Author: Weird Thinking, BlockBeats
Having been in the cryptocurrency circle for a long time, I am no longer surprised to see this trend of a project.
We have seen too many projects that became an instant hit, but then declined and the community and the coin price fell into complete silence.
Time in the cryptocurrency world is too precious, and every day brings new opportunities. We know there is no need to stick to one project.
But there are always some projects that attract a group of solid supporters because of their unique temperament. After the speculators disperse, they still build with enthusiasm, trying to bring the project back into people's attention.
r/datadao is such a project.
The rise and fall of the first data DAO
As the first data DAO, r/datadao was originally intended to counter the unreasonable ownership and disposal rights of user data by traditional Web2 platforms.
Reddit sells user content to AI companies for $60 million a year to train models, but none of that money goes into users’ pockets.
In such a huge injustice, r/datadao was born on April 4. It calls on users to export their data on the Reddit platform and upload it to the community database, and vote together to rent the data to AI companies to share profits. Users can also obtain governance tokens $RDAT based on their data contributions.
It was later revealed that the promoter behind r/datadao was Vana, a crypto AI startup that raised $20 million from VCs such as Paradigm and Polychain. A number of crypto industry bigwigs came to support this project. The project’s overwhelming publicity caused $RDAT to surge 50 times from its opening price of $0.01 to a high of $0.62 in just a few days.
The amazing wealth-creating effect made the first batch of 20 million $RDAT open for circulation all taken on April 8. The official clearly stated that there would be more batches, but did not disclose the total amount of $RDAT. In the end, the problem really lies here.
On April 11, r/datadao finally announced the second phase plan, which dealt a heavy blow to all $RDAT holders.
The project stated in the document: “Similar to Ethereum, $RDAT does not have a fixed supply. New $RDAT is issued when new users contribute their Reddit data to the community-owned database.”
But they forgot one thing. Although Ethereum does not have a fixed supply, it has created long-term deflationary potential for ETH through EIP-1559 and PoS upgrades. And their $RDAT? It is just a useless governance token, and now it has become an "air coin" with infinite inflation.
The project team seems to know that this is not right, and has introduced a staking and referral reward mechanism. Participants in the first phase can get more $RDAT by staking and recommending others to participate, so that their shares will not be diluted due to the increase in the total amount of tokens. But holding $RDAT can only get more $RDAT. Isn't this a naked Ponzi scheme?
The retail investors who came to their senses chose to "cut off their shares permanently", and $RDAT began its endless decline.
When the decline suddenly stops
I thought the story ended here. Occasionally, I would see r/datadao’s official Twitter account announcing some progress on the staking mechanism, which was also a bit of fun.
Three months passed uneventfully, and suddenly I found that $RDAT could no longer fall, and even had frequent "dead cat bounces".
After carefully reading the official tweet, I found that r/datadao had quietly done something big: on July 7, r/datadao officially disabled token minting and gave up contract ownership.
That is to say, $RDAT will not be issued any more from now on. The 20 million in the first phase plus the 10 million in the second phase make up the total supply of $RDAT, which is 30 million. The reason for the endless decline of $RDAT has disappeared.
In addition to this, another resolution was also approved by the community - to work with ORA to deploy a decentralized AI model and complete an IMO (Initial Model Issue) for this purpose.
First of all, this decentralized AI model is much more reliable than other scam projects in the cryptocurrency circle that simply and crudely use the GPT shell. A former Google engineer developed this model for r/datadao. Before that, he wrote a detailed "Summary Analysis Report on Reddit Datasets for AI Model Development", exploring how to use r/datadao's dataset to develop an AI model that can generate Reddit-style content, and pointed out the commercial application potential of deploying such a model in social media management, content creation, and user engagement strategies.
As for IMO, it is not much different from traditional ICOs, which is to raise funds for the development of open source AI models. IMO represents the ownership of AI models by issuing ERC-20 tokens (more specifically, ERC-7641 Intrinsic RevShare Token). Anyone who buys these tokens becomes one of the owners of the AI model, and token holders can share the revenue generated when the AI model is used on the chain.
According to the token economics document, the total supply of the new token $RDML is 1 billion, 50% of which is used for this IMO public sale, and it is planned to raise $5 million at a unit price of $0.01. The $ETH funds raised, together with the reserved 150 million $RDML, will be deposited in the r/datadao treasury. In other words, through this IMO, the r/datadao treasury will suddenly have an additional $6.5 million in funds. These funds can be used for a wide range of purposes, of course, including the repurchase of $RDAT. And what is the current full circulation market value of $RDAT? Only around $1.5 million.
Assuming r/datadao decides to use all $6.5 million to buy back $RDAT, it would theoretically be able to buy back all $RDAT in circulation at 4.33 times the current market price of $0.05. (This is an extreme assumption, r/datadao cannot use all the funds, and $RDAT is not fully circulated in the market.)
What was originally an air coin that was not even as good as a meme has become a valuable coin with sufficient funds in the community treasury and a stable source of income through this dazzling operation.
To create human happiness, it all depends on ourselves
I was very curious, how could a project that had been sent out suddenly come back to life? After a deeper understanding, I had a deeper understanding of the lyrics of the Internationale: "There has never been a savior, nor do we rely on gods or emperors. To create human happiness, we must rely on ourselves."
It turns out that the r/datadao community has not been sitting still. On June 22, a three-person team was selected to serve as community leaders to formulate proposals and lead the DAO. Among the three selected, Agung Triyono (agungtriyonode) claimed to be a listing partner of multiple CEXs and could contact CEX to handle the listing process. Parslowed (lowparslow) claimed to have a close relationship with ORA, and SuperKingCheese was the community OG who promoted this election. These three people are all talented, and their proposals have indeed brought r/datadao back to life.
Originally, r/datadao was a huge innovation of Web3 sucking blood from Web2, and there is a lot of room for imagination. The original token plummeted only because the project team did not find a good solution to deal with inflation. The solution proposed by the new three-person team not only completely eliminated token inflation, but also found a new value growth point for the old token by issuing new coins.
But do you think this is the end? No, r/datadao has another hidden benefit that has been overlooked. Yes, we have not yet unveiled the giant Vana.
One point to emphasize here is that in the future, Vana mainnet will launch a DLP (data liquidity pool) slot similar to the Bittensor subnet. As the first DLP officially supported, r/datadao will definitely receive emission rewards in Vana's native token $DAT. These rewards will also flow into the r/datadao treasury and become another new source of funds for repurchasing $RDAT.
