https://etherscan.io/tx/0x9979fa8763d881d1880b591d5c048f1819c76116c5067e099760763cb44d2d3a
Here is a story.
It is August, 2022.
Tsuka whales are running degen DeFi in the bear market and speculative capital is starting to bid in the degen crypto market again after a good half year dry spell.
Deployers are launching big money larp tokens and writing mediums and inviting "the community" to take charge of their ponzis after they have cleared large profits with nothing to show for it.
A dormant "big money" deployer address deploys x7m105 with a few thousand in initial liquidity, and a new flavor of the month mystery token is born. Millions in trading volume and 10s of thousands of dollars in token fees are pouring into fresh wallet addresses. "Community" telegram chats. Unverified tokens. Speculation over "the tech" behind it. Speculation about what X7 Protocol is.
To veteran DeFi degens it smells like a larp. And the end result is clear too - bag holders turned to dust.
But what if all of this capital investment and community enthusiasm could be turned towards a real revenue bearing product. Not just a copy pasted version of a token locker, a launchpad, etc., but a new, novel protocol?
A group of 6 DeFi enthusiasts, protocol designers, and devs began brainstorming late into the night. What kind of product could demand this level of enthusiasm and capital outlay? What kind of product could escape the speculative ponzi cycle? Leveraged trading? Yield farms? Anonymization tech? And then we landed on initial liquidity, and designed an ecosystem that could realistically support the capital flows and governance needed. Via protonmail email accounts, we invited the original X7m105 deployer along with our idea, but were met with requests to incorporate for tax and governance purposes. We declined and sourced a 7th dev to fill our roster and skillset needs. We encouraged the x7m105 deployer to contribute their funds to the community efforts or other decentralized parts of the protocol. We were met with excuses related to tax obligations and silence.
A decentralized autonomous organization is not a punchline to a bad joke. It is the embodiment of independent actors around the world, interacting across borders through protocols, for their own best interest.
X7DAO was born as a means towards this end of preventing the large capital outlay that we were observing on chain from turning to dust.
We worked tirelessly, pushing the bounds of human capability to execute on the technical pieces - shared liquidity pools, NFTs with actual utility, a trustless migration to stop the bleed into the x7m105 wallets, the protocol itself, and the UI to support it. We were not perfect - there have been bugs, the UI was not nearly as cleanly implemented as we hoped, and timelines have slipped.
