How Launchpads Fail: Fixing Capital Formation onchain with Umia - Francesco Mosterts

Transcript

[music] >> Thank you everyone for for coming and yeah, wanted to to make this presentation a bit to highlight the the problem of what we were trying to solve with uh with UMI and and what is in general the the opportunity that we are seeing as as a as a platform and uh and also outline a bit how it works. Uh I see it as a very unique uh oh, I got a notification. Um I see it as a pretty unique way of of creating more utility on our on our blockchains

and EVM chains. So, um let's start a bit with how the world is changing, which I think is most interesting part and everyone in this room, if not 90% of the people, experienced it is the builder now can can build software, can build MVPs and ideas in a completely different ways than literally 6 months ago. Um and this is because of AI agent, this is because of AI getting better and we need as as as infrastructure provider with UMI and chain bond, um we need to see what are the second order effects. And the second order effects of all of this is that yes, you can build a software, yes, you can build an MVP that works, you can

find a few friends that try it, but when you want to make it into a company, um things still look very different and very rudimentary. Um hence the few options that you have is either you go to to a VC to find funding or you bootstrap or whatever. Um but the reality is and that's the cool part I think for everyone again in our industry is that we believe that tokens are actually the best way for capital formation um for agentic ventures, for ventures that that are built with using using workflows.

And why we believe that is for for many different reasons. The first one is that um tokens are inherently a programmable uh framework uh for for the founder, for the team to to give ownership to people. And it's much more programmable than equity, obviously, and is much more programmable than a crowdfunding where you pre-sale your your products. Um Tokens are also global permissionless uh in in their way of of access, meaning like anyone really can have access to your to your token, and that broadens up your opportunity of raising capital, of getting a customer base, of of uh incentivizing people to to an extent that probably nothing else can.

Um and then obviously, they allow for composable governance and coordination, which we're going to look at it later, what what we built for that, but uh the TLDR is yeah, now you can use governance not as a limit to you, but actually an opportunity to engage with your community much more. Um and then there are again third-order effects, which is you have a you with tokens ownership with tokens being the ownership framework of your product, you have a transparent treasury management solution because now the treasury is on chain. And um yeah, that's I'd say the biggest qualities that we've seen. So, the big thing is look at it uh in a way where UMI really wants to be the platform in which the founders, the builders of the

future look at tokens as a real solution for ownership of their project, capital raising building and moving from an MVP, an idea into something that obviously requires more resources, so the capital raise and and uh the management of uh of contracts, the management of becoming a service company, to then evolving to anything they want it to be. They can migrate out of UMI whenever they want. They can make it into into yeah, a normal business a normal business a non-token business or they can make it into a non-standalone token with other support of Omiya.

Um And that's what we are. But if you look at the options that are outside today and that's why to we do Omiya we we started building this is because we were like okay, like if I really believe that launching a token for my project is a good idea, what are the options that I have? And they're not great. Um the options um we outlined a few. The first one is you have meme coin launch pads, ICO crowdfunding solution or curated launch pads. I wouldn't suggest any of the three to to any of you and on top like when we wanted to actually launch something we were like okay.

I I have an idea. I think there is value accrual to the token with this idea and I think um I I I want to launch a token to raise some funds to to do the initial investments, but I couldn't find anything that really that really provided me the the right type of solution and what nothing that was full stack. And and so we're building Omiya. Omiya then is the is that the on-chain venture creation layer uh which uh we hope with this one liner it encompasses everything that Omiya really is.

Uh and the cool thing also is we define it as the operating system for a internet internet native ventures. Um yeah. So, what are the components now that make Omiya? Is let's start with the first one. Uh the first one is could be looked as the most boring one, but actually is one of the most innovative ones, which is the legal uh legal framework that Omiya uses. We partner with Metalex, which is in my opinion one of the leading law firms in terms of innovation and new developments of legal framework for for for crypto related companies into building this setup uh in which you can actually have a legal token wrapper to your token

which your investor have real value accrual certainty when they hold a token which again, we've seen how alt tokens have been performing. They've not been doing great. But why? Because the reality is there has not been a framework for for these founders and on top for the investors to really price them because you don't know where value accrual is going to go. You don't know if this is a a vibe token like oh, I am aligned with this token but do I ever going to get any value out of it? With this legal framework instead you have a legal wrapper that says okay, you you have this token, you hold this token and you have a very high certainty that whatever value accrual comes from this product is going to go to the token.

Um then you have the treasury management. We built the whole treasury logic on chain. The um is a non-custodial treasury. What does it mean? It just means that when you finish up the crowdfunding through Omiya, the the fundraising through Omiya, the assets get deposited in a smart contract that is managed by a rule-governed framework by decision markets. And I'll show you later how how it works the decision market and again, it's pretty pretty cool. And then you have uh yeah, the governance part which is decision market I just said. And uh and finally the fundraising part which is probably the first point of action of most of the project is you have an idea, you need to raise some money and you want it to give ownership to your

community and not a VC that could change their mind or who are really um they yeah, they they have different uh they're not as aligned probably as your community and your and your your your consumers. And here instead we provide you a framework where you say okay, I can permissionlessly give access to the people that I want to the token at given prices and on top give access to anyone that later on wants to to own it. Um so, yeah. These are the four big pillars: the legal enforceability frame the the legal framework, the treasury, the governance framework with decision markets, and the fundraising logic.

So, you're a venture, you you you have an you you you want to launch. What's the path? You build it. Uh then you apply. You if you get selected, uh you get funded through through the mechanism. Um what does it mean is you open up a fund a fundraising that could last 7 days or uh however we we decide. And and with that you you get sort of funded with we we say you sell between 30% and 50% of your token supply to the community. So, is a re Why we say that is because we want the community to truly own and govern part of their token ownership. And then uh you you grow. And for grow, it's just one box, but grow means a lot because you could grow inside of Oomia. You

could say, "Well, I did my 6 months at Oomia. Um things went well. The token grew uh and the project actually has uh monthly active users of more than 1,000. I want to move out, or I want to I'm getting buyout." And if you get buyout, it just There is a process for that. You want to move out, there's a process for that. You want to um you want to liquidate because the idea is not working. Uh you can do that, which again is great. Uh is actually a value product that we provide because you could just uh yeah. Run a decision markets in which you say I want to liquidate and everyone gets pro rata the value of the treasury that still stands there. So, that's high level the value that that we provide.

Okay, let's go into the details. The tailored auction. So, this is the the launchpad components of Oomia. Is a is a component is a logical I don't see anything. Uh is a is a component that uh um that has a few unique properties. The first one is it's fully built on the Uniswap CCA, uh, continuous clearing continuous clearing auction mechanism from Uniswap, but we built a few uniqueness into it. The first one is, um, we allow for permissioning the access to your auction at different periods. But why we do it? Not just because it's cool, but rather because speaking with founders, they're like, "Well, I want to give ownership or I want to give a preference to a certain type of users because an example, I'm

launching an AI token for people to streamline the workflow of people that like, uh, use, uh, cloud extensively. So, you could say, "Well, I'm going to set up a ZK-TLS, uh, proof, meaning like you need to provide a proof that you use more than a million, uh, cloud token in the last day." And if you have that proof, you get unlocked uh, one of the first buckets. And so, inherently we built a way for price discrimination between category of users, which is one of the biggest, um, optimizations in our in our, uh, idea of, uh, of giving ownership and and and inherently run capital formation in our

in our, um, yeah, in on chain. The other thing is CCA has a very unique framework in which you give preference to people that start earlier, um, that that bid earlier, but on top the the clearing price at which the auction closes um, has been proven to be one of the most inherently, um, correct compared to many other, um, auction mechanism. What does this mean? It just means that many times there were fundraisers on chain and the price of the token was just completely off. Why?

Because the mechanism through which people could bid and so on just inherently shoot up the price and then it was just down only. Instead here, we have something makes it organic, something that makes it so you can give a substantial amount of your token out and not get screwed by an absurd price at the start and then only bad news for the next years. So, yeah. That's the logic. That's actually a screenshot of how it will look. Um and yeah. Then we have the second part, the second component of UMA, which is governance. As we said at the start, we're solving for the agentic founder, the the solopreneurs, the people that want to move fast and so on.

Okay, you're raising fast, you're moving fast. The problem is the investor, if you want to raise a substantial amount of money, needs to have different type of assurances. You cannot raise in 7 days You cannot have 10 fundraisers in 10 uh yeah, 10 fundraisers in a week and expect that um all 10 are going to be going all well and so on. You need more assurances into that. And the assurance that we bring is the non-custodiality of the raised assets. So, the raised assets go in this treasury and the treasury has um amount in disbursement uh we're going to see later, but anyway, amount in disbursement that go to the to the to the team, but every type of other decision

is managed by decision markets. What does it mean is every decision opens up a conditional market and here you can see a conditional market which is say, which chain should we deploy on next and so which we should invest millions of dollars to to make the the deployment. Base, Solana, or we shouldn't. And you can and this framework that we built allows you to price this the the the token of the protocol relative to that decision. So, you can say, well, if the token launches if the token Sorry, if the protocol launches on Base, the token is worth 0.37. If it launches on Solana, it's worth 0.31. So, there is a premium of uh what 15%, 20% um

if if it launches there. So, the community should take the So, the community So, the protocol will take the decision uh mainly driven by market direction rather than vibes or or rather than just a few people. And you can see here that why this framework allows for maximization of token welfare. Because the token holders, the market participant, will not trade for something that goes against their will, obviously. So that is the pretty strong value prop that uh that comes out of this governance framework. And what's the other value prop? is that people are much more incentivized. Like you could be a you could not have a hold of uh any of this token, but you see that the decision of trading on base is

underpriced, well, you can buy it and make some money. So everyone, even people that don't have token, are incentivized to participate, to engage, to build a community, and yeah, to make a new point of contact for the protocol. Um yeah. This is the the treasury setup that I said that I mentioned it before. Mainly the auction proceeds going to a treasury, then there is um an automatic monthly disbursement for the operational development. So let's say you raise a million dollar, you want to have um a a million and 200 and 200, and you want to have uh 100k of uh you want to have a year of runway, and you want to spend 100k uh to to do the development. Uh pretty absurd, but

okay. Um and with with this sort of parameters, you're going to have every month um an automatic disbursement of 100k to the management to the to the people running the company. And then any other type of decision from the treasury needs to go through decision market. So again, here you see how there is full control for the operational management from the um from the managers, and full treasury management and board level decision management from the token holders. Again, pretty I think unique. Um and what really can you decide on is investment on treasury, is parameter changes on treasury, dissolution of treasury, so you want to close,

buyouts, and mint and burn of the token. The tokens launched on Omen will have a non-fixed supply. The supply is fully managed by the decision markets. What this means is you have an investor that come in and says, "Well, your project makes sense. I want to invest, but you already had a deployed token." Before it would be very tough, but now instead you say, "Okay, we make a decision market. We issue 100 more tokens for $100." Token is trading at one. And with that you you And if the yes passes, do with that you have a pretty you have the supply increasing of the token, you have more treasury, and you have a very dynamic way of of again managing your your finances as a as a

project. Um, yeah. The legal enforceability, we mentioned it before, but what are the the real real um benefit is that there is no setup cost because this is a a setup in which you you you is just a legal wrapper that is built on the framework of Omen that is a SPC framework, a segregated portfolio company framework that we built. Um, you have a segregated balance sheet. It means like legally like your assets are yours and your liability are yours. Um, so good luck. Uh and uh the board decisions have every um of every tokens that have this this legal wrapper are delegated to decision markets. So, there is no board. There is

no VC on the board. There is just everything is actually decided by the markets. Um, and here we made a a cool a cool comparison is what what we aim what's our vision what what we hope to get to is we want to um make ventures uh creation a programmable sort of uh um framework. As Ethereum made money programmable, we made infrastructure programmable, Stripe made the payments programmable, we believe that with this paradigm shift that's happening with AI, with agentic workflows, and so on, there is really this opportunity to make token to make ventures uh set up venture management, venture creation fully programmable.

Um and yeah, and again, the tokens are a tool to get there. Um and we hope it works. Um for builders, um here we outline a bit of the because in this room I I think most of you are builders. We outline a bit of the benefits that come out of of of being here. The first one is, as I said, you launch faster with on-chain native formation. What does it mean? It means also that yeah, you've seen the insurances that investors get are much better than what you get otherwise. The the access of investor pool is much larger because now you don't need to do a roadshow between 10 VCs, but rather you you will be supported by us on one side, but on the other side you have

access to anyone everywhere uh to potentially bid for your token. Um you you have now the ability to leverage your community. Like it's not anymore that oh, there's a DAO proposal that's like a burden. No, here every DAO proposal, if it makes sense, and so on, is actually a huge opportunity to resonate the message of your business and to have engagement by people, and so on. Like a stupid example I always make is you make a proposal The proposal I made before, and someone says, "You know what? Like the base deployment is actually underpriced, and I can make money out of it." So, the guy opens up his position on token condition trading condition on a base deployment, and then uh he writes an X article explaining

why, and then he also goes to talks and explain why why why. And at that point you have literally a delegated comms person that exists just because he wants to prove and just because he has exposure to a conditional future of your own company, which it's very unique and very powerful. Um The The other few things is obviously you have transparent governance um and then you have uh a new legal framework that uh that uh we hope is going to become the standard for for token in the future.

Um yeah. For for the ecosystems in general, um what happens now? Like let's think of a world where you mostly have this type of tokens. Well, it's pretty pretty cool because you have first of all a clear framework to um to assess where the value is going. You have a token, you have a protocol, the protocol is making a million dollar revenue. Where is this revenue going? To the foundation? To the founder? To No, here you know it that if this if this framework is used, it goes to token holders um through burns, through buybacks, through uh disbursement, whatever setup is deci- is decided by the decision makers themselves.

For participants also, is ability now to have access to ventures uh and to to to to companies that before they didn't. Um we've seen it with AI. Most of the of the upside came from private companies and apart from like wrapper of wrapper of wrapper of SPCs uh no SPVs sorry. Uh there's no real access to to retail and here instead we give uh real access from day one to communities and people that really worth it. And we've seen with the last you can give even even more uh preference to the people that you really want on board from day one. Um so yeah, that is

high level uh why uh you should be interested. Uh then what's the future we we hope to to see with this. The future is a future obviously of uh of internet native company now AI native of token of companies that use tokenization not because it's cool. I don't want to say I want to to to build something just because it's cool to have a token. No, because tokenization in this case actually brings you more than not. So that is the the rational gap that we're trying to to fill with with UMA. Um that organizations are community capitalized like the the the cap table is owned by the community and and truly

and in a way that is permissionless. Um that is market governed. Uh so yeah, you've seen it the governance frameworks and all that stuff is pretty pretty um economically driven rather than vibe driven or just dreams driven like many doubt proposals sometimes come out of. Um and then obviously program programmatic coordinated. This is just the start. Uh UMA will launch in two in around 2 months. Uh and we want the program the fact that it's modular is programmatic to continuously improve to continuously have more more to to bring and and that's yeah, a feature that we hope to build with all of you builders.

Um so we built a cool tool. This is more of a game. It's UMA score. We launched it 3 days ago and the idea here is we you have the sort of chance to score your ideas. It's a it's a it's part of the UMA platform where you can put your repo, you can put your X account, you can put your thesis and the the this this logic evaluates the potential it has, where which which stage of development it could be and also a fictional TPV tokenization potential value. It's pretty cool. We launched it 4 days ago.

We already had 200 submissions and give it a look it's it's funny. And then we have a community that we're we're building. You you don't build a marketplace without a community. You don't build for sure on chain venture creation platform by yourself. So it would be cool to have you all in our community to give your opinion here to be as opinionated as possible. This needs to be built together again because we need to cater to the needs of the builders rather than trying to force something because otherwise then people don't use it.

So give it a join, discuss and if you have anything to talk about let's talk there. And that's it. >> [music]