Name of Project: University Blockchain Alliance DAO (UBA DAO)
Proposer: Nicholas Harness & UBA proposal committee
Proposal Summary: This proposal requests 300,000 $UMA and 200,000 USDC of funding from the UMA DAO to UBA to support student run blockchain events, the creation of the UBA DAO, and the creation of a Student Governance Cohort to help give young people more of a voice in Governance.
What is UBA? First a little background on UBA for those in the community who haven’t met with us yet. The University Blockchain Alliance is a coalition of 117 university blockchain clubs across schools in 20+ countries, all 6 inhabited continents, with a total student population of 3.3 million, and one of the largest collections of active developers in the entire web3 world who all believe blockchain education should be available to everyone. Our primary mission is to make the blockchain space more accessible for all students, regardless of if they are new and simply crypto curious or a veteran with years of experience in this emerging space. UBA is especially focused on helping those at smaller schools where good opportunities for students can be hard to come by. UBA started in august of 2021 as 5 small university blockchain clubs in central Illinois who came together to share opportunities between smaller schools who, on their own would have had very little chance of landing partnerships with major companies. We built up a presence at events across the Midwest and started getting interest from students who wanted to join UBA and take advantage of all that we had to offer. Since then, UBA has rapidly grown to become the largest student blockchain community and we’ve successfully established partnerships with many of the major projects and companies in the blockchain space. The very first group ever willing to work with us was UMA and the Umans and over the last year and a half we’ve been working with Risk Labs, the SuperUmans, Umans, and community members to support education related initiatives, community projects, and even launch our own in house UMA workshop series which we’ve taken to 14 campuses. We had also explored a number of ideas relating to early KPI options integration and real world applications as well as UMA tool usage by students and student clubs which eventually evolved into this UBA DAO proposal.
Project Description: As part of UBA’s effort to further decentralize and democratize the student space we are transitioning UBA to a DAO run entirely by the students and university clubs that make up our organization. UBA has received many large offers from prominent blockchains and communities looking for UBA to host our DAO on their chain or platforms, but in light of UMA and the Umans support of UBA since our founding as well as their focus on community led projects and building an incredibly DAO friendly ecosystem we have decided to reach out to the UMA DAO to ask for support to launch the UBA DAO as the latest addition to the UMAverse. The UBA DAO is envisioned as a central hub for all students (regardless of where they come from or what university they attend) around the world to work together to further the blockchain space on their campuses, get connected with a global community of like minded students, and receive support and funding for their projects and ideas. UBA and our DAO teams have also been tapped by various blockchain projects and student organizations looking for our help on building DAO’s of their own and supporting this initiative will be another primary goal of UBA DAO. For this proposal we are requesting a grant of 200,000 USDC (ERC20) tokens to fund the creation of the DAO, the building of a new student team to build and maintain the DAO, support the creation of UBA’s sub DAOs, and with the remaining tokens serving as the initial treasury for the DAO so that we can start accepting proposals immediately after launch and hit the ground running. As the UMA DAO does not maintain a USDC treasury this amount would be obtained by an OTC trade with Risk Labs, or a UBA partner exchange of 125,000 $UMA for 200,000 USDC. We are also requesting a grant of 300,000 $UMA to launch a Student Governance cohort for UMA to address the problem of students lacking a voice in Governance platforms across the space. Students 18-24 despite making up one the largest and most active demographics in all of web3 make up the smallest percentage of any age group in Governance protocols due to lack of financial means to engage (College is expensive man!). This grant of UMA tokens will seek to address this problem within UMA and make it one of the first ecosystems to take action to solve the issue and give young people & students a seat at the table. The tokens from this grant will exclusively be used for student voting pools and to make sure there is no selling action that could negatively affect the token price and by extension the community that has supported us so much we will be paying back the entirety of the 300,000 UMA to the DAO at the end of a 5 year period in addition to a 20% interest fee (for a total of 360,000 UMA paid back) as a sign of our gratitude to the DAO. We also plan on working with the Umans to open up this governance cohort to any UMAverse DAO projects. These DAO’s will be able to delegate their respective DAO’s voting tokens to UBA to be used by the UBA Governance Cohort in voting within these DAO’s governance frameworks and in exchange get access to this active community of students who can contribute ideas, feedback and activity to these communities as well. In exchange for the support from the community UBA seeks to deliver value to the ecosystem in 3 main ways. The first being the addition of our 30,000 members to the community, Discord, Discourse, and other UMA socials and sites, and the millions of students we have access to that serve as an additional addressable market for UMA and potential future members of this community. Students and young folks in general serve as the largest talent pools for developers in the web3 space and UBA being the largest student org in web3 has one of the largest and most robust developer communities that UMA and its projects can tap into. The second way we seek to add value is to include UMA & Risk Labs as sponsors for all future UBA events putting the project front and center for all of our students, partners, and event attendees to see. A great example of this is the UBA Big Ten Block Talk series we have planned. UBA has been asked by the BigTen Universities (750,000 students across their schools) here in the US to help onboard them into the web3 space. Huge amounts of students (specifically CS and business students) are wanting to pursue a career in this new industry and the uni’s didn’t know how to help connect these students. UBA will be helping them connect and build relationships within the blockchain space and build pipelines for placing students with these companies; We view this as a huge step towards mass adoption if we can get these Universities all in on Blockchain. We are also working with Coinbase, Binance, and AAVE, Solana, and countless other partners to launch a Ted Talk style founders series on each big ten campus (the first ones will be at the universities of Illinois, Michigan, and Rutgers in conjunction with their business schools and UBA affiliated clubs on campus). We would be honored to include UMA in historic events like these that are helping the space as a whole move towards mass adoption and acceptance by some of the most important institutions such as academia and legacy finance. Lastly UBA wants to support the DAOs and ecosystem projects within the UMA community through access to our network of partners and student projects. UBA students and alumni are constantly launching projects and companies with a focus on supporting existing and new projects alike. UBA also maintains a large array of partners who together with our student projects can help to address many of the problems or fulfill any needs that projects in the UMA ecosystem have
Budget outline: We want to be as transparent as possible with how the funds allocated to us by the DAO would be spent. To help achieve this UBA will be launching a site to keep track of all transactions and uses of tokens and give our students and the UMA community the chance to see firsthand how the grant funds are used, additionally the site will remain in operation long after the grant funds are gone as it will also track the UBA DAO treasury and how the funds there are used so that anyone currently or future can see what we’re up to. Lastly we can not stress enough that all $UMA tokens allocated to UBA as part of this proposal will be used exclusively for voting, no tokens allocated towards the student governance cohort will be sold or used outside of governance as we recognize that any selling of $UMA could negatively harm the price and by extension harm the holders and community members we are asking to support us.
For the 300,000 $UMA it will be delegated to 20 universities in segments of 15,000. UBA doesn’t want to act as one voting monolith but instead give a voice to a diverse set of universities from around the world. The goal here is to get a wide range of students from different parts of the world active and engaging on the UMA discord, forums, and within voting. UMA is a global community but currently the vast majority of community members come from the Western countries in North America and Europe, the same is true for the university space. UBA seeks to help give the universities in South America, Africa, and Asia the voice that they currently lack. To do this within the scope of the UMA proposal we intend to have a minimum half of the delegate universities to be from outside Europe and NA. We hope this has the effect of broadening the current reach of UMA and enlarging its community in these regions as well as simultaneously helping us to achieve our goal of giving smaller universities and those from non western nations a chance to participate in the delegate ecosystem which across the entire blockchain space is currently monopolized by a few large universities. A group of UBA students in brazil actually just released a report on this (and the wider role of universities in DAO’s and Governance), for any interested in checking out the paper here is the link Copy of 🏫 The influence of universities on DAOs - Google Docs
For the USDC the budget breaks down as follows
25,000 will be set aside to compensate UMA ambassadors
40,000 will be used to help expand and further flesh out our existing UMA workshop series. We also plan on incorporating the SuDAO Education team’s UMA course and corresponding UMA educational material into our workshops. These funds will also be used to cover travel costs to help us reach schools around the world and the compensation for our translation teams who will be working to translate UMA related educational materials into Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Mandarin, Hindi, and Eastern Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, etc). important UMA documents such as the white paper will also be translated as part of this project and made available on the tracking site.
50,000 will go towards our dev fund to support student dev teams who are utilizing OO and other UMA tools such as KPI options in their projects. This will be held by the UBA DAO (separate from the general treasury) and any grant requests will be voted on by the DAO
25,000 will go towards UBA’s travel fund, this fund will be used exclusively to help students pay for travel costs at events in which UMA has a presence (such as ETH Denver & ETH CC if UMA is returning to those two in 2023).
50,000 will serve as the initial treasury for the UBA DAO so that we can immediately start accepting proposals from our students.
The 10,000 remaining will be set aside for any unforeseen costs or extra needs by any of the above budgets.
UMA voting rewards from the 300,000 $UMA being used in governance will be used for 2 main purposes. The first is paying the 20% additional $UMA (60,000) paid back to the UMA DAO as interest. The second is for our planned UMA Experiment, a replication of the Infamous MIT Bitcoin experiment with an UMA themed twist. A group of student researchers from the Big Ten universities want to work with local small businesses on their local campuses to pay employees either partially or fully using KPI options and $UMA as well as having the business accept UMA as payment, making for a small insular $UMA economy. This idea will be the first proposal in the UBA DAO and students will vote on whether they want to use the voting rewards to support this student project. If the vote would be rejected we would open up other students to submit proposals in our DAO on how to use the voting rewards.
