TL;DR: ADAM Vault is an omni-chain decentralized treasury management system supporting communities to safekeep and manage the treasury with on-chain budgets along a fiat payment channel via budget-specific credit card. ADAM DAO is the community that governs ADAM Vault.
The Name — ADAM
ADAM stands for Association of Decentralized Asset Management.
What is ADAM Vault?
ADAM Vault is a decentralized treasury management system. Users, organizations, or DAOs can create their smart contract Vault to store, create, and manage on-chain assets with fully on-chain tools. They require no-code knowledge.
Core features of ADAM Vault
- Budget Proposal
Budget Proposal is a smart contract that gives conditional pre-approval of transactions of treasury assets, which is the only way to get assets out of the Vault. A Budget Proposal has the modular parameters of all the who, what, how, why, when of a transaction. The parameters include destination, platform of action, outflow token, inflow token, amount, effective time, executors/teams, approvers, etc.
Users can adjust the parameters in a no-code graphical user interface to build their desired type of transaction. The general transaction types are airdrops, rewarding distribution, token vesting, salary distribution, investment permission, swap, staking, asset listing, etc.
The execution “person” can be appointed to a member or a specific team, depending on the organization or DAO needs, decentralizing the execution power beyond a few treasury team members.
There are other types of Proposals that could be voted by Vault members including DAO settings, general voting, token minting, and smart contract upgrading.
- Virtual Credit Cards (Coming soon)
One kind of Budget is fiat spending with budget specific virtual credit cards. Users can assign an amount to a Budget, a virtual credit card then will be generated for the Budget. Executors can take the virtual credit card for fiat payments.
- KYC & Team Soulbound Tokens
Soulbound tokens (SBTs) are non-transferable tokens representing a person’s identity on blockchain, an idea raised in 2022. ADAM Vault issues two kinds of SBTs: 1) KYC-certification SBT to wallet addresses that have gone through the process with us, 2) team-specific SBT for each team member within the Vault.
Given the two kinds of SBTs, ADAM Vault is able to 1) create whitelisted DAO for KYC-only members, facilitate setup of regulated investment DAOs; 2) create team based budget, whoever has the team SBT can execute a designated Budget; 3) create Discord gating for KYC-only or team members-only channels.
Team SBT is available now, KYC token is coming soon.
- Token Minting
Vaults can easily mint tokens by creating Proposal with no-code. Upon members agreement, tokens could be minted for members threshold, POAP, governance, etc.
- Liquidity & Market Making
If the Vault and token fulfilled the criterias, $ADAM token will be matched with the Vault tokens to set up liquidity pools. In this case, $ADAM can act as the liquidity bridge between the token and other tokens in the market. Market making service will also be provided if certain demand is reached.
- Members Aggregate
In comparison to most treasuries that are built as a commingled pool of assets, each member of the Vault has their self-custodied and segregated smart contract accounts. They can choose to deposit inside the treasury Public Account or their Member Account.
Who should use ADAM Vault?
While building a DAO Vault (Decentralized Autonomous Organization Vault) is one of the best uses of ADAM Vault. But whoever needs a smart contract wallet could use it regardless of personal or organizational needs. For example,
- An investment fund starting a crypto investment portfolio could use ADAM Vault to manage their clients assets. Each of their investors deposit inside their Member Account, the investment fund manager then uses Budget to trade and invest.
- Another example could be an NGO (not necessarily DAO) using ADAM Vault to manage crypto donations transparently. Every spending would pass through Budget Proposals that marks the expense explicitly on-chain.
- A project team could use ADAM Vault to put their project assets inside, distribute salary, mint project tokens, vest tokens and pay for other expenses with their Vault. ADAM team have spoken to some projects that used months to build their own treasury and tools. ADAM Vault is meant to save project teams’ time with a no-code ready-to-go interface and system.
- At a personal level, starting a one person no-code vault, each proposal need not pass through the voting process. However, the person could use ADAM Vault as their personal smart contract wallet to allocate assets.
- DAOs currently use numerous platforms to operate can simplify the operation flow in ADAM Vault with Teams, Budget, Dashboard, Token Minting, Liquidity, Virtual Credit Cards features.
Which chain is ADAM Vault based?
ADAM Vault will first launch on Ethereum mainnet, then deploy to Layer 2 rollup and other EVM ecosystems for lower gas fees and facilitate different chains’ users. ADAM Vault has a roadmap to support Layer Zero technology, develop an Omnichain decentralized treasury.
Build a treasury that make sense – market challenges
The third generation of the internet — blockchain, crypto protocols, DeFi, GameFi, NFTs — has pioneered brand-new formats of economic and social interactions. People can collaborate, exchange ideas and transfer ownerships of digital assets easily on Web3. What’s more, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization aka DAO is one of the community structures people use to gather together.
Regardless of calling itself a DAO or not, any Web3 community that manages digital assets together will need a treasury. However, studying the current common practices of treasury management, it does not make any sense. Communities are now having fierce debates on the governance model, but little have asked the root question— is the treasury assets safe?
Multi-sig treasury is now the most common practice for treasury, but all it takes to rug pull in such a treasury model is only a few people’s consents. While “Trustless” is the fundamental principle of blockchains and crypto, fully relying on only a few people’s decisions is far from reaching the vision. A safe and reliable treasury is what all communities need to play the long game.
The other problem with multi-sig is the efficiency bottleneck, relying on a few signers makes the operation unscalable. Often in projects, contributors are based in different countries and time zones. Each transaction can either be executed in the same time slot or have a long waiting time. A lot of ad hoc actions and timely investments could not be made. To avoid this problem, some treasuries even grant assets to a member’s wallet/EOA, intensifying the rug pull risk.
A more serious problem of existing treasuries is the regulatory concerns. Nearly all treasuries are structured in a commingled pool of funds, in other words, a single pool that gathers everyone’s assets together. However, many countries have regarded such pools of funds as regulated securities. There are requirements on the managers, asset custody, operations, auditing and reporting, etc. If the treasury is multi-sig, the signers to a certain extent are required to be asset managers with licenses. DAO’s legal and treasury structure is an issue the space should solve professionally besides DAO governance.
ADAM Vault is here to fill the gap. You can read our litepaper here.
Decentralized Treasury matters – Why do we create ADAM Vault?
There are a lot of conversations about DAO governance, but the discussion framework on treasury is limited due to the lack of platform capabilities. DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, communities are highly aware of the “decentralized” part. Putting DAO governance, operations, platform, and communication in decentralized ways if possible. But decentralizing the treasury hasn’t been attention grabbing.
Within DAO governance, voting is often the part people advocate to be decentralized and put on-chain on some DAO platform. Paired with on-chain voting, a simple transaction can be triggered after a pass in voting. Under this use case, DAOs are actually putting every transaction on vote. No matter if it’s a US$10 transaction or a US$100k transaction, they both need the entire community’s approval under the existing fully on-chain DAO governance model. This has formed the existing framework of what a decentralized treasury should be, but it is not efficient at all.
Decentralized treasury is nevertheless incompetent in current state, it is still an essential component in Web3 and DAO governance evolution. Treasury in simple form is the resource distribution within a community. Centralized treasury makes the distribution of resources insecure and low efficiency. Decentralized treasury in our terms is:
- Decentralized Safekeeping
Members self-custodial their assets with segregated member accounts and not mixing with others.
- Decentralized Execution
Empowered by on-chain budget system, any team/member can spend treasury assets within pre-approved conditions.
- Decentralized Application
From frontend to backend, the entire application is fully decentralized without a single point of failure.
To conquer the defect in current DAO platforms and solutions on decentralized treasury is what ADAM Vault is here for. Our team will keep pushing the vision forward.
Who governs ADAM and its tools?
ADAM DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that governs the development of ADAM. Progressive decentralization will allow $ADAM holders to participate in the ADAM decision making via our no-code platform.
Where is the Treasury of ADAM DAO?
ADAM DAO Vault will also be hosted on ADAM Vault at launch. ADAM DAO Vault will also be a display to the public of what a no-code DAO Vaults on ADAM Vault is capable of. Some example usages would be salary and bounty payment, token vesting, team separation, improvement proposal voting, treasury investments, etc. All records of ADAM DAO Vault would be on-chain and available for study.
Where can I use ADAM Vault?
Only invited parties can access and use ADAM Vault in the current stage. Stay tuned to our Twitter, or subscribe to newsletters for private early access.
How to let friends understand “What is ADAM” easily?
This passage, litepaper, and our main website are main materials to understand ADAM in short. For ADAM Vault user guide, please go to our Gitbook. Our no-code ADAM Vault will be available to the public soon.
What happens to your Vault when the ADAM team is gone?
It will still be there. Your Vault is hosted on blockchain, not any server that our team hosts. ADAM Vault is also open source, your vault is totally accessible even ADAM team is gone. We are meant to build a dApp/ DAO platform that lasts.
