RomeDAO is taking the word ‘experimental’ to new heights, proposing a 100% community token allocation, no VC funding, and a reserve currency held stable by rock-solid governance.

Built by a core team of developers, researchers, and community builders from the OlympusDAO community, RomeDAO is based on the audited OlympusDAO contracts. The Ethereum-based algorithmic stablecoin solution backs its stablecoin OHM with DAI and other crypto assets. If the value of OHM drops below the value of DAI, the algorithm buys back OHM on the open market and burns it—if the opposite happens, it mints new OHM and sells it.

However, the team maintains that Rome isn’t a fork per sé, as it includes various changes to the contracts to make them compatible with Moonriver. RomeDAO’s treasury will be backed with three different bond types—Magic Internet Money (MIM), DAI, and ROME/MOVR Liquidity Position.

The experimental EVM-compatible chain launched on the even more experimental Kusama was chosen to provide the project with quite a lot of freedom. The freedom provided by Moonriver will also eventually enable the project to expand into Moonbeam on Polkadot.

“Our long-term goal is to be seen as the premier stable asset of not only Moonriver & Kusama but also the broader Polkadot ecosystem, an ecosystem we believe is primed for explosive growth. To do this requires many thoughtful steps to create a robust treasury and long-lasting reserve currency,” RomeDAO developers said in a Medium post.

Gamifying governance

Launching a treasury-backed unpegged reserve currency is an extremely challenging endeavor. And while OlympusDAO managed to position itself at the forefront of that movement, RomeDAO believes there’s a lot that can be improved.

Namely, the developers believe that DeFi is currently too centralized—it lacks community participation and has a low ratio of volunteers to output. RomeDAO is an experiment in gamification and an attempt at making governance fun and engaging. Rome’s success won’t be measured in its market cap or its TVL—it will be measured in the percentage of ROME tokens participating in governance.

Governing a protocol like RomeDAO won’t be easy.

In order to provide as much incentive as possible to its users, the entire supply of ROME tokens will be allocated to the community. The developers said that they have not and will not receive any venture capital money, or reserve allocations to the team.

We are a community project building with/for our community.

VCs can stop DMing us asking for allocation in a venture round. We are not raising venture money.

If you are a VC who wants allocation, get in line next to our community members.

For Rome.