Proposal: Messari Quarterly Reporting

📜 Treasury Grants
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Hello 0x Community! For a quick intro - I’m Jack Purdy, Director of Business Development for Messari on our Protocol Services. After discussing with various members of the community we wanted to put forth the following proposal.

Abstract:
We are proposing that Messari becomes a core ecosystem relations arm for 0x providing in-depth financial reporting and research. This would serve to better inform existing stakeholders as well as attract new ones.

All reports would live as free resources on Messari and would be distributed through our newsletter (250k subscribers), various social channels, and distribution partners including S&P Global, Bloomberg, and Refinitiv which combine for over 1 million active users across nearly every major bank, investment firm, financial services company, and large corporate.

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About Messari
Messari is a team of crypto natives passionate about building powerful data analytics tools for the web3 world. The company was started in early 2018 and has since scaled to over 150 employees after raising a Series B led by Brevan Howard. We recently received a $12.5 million grant from The Graph to become a core developer to build and standardize subgraphs creating a robust open-source data infrastructure for the broader crypto ecosystem.

In addition to Messari Enterprise, our market intelligence platform for crypto professionals, we are active participants in over 35 DAOs including Compound, Uniswap, and dYdX providing long-form research, comprehensive data dashboards, subgraph development, and quarterly reporting.

Rationale
Ecosystem relations are a necessary function of any project to keep existing stakeholders adequately informed while also attracting new ones through better surfacing of fundamental data. This is even more essential in the open-source world of crypto where there are a wider set of stakeholders including users, developers, and token holders that can actively contribute value to the project allocating their time and resources to grow the network.

While projects often have scattered data dashboards, analytics pages, or other resources to better understand the protocol and the economic activity around it, there remains a need for standardized reporting so that anyone can analyze it like they would using a company’s annual financial statement.

As we continue in a bear market, this becomes increasingly important as people tend to misinterpret a project’s token price as their barometer of its success. By outsourcing this critical ecosystem relations function to a specialist firm, 0x can be better positioned to withstand turbulent times and retain the mindshare of major crypto participants.

Proposal Breakdown

  • Four quarterly reports beginning in Q1 2023 that present and analyze key KPIs and fundamental adoption and usage metrics (network volume, trades, integrations, users, etc.) ) from both a macro protocol level as well as more granular specific markets. The report will delve into major governance developments, upgrades, and key roadmap initiatives on a recurring basis.

Examples: 1inch, Balancer

Payment to be made with $90k of $ZRX upfront based on price at time of payment (a 15% discount to what we’d offer normally as part of our partnership with Pantera for the DAOs they’re stakeholders of)

We’re eager to engage with 0x and welcome all feedback. I’m available on Telegram @jackpurdy if any community member wants to message directly or set up a call to discuss in further detail

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Hey Jack and the Messari team, thanks for creating this proposal and engaging with the community to potentially partner with the 0x ecosystem to provide reporting and research on 0x to broaden education.

Summarizing what the Discord discussion looked like last week around this topic so that it’s easier to follow:

  • Rough breakdown of Messari subscribers (potential viewership)
    • 250k subs with ~28% open rate = 70k views per email
    • 56% in DeFi, 5% in DAOs, 8% NFTs, 11% infrastructure
  • Payment structure
    • open to doing quarterly payments of $22.5k before the start of each quarterly report
    • do not do one-offs as the majority of work is upfront data lift – approval will likely mean committing the full $90k
  • Community should be able to add specific links to the bottom of the report to highlight certain initiatives (i.e. active grants, governance forum, etc.)

Proposing that we do a snapshot vote to gauge community interest in partnering with Messari to have them produce 4 quarterly reports on the activity of the 0x protocol/API ecosystem. If there is broad interest, we can refine the conversation topics more specifically around the payment structure and content of the reports. Any objections?

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0x publishes regular ecosystem updates and has a fantastic data team and analytics products that track most if not all of the metrics mentioned, so I tend to think this could be a rather expensive and potentially redundant service. If Messari has other options, such as they have proposed for other paid/fee-for-service engagements, I would like to know more about those options before proceeding.

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Appreciate your input here Nikita! I am also curious if there are other content of the reports that Messari could provide, hence my suggestion of doing a snapshot vote not to necessarily approve of the proposal as is but to do a temperature check of whether or not the community wants to partner with Messari.

I’ll also repost this question in the Discord in case that is a better forum for Jack :slight_smile:

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Hey @nikita thanks for your thoughts! Agree that 0x has top tier data and analytics team however I don’t believe this work would be redundant as they don’t have the same end product and distribution as Messari. We’re getting not only the numbers but the contextualization of those from a third-party research firm into the hands of over 250k crypto natives and 1 million active users in tradfi.

In terms of other services we provide, the quarterly reporting is our main offering but we’re exploring more governance specific analytics and research (ex: Optimism Season 1 recap)

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Agree with you that some of the report content may potentially be duplicative. That said, it would be interesting to see what a 3rd party analyst might dig into or what the community may want the analyst to dig into. I’m making an assumption that the community would have a say in guiding what the analyst covers - @JackPurdy_Messari can you confirm?

Messari’s distribution feels like the real value-add here. I’d like to better understand how we’d evaluate just how effective that reach is, though. @JackPurdy_Messari can you share insights on how other projects you’re working with have measured ROI on this investment?

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We’re open to any and all ideas for specific metrics or protocol developments that the community would find value-add for us to delve into! Naturally, I can’t promise we could accommodate for every single ask but we’ll definitely shoot to do so within reason.

Measuring direct ROI for something like research reports is admittedly difficult in large protocols as there are so many external factors making it hard to directly attribute growth (i.e. tvl and user account increases after q4 report but could be driven by broader macro environment or crypto specific tailwinds.) That said, we’ve had projects report increase in protocol metrics along with other things like engagement in Discord/forums from new players (particularly institutional) being interested after consuming these reports.

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