As of now, out of the 10k Gov NFTs that can be minted, only 606 are circulating. 400 of them belong to investors that partecipated in the three public sales held last year that helped raise money for trading liquidity, development costs and the audit. The rest is divided between the Team, that currently has 112 Gov NFTs distributed between individual team members and the Treasury with 94 Gov NFTs. The Team NFTs are meant to reward each team member for his work on the project while Treasury NFTs are supposed to collect money that will be reinvested into the protocol by paying for marketing, hire extra developers, pay for hosting etc.

The problems with current Gov NFTs distribution

Although before the audit all trading liquidity was owned by the protocol, with the new audited contracts a new liquidity model has been adopted.
While the protocol can still provide liquidity if needed, anyone can swap DAI or USDT for tigUSD and lock it from 7 to 365 days to receive a portion of trading fees (the longer the lock, the higher the rewards).
Since the contracts don’t allow for a part of the fees to be divided between locked tigUSD and Gov NFTs (all fees go to Gov NFTs), a part of the rewards earned by the Gov NFTs owned by the treasury are given to tigUSD lockers.
Out of 94 NFTs, 80 are set aside for this purpose (40 on Arbitrum and 40 on Polygon). This means that the Treasury currently only has 14 Gov NFTs.
Distribution is:
Investors: 400 (66%)
Team: 112 (18,5%)
tigUSD staking: 80 (13,2%)
Treasury: 14 (2,3%)

Problems with this distribution:

• Treasury doesn’t have enough Gov NFTs to build up an healthy budget that can be used for project development. 14 NFTs is simply not enough.

• Locked tigUSD should earn more. Liquidity is the number one priority for any protocol because it allows more trades to be open at the same time. In general a well thought out liquidity model enables a positive feedback loop where: Good APY for stakers → More liquidity → More traders → More fees → Good APY for stakers. While current APY for stakers is pretty good it could be even better. This will kickstart the positive liquidity feedback loop.

• The number of NFTs in circulation (606) is very low and limits the potential number of investors into the project. While 400 Gov NFTs is not a small number, the majority of them are owned by an handful of whales. While it’s good to have loyal long term investors (very few Gov NFTs have been sold), the number of holders should be ideally growing over time in order to have a larger and stronger community that can also help in raising awereness about the protocol and bring more users to it.

My proposal

To solve this problems I propose to mint more Gov NFTs and bring the total circulating number to 1500, distributed as: Investors: 750 (50%) Team: 270 (18%) tigUSD staking: 300 (20%) Treasury: 180 (12%)

The new 350 NFTs going to investors would be sold in a new public sale. My proposed price is $850, in order to reward current investors by creating a sort of floor price that is higher than previous public sale and to raise a nice sum that can be used to accelerate protocol growth.

The Team would gain new NFTs to distribute to current members.
As of now Team is composed of GainsGoblin, Haz and Telcontar.
Max and Camillo are not part of the team anymore and while they each own 18 Gov NFTs, they won’t receive any more in the future. The new NFTs could also be given to new long term team members like mike9 as chief marketing officer.

tigUSD share of fees would jump from 13,2% to 20%. This will help attract more stakers and raise the maximum open interest available to traders.

Treasury share would be big enough to create a proper budget for the development of the project. This will accelerate the growth of the project. We have big plans for Tigris and we are currently limited by a lack of resources in achieving our goals for the project.

What about a token

Recently there have been some talks about leaving the Governance NFT model to embrace a more standard token model. Tigris token holders would stake their tokens to earn trading fees and participate in governance votes. Launching a token could attract a lot of investors to Tigris since everyone could invest into the project with just a few dollars instead of heaving to buy a Gov NFT for a much higher price. A part of the token could also be used for an airdrop and that would surely generate a lot of hype around the project.

That said a token needs its own liquidity, which is not always easy to handle, and while a token launch or an airdrop would create a lot of hype, it could also be temporary and not create a significant number of long term users to the protocol.

Regardless of those considerations, an eventual token will still need to be distributed in such a way to reward every protocol actor (Investors, stakers, team and treasury).
So while the DAO decides if a token is the right choice for the project, we can change the Gov NFT distribution as proposed in order to have everything ready if and when a token is launched.

Personally I think a token is not needed and the Governance NFTs have proven to be what the project needs for its growth but the DAO will decide on it.

This proposal is not a vote and is just meant to be a starting point for an healthy discussion in the DAO chat. If you have any consideration to share feel free to share it.