“It seems like a running theme in Web3 where people ask for millions of dollars, but don’t want to put their names out there.”
The DAO treasury is not accessible by the creators directly, everything depends on a vote… so there is really no way to ‘rug’. The majority of the DAO can vote against any funding requests at any time.
If you visit the Github repo you can see everyone who has ever helped create Kinic. Most use their real names… those names are very much ‘out there’
‘project will move to an NPO’ The project is not moving to an NPO… Kinic is becoming a DAO. There will be a promotion and supportive developer entity called ‘The Kinic Developer Organization’. The timing of this depends on a lot of factors… but the core devs work in any case.
*It is the same model as Dfinity with ICP. Many projects in the space have a supportive research and developer NPO organised around a protocol.
I understand there’s no real way to “rug” per se, but your team could get funding and then just say f*#k it, and stop development/voting, or participating in the project. That’s also why I was curious about who the devs are.
I didn’t know there was a Github and did head over there to look. It is true, I was able to find real people behind 2 of the 4 contributors. Thank you.
I understand now, thanks for clarifying. Good luck on your sale!
From their whitepaper:: Scripts for finding sites and ranking them. I’m sure that’s not critical for a search engine
Kinic is an on-chain service. It currently has the following off-chain dependencies:
Ownership of the https://kinic.io/ domain name that has been pre-paid up to May 2024. Kinic will transfer to an alternative on-chain solution as soon as practical.
Scripts used for finding new sites and ranking them. Ranking is based on various factors such as meta data, social handles, and reputation. There are some subjective ranking values that can be given to token holders to determine in a democratic way.
A domain can be set by anyone with a cname record. Kinic.io has been pre-purchased for 2 years. The Kinic Developer Organization has access to renew.
This is discussed in detail above. Moreover, a community dev has recently started extending the script to work on-chain with a HTTP request; there are still a few details that need to be worked on that.
This is a confusing post. You have a dislike for scripts and code?
Sorry but I have to use more technical terms here. ‘Reproducible builds’ have been created and are being tested now. If these terms are not immediately clear to anyone, please use chatGPT or similar to look them up, thank you.
This GH readme has some shell scripts (things that you run in your terminal to automate processes with code), devs are testing on different OS ‘platforms’ and CPU (not going to define each technical thing I say).
P.P.S. (sorry for the spam).
The last sentence in the white paper is “Tokenholders that fail to stake their KINIC tokens and engage in voting for a reasonable time are subject to having their tokens repurchased by the DAO.”
Could you kindly elaborate what this means precisely ?
This wording was put in for some localities where ‘active’ DAO membership is needed… practically the DAO could possibly vote to repurchase tokens for non-active token holders. i.e. a token holder does not stake but holds tokens for three years, the DAO could have a vote to purchase those tokens as the member could be deemed ‘inactive’ in certain localities.
Personally, I would believe that there are other legitimate use cases for token holders which do not involve voting & staking. It might be interesting to get further views from the community (in particular interested swap participants) on this topic.
The process through which the DAO would decide on burning tokens.
This would have to come through a proposal like anything else.
The tokens that are used for search and API features may return to the treasury or be burned.
The criteria for selecting which tokens to burn (I assume they would need to belong to the treasury)
The basis on which future (projected) burn rates were calculated.
These are also subject to proposals and voting. They would come from the treasury, likely captured by the search API usage or other KINIC features.
The projected weights were used to show an offset of the reward rate. This too is subject to a proposal.
Many thanks for your swift feedback, @apotheosis. To better communicate my thoughts and queries, I have consolidated them into a single post.
I would like to preface this by saying that I find Kinic to be an intriguing dapp, and a highly beneficial addition to the Internet Computer ecosystem. My aim is to gain a better understanding of this dapp, as well as the plans for the SNS launch. This post contains my thoughts and does not represent any official stance on behalf of DFINITY. I aspire to create transparency without casting any judgments on right or wrong.
My feedback is grouped into four areas: Burning of tokens, machine learning, unstaked tokens and further sources of DAO revenue.
Burning of Tokens:
In your whitepaper, you note that KINIC tokens can be used for example for API calls or ad purchases, with the profits channeled to the SNS treasury. The SNS could then opt to burn tokens via proposal. Question 1: Could you kindly confirm which paid features are currently available and which ones are planned for imminent addition? Also, do you have a tentative pricing model in mind?
You project a development of the total supply, assuming the burn rate will be 0.125% of the total supply in the first year, increasing to 3% of total supply after ten years. Question 2: Could you elaborate in more detail on the rationale for these figures? For example, it would be helpful to understand the projected user base or API calls, as this, combined with target pricing, would offer transparency on the expected fee volume.
Machine Learning:
The executive summary of the whitepaper highlights that “Kinic’s SEO module will feature unparalleled transparency supported by zero-knowledge machine learning (ZKML) technology.”
As this appears to be a crucial element of Kinic’s vision and roadmap, gaining a better understanding of the proposed approach and the current development stage would be beneficial. Question 3: Could you detail the intended approach and highlight the current availability of these features (for instance, as a prototype)?"
Unstaked Tokens:
The whitepaper asserts that "Tokenholders that fail to stake their KINIC tokens and participate in voting for a reasonable time are subject to having their tokens repurchased by the DAO.” Yet, as I previously mentioned in this thread, I believe there are other valid uses for token holders that do not involve voting and staking. Question 4: Could you further elaborate on the vision for the Kinic SNS? Specifically, do you foresee that token holders will always stake tokens at some point, implying it will not be permissible to hold liquid tokens for an extended period?
Further sources of DAO Revenue:
Your whitepaper states that "The Kinic DAO also earns ICP if the DAO stakes its ICP into a neuron on the Network Nervous System (NNS) and earns voting rewards.” I think this is not possible on the NNS. In particular, a canister is not allowed to be the controller of an NNS neuron. Question 5: Could you clarify your plans regarding this?
I would like to also preface by saying that Kinic may soon be a DAO, everything is up for member discussion and a vote after that. The following is an opinion and the projected roadmap is not a certainty.
Within the first quarter the Kinic Developer Organization has plans to request changes to the API for usage to be payed for with KINIC. Various pricing models will be subject to a DAO vote coupled with the changes for the paid API. This will likely start out ‘very inexpensive’ and increase as time goes on.
These numbers were generated with a spreadsheet provided by Dfinity. No one can predict the future, least of all economists. The figures suggest lower usage with increasing usage as time goes by. The rational is that more and better paid features are created over time. The initial features will be for what is being used now; the ‘search API’. But the DAO could add web2 data, cross-chain data, in-site data (search Nuance only data for example from within Nuance) and much more. IMO the ‘burn rate’ projections are soft numbers that the DAO should achieve, while total utility rate will be much higher.
All of search has ML as a crucial component. Kinic was incubated at ICME. ICME has a very strong research and development team around zero-knowledge technologies and machine learning. If you want to read about the open-sourced efforts ICME is focusing on, I direct you to their public blog. https://blog.icme.io/
That being said, I will likely be one person making this proposal in the future.
There are three main privacy use-case for ZKML.
Private inputs (no more disclosing private company search to openML).
Private weights. (sometimes ML weights are expensive to compute and companies want to keep these private).
Private models.
Morever there is a “verifiable computation” use-case of ZKML.
Currently, their is a strong trust assumption in any ML app. One types in a prompt and a response is returned. Your data is collected, the model could be a different model that advertised or a person in a room typing responses. Verifiable computation via ZKP removes all trust assumptions as the Verifier will reject any deviation in the proof. As Dom once said “Math is not hackable”.
Kinic should bring these capabilities 100% on-chain for the benefit of many
More specifically, a future proposal will request integrating a ZKWasm instance that leverages ‘folding techniques’, with advanced lookup arguments which circumvent previous issues in ZK floating point / quantization and efficiency. I expect to see this in late Fall.
ML powered search is going to out-perform traditional SEO and Kinic is prepared to accel in the near term. ZKML is a high impact area both of research and VC funding currently. Kinic DAO has a good chance at becoming the ‘DAO’ envy of the world in this area
The bottom line here is that in many regions, ‘members’ need to be active in some way. The authors of the white paper likely had this in mind as a warning. “do you foresee” this is subject to a proposal. This is not an economics issue.
Thank you for highlighting this. This may be deleted from the FE. From the authors:
“We went by what OC had. And I think any owner of ICP and stake and earn rewards, including a DAO
But if a a canister is not allowed to be the controller of an NNS neuron then maybe that line should be deleted”
I suspect that the authors assumed that the DAO could own ICP in the future in some capacity and this line covers that.
SNS CONFIG
This is now open for public review. A readme is being added.
I ask the community and NFT holders to review, to see that it matches the white paper and IDs previously provided.
Kinic hits all of the marks as an epic potential community driven DAO. In the white paper there has been a publicly visible 16% CF request; which is much less than OpenChats’s 30%~ for example. I also think changing the process to have the CF finish SNS rounds is a great idea! Maybe there should also be some objective standards to what % is considered appropriate, in the future.
Kinic has had a 3~ month due diligence and planning process with Dfinity team members and in public forums. With such a long and detailed process I think the main thing left is to initiate a vote.
Spnr mentioned on their twitter that your valuation is USD 28.5 Milllion, which seems wrong.
It should be 12.5 Million post money, which is 10 Million base (500K ICP * 4 = 2 Million ICP) + 2.5 Million of 500K ICP gets raised in the SNS. That is 12.5 Million USD if SNS sale gets subscribed, and the best case can be dependent on the subscription by the community.
