After hitting bottom and rebounding, why did r/datadao, an old coin in the AI track, come back to life?

Having been in the cryptocurrency circle for a long time, it is no surprise to see a project with this trend.

We have seen too many projects that became popular overnight, but then the community and the price of the currency fell into complete silence.

Time in the cryptocurrency circle is too precious, and every day is a new opportunity. We know that there is no need to stick to one project.

But there are always some projects that attract a group of solid supporters because of their unique temperament. They are still enthusiastically building after the speculators have dispersed, trying to bring the project back into people's vision.

r/datadao is such a project.

The glory and fall of the first data DAO

r/datadao, as the first data DAO, was intended to fight against the unreasonable ownership and disposal rights of traditional Web2 platforms over user data.

Reddit sells the content posted by users on the platform to AI companies for model training at a price of $60 million every year, but none of this money goes into the pockets of users.

Amid such huge injustice, r/datadao was born on April 4. It calls on users to export their data on the Reddit platform and upload it to the community database, and vote together to rent the data to AI companies to share profits. Users can also obtain governance tokens $RDAT based on their data contributions.

It was later revealed that the promoter behind r/datadao was Vana, a crypto AI startup that raised $20 million from VCs such as Paradigm and Polychain, and a number of crypto leaders came to support this project. The project's overwhelming publicity caused $RDAT to soar 50 times from the opening price of $0.01 to a maximum of $0.62 in just a few days.

The amazing wealth-making effect caused the first batch of 20 million $RDATs that were open for circulation to be completely claimed on April 8. The official clearly stated that there would be more batches, but did not disclose the total amount of $RDAT. In the end, the problem really came from this.

On April 11, r/datadao finally announced the second phase plan, giving all $RDAT holders a heavy blow.

The project said in the document: "Similar to Ethereum, $RDAT does not have a fixed supply. When new users contribute their Reddit data to the community-owned database, new $RDAT will be issued."

But they forgot one thing. Although Ethereum does not have a fixed supply, it has created long-term deflationary potential for ETH through EIP-1559 and PoS upgrades. And their $RDAT? It's just a useless governance token, and now it has become an "air coin" with unlimited inflation.

The project seems to know that this is not right, and introduced a staking and referral reward mechanism. Participants in the first phase can get more $RDAT by staking and recommending others to participate, so that their shares will not be diluted due to the increase in the total amount of tokens. But holding $RDAT can only get more $RDAT, isn't this a naked Ponzi scheme?

The retail investors who changed their minds chose to "cut off the stock for permanent control", and $RDAT began to fall endlessly.

When the decline suddenly stopped

I thought the story ended here. Occasionally, I saw r/datadao's official Twitter announced some progress in the pledge mechanism, which was also a fun thing.

Three months passed so uneventfully, and I suddenly found that $RDAT suddenly stopped falling, and even had frequent "dead cat bounces".

After carefully reading the official tweet, I found that r/datadao quietly did a big thing: on July 7, r/datadao officially disabled token minting and gave up contract ownership.

That is to say, $RDAT will not be issued any more from now on. The 20 million in the first phase, plus the 10 million in the second phase, constitute the total supply of $RDAT of 30 million. The reason for the endless decline of $RDAT has disappeared.

In addition, another resolution was also approved by the community-to cooperate with ORA to deploy a decentralized AI model and complete an IMO (initial model issuance) for this purpose.

First of all, this decentralized AI model is much more reliable than other simple and crude GPT shell scam projects in the currency circle. A former Google engineer developed this model for r/datadao. Before that, he wrote a detailed " Reddit Dataset for AI Model Development Summary Analysis Report ", exploring how to use r/datadao's dataset to develop an AI model that can generate Reddit's typical style content, and pointed out the commercial application potential of deploying such a model in social media management, content creation, and user engagement strategies.

As for IMO, it is not much different from traditional ICOs, which is to raise funds for the development of open source AI models. IMO represents the ownership of AI models by issuing ERC-20 tokens (more specifically, ERC-7641 Intrinsic RevShare Token). Anyone who buys these tokens becomes one of the owners of the AI model, and token holders can share the revenue generated when the AI model is used on the chain.

According to the token economics document , the total supply of the new token $RDML is 1 billion, 50% of which is used for this IMO public sale, and it is planned to raise $5 million at a unit price of $0.01. The $ETH funds raised, together with the reserved 150 million $RDML, will be deposited into the r/datadao vault. That is to say, through this IMO, the r/datadao treasury will suddenly have an additional $6.5 million in funds. These funds can be used for a wide range of purposes, including repurchasing $RDAT. And what is the current full circulation market value of $RDAT? It is only around $1.5 million.

Assuming r/datadao decides to use all $6.5 million to buy back $RDAT, it will theoretically be able to buy back all $RDAT in circulation at 4.33 times the current market price of $0.05. (This is an extreme assumption. r/datadao cannot use all the funds, and $RDAT is not fully circulated in the market.)

Originally, a virtual coin that was not even as good as Meme became a valuable coin with sufficient funds in the community treasury and a stable source of income under this dazzling operation.

To create human happiness, it all depends on ourselves

I am very curious, how did a project that was originally sent back suddenly come back to life? After a deeper understanding, I have a deeper understanding of the two lines of the lyrics of "The Internationale": "There has never been a savior, nor do we rely on gods or emperors. To create human happiness, we must rely on ourselves."

It turns out that the r/datadao community has not been sitting still. On June 22, a three-person group was selected as community leaders to formulate proposals and lead the DAO. Among the three selected, Agung Triyono (agungtriyonode) claimed to be a listing partner of many CEXs and could contact CEX to handle the listing process. Parslowed (lowparslow) claimed to have a close relationship with ORA, and SuperKingCheese was the community OG who promoted this election. These three people are all talented, and their proposals have indeed brought r/datadao back to life.

Originally, r/datadao was a huge innovation of Web3 sucking blood from Web2, with huge room for imagination. The original token plummeted only because the project party did not find a good solution to deal with inflation. The solution proposed by the new three-person team not only completely eliminated token inflation, but also found a new value growth point for the old token by issuing new coins.

But do you think it's over? No, r/datadao has another invisible benefit that has been overlooked. Yes, we haven't unveiled the behemoth Vana yet. But I won't introduce it more here. For details, please read "Vana, the behind-the-scenes promoter of the first data DAO in the AI era: a small Bittensor defending user data rights".

One point to emphasize here is that in the future, the Vana mainnet will launch a DLP (data liquidity pool) slot similar to the Bittensor subnet. As the first DLP officially supported, r/datadao will definitely receive emission rewards in Vana's native token $DAT. These rewards will also flow into the r/datadao treasury and become another new source of funds for repurchasing $RDAT.

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