The Past, The Present, The Future.

Throughout the last few months, the founding team has been hard at work with rolling out the XBE Hive into a more public perspective. The many hours of development, auditing and testing has finally gotten us into a unique position with the Hive, and we are thrilled to see how the soon-to-be DAO leaders can tap into the extensive functionality of these vaults. In previous months, the managerial and R&D phases have been completed by the team, with several helping hands from DAO contributors. But how do we go about this in the future? What are the next steps for us to have a self-sustaining DAO that aligns with the underlying vision?

The answers lie within the heart of our leadership colony. A new team of community contributors whose love for XBE can be perpetuated into the long term success of the protocol, and whose bright minded skill sets can contribute to the DAO direction.

When the initial 15,000 supply of XBE gov tokens were minted early March last year, the XBE DAO came into being - as evidenced by the first DAO vote only a couple months later. Since then the founders have contributed a lot to the XBE DAO, including the development of the current XBE protocol app and smart contracts (including the Hive Vaults), including the hosting, deployments, audits, maintenance, and testing. They are also contributing the work in process for the "Layer 2" app (which is planned to be back-ported to XBE on Ethereum when complete) and associated smart contracts that will allow the protocol to expand to several other networks.  All of this was self-funded - with zero token allocations -even buying tokens from the market over time.  While the completion of this contribution has proven to be more challenging and time consuming than expected, the DAO has now achieved a really important product milestone with the stable release of the Hive Vaults - notwithstanding the current bear market we find ourselves in.

This positions the XBE DAO at a point where it has the assets and tools it needs to operate as a completely independent decentralised organisation, which other DAO's and TradFi partners can engage with and connect their services to, so it can achieve the vision of an integrated finance world. But to be a properly functioning DAO, the DAO leadership should be elected from the DAO membership so it can operate effectively.  Naturally the founders want to and will be involved on an ongoing basis to help guide and support the DAO where-ever possible, but it was never envisioned that the Founders would operate the DAO - that day to day leaderships and decision making is for the DAO to manage, and why the founders made sure not to issue gov tokens to themselves, but rather ensured that 20% of the original token issuance was allocated to the DAO treasury.

During the DAO hangout yesterday (17/05/2022), the idea of the Leadership Colony was proposed to the community. So how would a DAO Leadership Colony work with the founding team? The founders will continue to participate as members of the DAO, with a more formal advisory role that allows them to facilitate the implementation of TradFi partnerships that they've been developing over the last year without being conflicted. The DAO leadership will work with the Founders to facilitate the DAO's engagements in these partnerships, and continue to maintain and operate the functioning of the protocol, and also deploy it onto new networks as needed.

XBE has many passionate, talented and gifted DAO members that have already been nominated for a DAO leadership colony, and the founders look forward to sharing the intricacies of their contribution to the protocol - including contract operations and ambitions for the further implementation and applications thereof in TradFi, DeFi, and even CEX - with the DAO leadership to ensure that the protocol realises it's original vision.

As mentioned above, we have already received several nominations for this Colony, and we open the doors to any long term believers and DAO contributors that would like to be on the forefront of something great! Any DAO member that wishes to take on more responsibility within XBE, can nominate themselves to be a part of the leadership colony, or alternatively can nominate someone else for it.

All nominations & applications should be done via the Discord and Telegram channels. After receiving these nominations, we will reach out to the nominees and see if they accept. Concluding this, we should have a list of nominees by the end of the week, where we will then be able to have a DAO quick vote to shortlist the nominees.

After a shortlist has been completed, we can then take it to a governance vote, and if passed can enact the shortlisted nominees to be a part of the DAO leaders.

We are at the brink of something revolutionary and with the right minded individuals, can achieve this! We look forward to seeing all the nominated applicants and will continue to grow the XBE protocol as a collective!