Grant Proposal - Quarterly financial reporting

So while I’m supportive (as stated), I don’t disagree with some of what you said. What’s a rough estimate on how much it would cost to “establish data reporting flows” and the associated maintenance/upgrades that come with that? I’m also curious to get your take on how we’d market this data once available.

Data
The contracts themselves don’t really change. Some settings are configurable and subject to gov action, but not significant maintenance necessary particularly for the type of stats shown in compound macro overview above.

The above proposal does not mention if new products would be covered, such as if EulerSwap were to launch, would this 50k cover it. I run off the assumption it wont be covered by this arrangement but its not clear.

No doubt producing quarterly reports is the cheapest aspect of this arrangement which is why I think it should be viewed as a marketing initiative moreso than a data one. This is purchasing distribution.

Marketing
As for ideal approach to marketing such info, I do think this is a good question which should be explored.

I have no insight to the cost of getting content displayed on Bloomberg terminal. Of the 1m bloomberg terminal subscribers I have no insight on the size of the subset which participates in DeFi meaningfully.

In my limited experience many institutional type shops use information like this to speculate on token price rather than to participate in onchain activities, often preferring CEX offerings. I question if such efforts benefit TLV and use of the protocol. While acquiring broadly distributed token ownership is important, I do not think EUL speculation should be a focus of marketing efforts at this stage.

Rather than focus on quarterly reporting to be marketed generally to institutions, i’d focus on creating useful real time data to be marketed towards active token communities and DeFi power users. Getting representation on podcasts, and at small personable meetups.

If this is to be viewed as investor relations is a quarterly report as hands on as we’d like that relationship to be? Is there more service not covered above offered for engaging in that relationship management? Could these relations be more transparent if governed through something like coordinape (for example: perpvangelist )? I personally do feel that there are more accountable ways to fund investor relations than this proposal.

In Closing

I think Tyler sums up the benefits of their distribution well.

Of these benefits, I do not see targeting those who do not use crypto, and general market education strongly benefiting the usage of Euler’s products.

I believe we can produce reports within public standards more affordably, while targeting marketing efforts towards an audience more likely to use Euler.

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These are great questions, to provide more details here:

  • On the newsletter, we get ~30% open rate from the newsletter of 250k (so ballpark 80k reads) and onsite views get ~12min read time.

  • Regarding the investor relations vs. marketing distinction, when a company puts together a 10q its IR - this feels pretty similar to that type of service for DAOs where the core function is informing stakeholders not just with quantitative data (that yes you can mostly find on a live dashboard) but with contextual analysis on why it actually matters (most people don’t have time to scrape data and piece together a narrative to stay informed). Sure there’s a marketing component to it since what good is financial reporting if no one actually consumes it so we try to get as wide of a distribution as possible.

  • If new products are launched, they will absolutely be covered by the report

The report will delve into major governance developments, upgrades, and key roadmap initiatives on a recurring basis

  • From our experience with the institutional shops that consume most of their research on Bloomberg/S&P, they are most definitely not looking to just speculate on token price (that’s mostly just crypto native funds). These guys have committed the time and resources necessary to get up to speed in this industry and are looking for how can they meaningfully participate on-chain in ways that are complementary to their business or investment thesis. There is often an inherent skepticism when looking at the space as a whole but having professional grade reporting alongside the sell-side reports they read on a day-to-day basis goes a long way getting them aware of the magnitude of economic activity in the protocols to get them comfortable with taking the next step.
  • In terms of full-service investor relations, we hope to grow this outside just the recurring reports. We’re already standardizing subgraphs and would love to use this engagement as a first step in providing more live data analytics and risk management tools in the future!

As I understand it, Messari’s newsletter extends far beyond quarterly reports. With 150 clients of your quarterly reporting that’s 600 quarterly reports produced a year (assuming all are full service). As someone not subscribed to your newsletter, I have to imagine you include multiple quarterly reports in the same newsletter in addition to other content which has me wondering how much time is spent on reading other content vs these reports. Does any individual quarterly report get read all that much? Do you have numbers on QR readership isolated from other content? Do some QRs get drowned out from the volume?

Its really surprising to me given the scale and reputation of Messari that so little information is known about the impact of these reports given so many onboarded clients and the associated revenue that’s produced.

I agree contextualized analysis has value. If the purpose is to communicate with existing stakeholders who already meaningfully utilize or invest in Euler, then shouldn’t the Euler website effectively handle distribution to these entities?

this seems to confirm that actually getting this information out there is not the priority here. The priority is communicating standardized information with existing investors with distribution channels as a bonus.

What’s interesting to me is so many who have commented they support this, specifically reference distribution as the core reason. While I agree Messari has great distribution, is that all that valueable for things like quarterly reports meant for existing stakeholders?

This is good to hear. Thank you for clarifying.

Perhaps some misunderstanding here (likely my fault). I meant to imply that quarterly reports are used for the purposes of price speculation on equity assets moreso than generalize that folks who read bloomberg or messari do not have complex thesis.

Do you find that quarterly reports are key components of your customer base trying new protocols or scaling up exposure in using protocols?

Given ~600+ quarterly reports are expected to be produced annually and should be published up to date around similar time periods, do you feel that your team is able to make them all truly professional grade with useful contextual analysis moreso than the organization itself?

I would be really keen to read a case study on an organization that viewed the space as a whole with skepticism, and changed their mind due to quarterly reports which then resulted in them using a protocol significantly. Its hard for me to believe that skepticism waits for the end of the quarter to confront the magnitude of economic activity occurring,.

This is great and something I’d be interested in hearing more about. How does investing in investor relations w/ Messari impact standardized subgraph work produced by y’all, given it appears its produced regardless?

Does Messari maintain the right to paywall quarterly reports in the future? (I see some reports are paywalled in the Quarterly Reports section)
If so would Euler have the right to publish purchased quarterly reports without paywall in such an event?

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I’d like to propose another offer from DefiLlama: we would be willing to provide these reports for the significantly lower price of 30k

And on top of that we’ll opensource all the data, dashboards and tools we use to create these reports, which I believe will be of great value since it will allow everyone to check exactly how data is obtained (imo extremely important for transparency) while allowing people to build their own reports.

Furthermore this will go towards funding defillama, which is completely opensource and offers all our information for free.

Regarding distribution, defillama is very well established in the space and we’ve been quoted by parties such as the US treasury, so I believe that we provide a god platform for that.

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I voted against this prop.

The product delivered would have a fixed value add that would disappear after the final report. If these reports are based on on-chain data then they should be generated by software e.g., dune charts etc.

Hire a dev for 100k to make generated reports that can be refined and built upon over time, and that can continue to deliver value beyond the expiry date of the engaged third party.

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At the risk of oversimplifying folks’ positions, I’m seeing the “yes” votes valuing Messari’s reporting frameworks and demonstrated track record of raising brand awareness to audiences beyond the relatively small DeFi-native world, while “no” votes favor open-source/transparent analytics and reporting directly from on-chain sources as a baseline for allowing anyone to roll their own reports. I think the “no” votes underestimate the strength of the network effects that Messari brings to the table to raise awareness of the protocol.

I lean toward “yes” on this proposal because I believe that Messari has created value for most of the DAOs they’ve worked with, in excess of fees. It looks like there may be others interested in presenting alternatives (e.g. DefiLlama). I’m reminded of competing proposals that emerged for security tooling for Compound after an initial post from OpenZeppelin attracted competing proposals. In this case, however, I think the costs are modest enough that Euler could fund both Messari and DefiLlama reporting if @0xngmi or another rep would be interested in putting together a separate full proposal. I see the DefiLlama effort as more of a public goods initiative as opposed to this protocol-awareness-raising proposal, which changes the questions that I think we would want to see addressed, e.g. what other protocols (if any) are supporting DefiLlama’s analytics/reporting efforts and at what levels.

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