Proposal to create an Investment Committee

Proposal to form an Investment Committee

Summary:

In simple terms, Index Coop is an asset management platform with a mission to create widely used crypto structured products. This means that over time, Index Coop will hold a growing number of underlying tokens while managing people’s investments in these tokens.

Just like Vanguard, BlackRock and others, we should aim to provide educational resources and investment insights to investors in our products. Whether it’s a macro piece of research on crypto or an investment thesis for a particular project.

This is a job for an Investment Committee (IC). To analyse and understand the underlying tokens and create investment insights for our investors. This further serves to cement our place in the centre of crypto investing, not just as a product provider, but also as an education and trusted resource.

Abstract:

The role of the IC is to really understand the underlying tokens held in the Index Coop products. Understand their tokenomics, roadmap, governance initiatives, etc. We can think of it as our own internal investment team.

In TradFi, every asset manager has investment analysts, portfolio managers, maybe a CIO and an IC. Published investment research adds to their credibility and helps investors to understand some of the underlying trends and portfolio positions.

I think we need to do the same. There’s an incredible value add opportunity from providing high quality information and research to crypto index investors. Think of it as Messari within the Index Coop.

If approved, the IC would have the following mandate:

• Cover and analyse the underlying tokens held in the Index Coop products;
• Produce “investment insights” style content for internal and external distribution;
• Cultivate relationships with crypto & macro investors to challenge and guide our thinking.

Motivation:

Simple:

1. It would be beneficial for the Index Coop to have a group of community members who really understand the underlying tokens. This could help for some of the intrinsic productivity analysis, governance proposals, etc.
2. Adding high quality “investment insights” content will give us further credibility as a structured products platform and create a sort-of educational moat around Index Coop.
3. Expanding our contacts and building relationships with crypto investors could lead to positive second-order effects. An example would be @LemonadeAlpha getting the Maker whale to abstain on the governance proposal to add DPI as collateral.

Specification:

At this stage I propose that the IC has 4 members, meeting weekly. Each member will be responsible for covering individual tokens as the primary analyst and producing “investment insights” content for their respective token.

The IC will also seek out industry experts and crypto investors as guest speakers. This will help the IC to form macro views and create macro content, while raising the profile of the Index Coop in the crypto community.

For:
Form the Investment Committee as per the above proposal.

Against:
The Investment Committee is not necessary at this point.

Thanks @DarkForestCapital, @overanalyser , @Thomas_Hepner and @DevOnDeFi for reviewing this proposal.