and decentralized governance.

Going forward

We want to clarify our role in the DAO, in order to both commit to specific efforts within the protocol as well as invite the ecosystem to fill in the gaps. In addition, we are requesting a grant of ~$1.5M to sustain the company in this role for at least the next 2 years without additional funding. This should be the only grant Ekubo, Inc. ever requests from the DAO: in the future, the company should be sustained by revenue from the one-third of total EKUBO tokens it holds.

In exchange for this grant from the Ekubo DAO, we will perform the following services for the next 2 years:

• Develop Ekubo Protocol core contracts for the benefit of the DAO
  • Provide cairo version updates to the core contracts as necessary
  • Complete and launch an on-chain limit order extension
  • Make source code available at the direction of the DAO (i.e. license & timeline decided by DAO)
• Design and implement a framework for distributing protocol revenue to EKUBO stakers at regular intervals by Q1 2025
• Develop and host the Ekubo Interface to provide free access to users of the protocol
  • This is proprietary and owned solely by Ekubo, Inc.
  • We will never charge a fee to swap on Ekubo Protocol from the interface
  • Respond to feature requests according to a public prioritization process
• Maintain documentation hosted at docs.ekubo.org
• Provide developer support in the Discord
• Provide technical support to DAO delegates for creating proposals
• Continue to operate and make freely available Ekubo data via the public API
  • Rate limits for the free API will be adjusted as necessary to keep operational expenses in check
• Open source and maintain the governance tooling
  • Voting user interface and API will be released under a permissive software license (e.g. MIT)

We also commit to never selling any of the allocated 33.3% of EKUBO tokens from the company treasury for as long as the company exists. This means the company will always be incentive aligned with the success of the protocol.

Proposal

Transfer $1.5m in ETH, STRK, and USDC to Ekubo, Inc., confirming our proposed role in the DAO. We will determine the exact amounts based on keeping the DAO exposed 1:1:1 to ETH, STRK, and USDC.

Ekubo, Inc. will liquidate the assets to cover the operational expenses for performing the proposed services for the next 2 years. We expect to hire 3-4 full time employees and contractors.

Areas for contribution

Below are some areas that Ekubo, Inc. will not focus on, and Ekubo protocol would benefit from ecosystem participation:

• Liquidity provider tooling
  • Advanced analytics, e.g. revert.finance
  • Automated liquidity management (e.g. Arrakis)
• Advanced delegate and governance tooling, e.g. Tally/Agora
• Market analytics, e.g. Dune dashboards
• Aggregators and advanced routing integrations (e.g. AVNU)
• Marketing and community management
  • Hackathons, event sponsorship and representation
  • User guides and documentation
  • Taking over the protocol X account
• Centralized exchange listing, and other token integrations