Common Protocol Funding Announcement
Developers of Common Protocol raise $3.2MM led by Dragonfly and Parafi to build a community for token holders
Common Protocol raises $3.2MM led by Dragonfly and Parafi. Participating investors and angels include Framework, Hashed, IDEO, Nascent, and Balaji Srinivasan. Commonwealth Labs incubated Common Protocol and will remain active members of the community.
Common Protocol includes an integrated client which is a community hub for token holders. Each tokenized community features a Reddit-like discussion board. Additional functionality includes on-chain functionality like viewing key stakeholders, governance, and crowdfunding for both new tokens and community initiatives.
Santiago Santos, Partner at ParaFi capital describes the integrated community experience as, "Active, representative governance discussions with high-participation are paramount to the success of protocols and their efforts to build strong communities. Without it, protocols run the risk of centralized echo chambers. As active governance participants across DeFi, we've found it hard at times to keep tabs on the ever-expanding number of discussions and proposals across our portfolio. Enter Common Protocol—a governance aggregator to monitor and manage proposals from one simple interface. We're excited to back the team and use the client to boost our governance capabilities."
Common Protocol already powers $5b+ of protocol communities in Ethereum, Cosmos, and the Substrate Ecosystem. The waitlist for integrations includes notable projects like: AAVE, Opyn, Osmosis, Marlin, Injective Protocol, SportX, Showtime, Terra, Clover Finance, HydraDX, Kylin, Anchor, and Mirror Protocol. Many of the founders on the waitlist are also investors in the round.
"Our goal is to become the place for token communities to launch, discuss, and grow in common. To accomplish this we’re building a multi-chain community platform that any EVM, Substrate, and Cosmos compatible protocols or tokens can use" said Dillon Chen, founder of Common Protocol.
The team behind Commonwealth Labs and the Common Protocol previously created Edgeware, a smart contract platform for building decentralized applications (dApps) that intends to operate within the Polkadot ecosystem. As of {day of announcement}, the coin market cap of EDG, its token, is {~$255M}.
With funding in hand, Common Protocol plans to make new hires to accelerate product and protocol development. One of the major features the Common Protocol will offer is cross-chain protocol governance and crowdfunding for any token community. This allows projects to use Common to crowdfund key community initiatives like initial liquidity, development grants, and audits.
Common Protocol earns value via three main use-cases:
- Projects: Kickstarter-like campaigns
- Collectives: AngelList-like rolling funds
- Governance: crypto native Discourse with integrated voting
Time spent with the Common Protocol client drives discussion. Each discussion is a crowdfunding opportunity. As the market cap of tokens on the Common Protocol client increases, more value can be staked in collectives (aka funds).
"Despite the immense growth in assets managed by DAOs and the complexity of operations these DAOs manage, the tooling for them is still stuck in the stone age. Solutions are fragmented, home brewed, and opaque. Having participated in many protocols' governance processes, I've personally felt these pains very acutely. Common Protocol is true next-generation software for managing these communities and will be essential for any DAO of any size to fundraise, organize, and scale-up. We can't be more excited to be supporting the team and look forward to working with them to build the future of DAO management" said Tom Schmidt, Partner at Dragonfly Capital.
When asked about Common Protocol's inspiration, Chen said, “As every interest gets tokenized into an ERC20 or NFT, your on-chain address becomes a link to your on-chain profile. Common Protocol can help this users who are linked on-chain collaborate and make decisions using the same default-open primitives we’ve built for discussion, funding, and group coordination.”
The seed round brings Common Protocol's total capital raised to date to $3.2 million. Chen declined to comment on the valuation.
For projects or individuals interested in learning more about the Common Protocol or Client, they can visit https://commonwealth.im, join the telegram group: https://t.me/HiCommonwealth or follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hicommonwealth