When Matt came onto a recent Town Hall to discuss revisiting the Riftwatchers for DEC proposal, he mentioned an option that I found intriguing - burning the DEC instead of having it go to the DAO. He said it was mistake selling RW for SPS and that they were trying to give utility to SPS at a time before the flywheel (burning SPS for DEC) had been conceived. Since that has been implemented, the argument is that everything should be sold for DEC to make it a true, product-backed stablecoin.
This is different from the proposal that was put out and ultimately voted against at the end of last year, which would have sent the DEC to the DAO. The idea of funding the DAO with the mini-sets is actually unprecedented though as previous sets all burned DEC to help regulate the token supply. Of course, the DAO did not exist back then but I do believe the principle stands now.
When you look at the DAO, it is set to receive 300M SPS tokens over the 65 month distribution period. On top of that, it has received over 60M SPS from the Node License and Riftwatcher sales that have already occurred. One way to drive value into not just the DAO but the token ecosystem overall is to burn that DEC - similar to previous mini-sets - and push the price/value of SPS up higher. Since the DAO is holding and will receive more SPS, increasing it's value should be the primary objective rather than just collecting DEC which will need to be dumped at some point anyway.
I can understand the argument for wanting the DAO to receive the value directly through DEC, but it works counter to the flywheel if the DAO has to consistently do something with the DEC which means most likely selling it to receive some kind of value (trading it for another token or paying for a service).
I do believe there will be other ways to fund the DAO as we see with the current Market Fee update proposal. There is no need for the DAO to have and sit on the value and going back to the original intention of the mini-sets - which was to regulate the economy and token supply - is the better thing to do.
Regardless, I will vote for a Riftwatchers for DEC proposal in whatever form it comes but I wanted to share my thoughts on why burning the DEC would be better for the DAO and ecosystem in the long term overall.
