Rally ERC-20 Governance Token (RLY) to launch October 15, 2020

10 min readOct 2, 2020

Earnable through YFI Yield Delegating Vaults to launch on Oct 15

Earlier this summer we introduced Rally, an open network for creators and brands to create easier, better, and more aligned token communities. Our mission is to help onboard the next 100 million users into crypto through a community-based, self-governed protocol.

Rally is a decentralized network and economic protocol that allows Creators — including digital entrepreneurs, crypto influencers, brands, and celebrities — to create better engagement and monetization opportunities within their communities without depending on any individual social media platform. Creators can now form their own token community free from middleman fees or third party platform controls. And, fans can prove which Creators they love and what communities they belong to.

Rally is designed to solve several fundamental problems that crypto-interested Creators face:

Creator/Fan alignment — Growth in the token community benefits Creators and fans.
Automated liquidity with a Token Bonding Curve (TBC) — Rally’s TBC design eliminates the need to supply liquidity on a DEX, reducing complexity for fans and Creators.
Easy fiat on-ramps — Fans, especially those new or unfamiliar with crypto, can enter a Creator’s token community with their credit or debit card in just a few clicks.
Low fees — Rally’s sidechain dramatically lowers transaction and gas fees, making participation appealing and accessible to all for everyday usage, not just crypto whales.
Fair/Programmatic token distribution — Simplified token distribution and balanced ownership between Creators and fans is based on demand and usage.
Network Effects — With a broad base of diverse Creators, brands, fans and communities, there’s more reasons to join the leading social economic network. The network as a whole goes through a single cold-start phase as opposed to each Creator or community tackling it themselves. As the network grows, the Rally Community Treasury and Developer Grants can fund technology integrating all Creator Coins into the newest e-commerce platforms, social media outlets, events systems and more. No individual Creator or brand would need to bear these costs alone.
Network Transparency — Worried about bad actor rug pulls? Rally’s template-based approach to token bonding curves allows each Creator to self select into selling restrictions and transparency rules, creating network level benefits for everyone to trust the system.

Community Roadmap

Currently, Rally lives on a purpose-driven sidechain with dozens of beta testing Creators already onboarded who have launched their own interactive token communities with their fans. The Rally Network utilizes key components from Forte, including its sidechain infrastructure, TBC tooling, embeddable crypto wallets, and streamlined transaction ecosystem for easy fiat onramps for first time crypto users.

On October 15, we’ll launch the Rally Network ERC-20 governance token, Rally (RLY). RLY will unlock multiple benefits for the community, including governance rights over the Rally Network, the ability to actively participate in Rally Network through both sidechain and Ethereum, and reward community members for contributing to the network. The phases to accomplish this are summarized here and outlined in further detail below:

Phase 1 — September: Launch Initial Creator Coins (complete)

Phase 2 — October 15: Launch RLY, launch YFI-based Community Treasury and open source Yield Delegating Vaults, launch the Liquidity Mining Program, and hand over Rally Network governance to the community

Phase 3 — Approximately end of October, with community support: Launch RLY bridge from Ethereum to the Rally sidechain, enabling RLY holders to programmatically stake RLY to acquire Creator Coins

Phase 4 — Approximately end of October, with community support: Launch network rewards for economic activity in Creator Coins

Phase 5 — Early November, with community support: Launch data pipe for developers, award first RLY grants for 3rd party developers

Phase 6: Mid November, with community support: Launch RLY bridge from sidechain to Ethereum

Phase 1 — Launch Initial Creator Coins

Creator Coin alpha launched in August 2020 on our sidechain and entered beta in September 2020 as we added crypto on-ramps and off-ramps as well as other core features. We are seeing early success in the form of significant demand for Creator Coin fueled by real utility and a wide array of use cases that few crypto projects to date have achieved:

25 committed streamers representing over 12k concurrent viewers and 1.2M followers on Twitch alone
More than two thousand fans creating crypto wallets and accounts to transact in Creator Coins
First “brand coin” set to launch soon
More than $35,000 in net deposits (even with volume caps) in our first month, and one individual streamer generating nearly $20k in net deposit volume

Over time, Creator Coin will expand to many other types of digital creators, brands, and crypto projects. Check out our Discord and Twitter to see how Creator Coin is being used, or go support your favorite Creator at Rally.io.

Phase 2 — YFI YDV, Community Treasury, and RLY Governance Tokens

We love YFI and are contributing to the YFI community with new code that enables crypto projects to leverage YFI Vaults to accumulate and manage a project treasury. We’re calling these Yield Delegating Vaults (YDVs). We’re adding a wrapper around existing YFI vaults that allows users to delegate some or all of the future yield generated on their behalf to a Rally Community Treasury in exchange for grants of RLY, without having to hop through multiple gas transactions. Code is being audited by Peckshield, and we will open source this code under MIT license. These wrappers can be configured by other projects for their own tokens and treasuries.

Why? We believe that YDVs present a new crypto-native funding model, and we’re excited about building atop the money lego from the Yearn community. For a project thinking about long term treasury management, this is a much better solution than sitting on USD in a bank account, or even stablecoins or ETH in a multisig. And we believe that a sustainable community treasury should be in a yield generating YFI vault for any project that plans to do real building over a multi-year time period. We hope that other projects that find our vision compelling can benefit from our code contributions and use YFI Vaults to manage substantial treasuries for the benefit of their projects.

Users can access Rally’s Yield Delegating Vaults once they go live on October 15. Contributors to these YDVs should expect their principal to be just as secure as if they deposited into a YFI vault directly. They can then elect to delegate some or all of the future yield to fund the Rally Community Treasury. By doing so, they’ll earn RLY that will enable them to govern the network and manage the funds from the Rally Community Treasury. For example, grants from the treasury may be used to fund third party developers building new innovations into the Rally Network, or as incentives to invite interesting Creators to join the network, or to reward existing Creators. We anticipate that there will be many other creative uses that will lead to a better and more robust network, as directed by the community of RLY holders.

In parallel, we’re also launching a liquidity mining (LM) rewards program. By pooling ample liquidity at a network level, individual Creators and communities won’t need to create their own Uniswap or DEX pairs, but instead can rely on the Rally token bonding curve to provide automated market making for all tokens. Additionally, these transactions occur without gas fees such that microtransactions become economically feasible. We’ll provide more details on the day of launch around the LM program.

The launch of RLY also marks the start of true community governance. From this point on, all RLY community grants, Creator approvals/bans to mint a custom token, management of the Rally Community Treasury, and even network/product development will be at the direction of the community. The Rally team will serve as an administrator to perform ministerial tasks on behalf of the broader community of RLY holders, but the Rally community will control the Rally Network starting on October 15, 2020.

We believe that by turning control and governance over to the community, we will position Rally Network to grow into the most creative and economically empowered community in the world.

Phase 3 — Ethereum Bridge to Rally Sidechain

With the community, we plan on launching a bridge that connects Ethereum RLY with Rally’s sidechain. Upon launching RLY Bridge v1, mainnet users will be able to stake RLY into the bridge to receive sidechain RLY (1:1 exchange) that can be used to purchase (and thus collateralize) Creator Coins. Creator Coin prices will in part function based on RLY prices on Ethereum, as all Creator Coins are bonded to RLY.

Note that users will not be able to exit to mainnet via the bridge for a few weeks until v2 is ready in Phase 6. Until then, Rally.io will support limited redemption of Creator Coins to Ethereum — more information will be made available on this blog and Rally.io.

We’re also rolling out additional social login methods at Rally.io for easier Creator Coin interaction. Note that over time we plan on implementing Web3 logins and pseudonymous ways for Ethereum users to purchase Creator Coin without relying upon social OAuth as we know this will be important to parts of the community.

Phase 4 — Network Usage Rewards

Network Usage Rewards will serve as the major growth driver of the Rally Network, rewarding community members who are actively participating in and contributing to the Rally Network. With the approval of the RLY governance community, Network Usage Rewards v1 will be implemented into the Rally Network at this phase.

Three types of Network Usage Rewards are being considered:

Creator Coin Community Rewards — Creator Coin communities earn RLY via a formula that will be decided by the RLY community based on net collateral change and economic activity. In future versions, the community will decide on different parameters for updating the formula. RLY rewards increase TBC collateral and benefit all holders of a Creator or Brand Coin proportionately.
Stake Rewards — Fans earn RLY by staking Creator Coin. We expect emergent social networking behavior to manifest depending on how users stake, how they delegate their rewards and governance, and how they show who or what they’re staking for publicly.
Referral Rewards — Community members earn RLY by introducing new Creators or brands that are ultimately approved by the governance community. We hope to work with the community to fund a new generation of digital agents that help normal everyday creators, athletes, celebrities, and brands unlock the potential of their Creator Coin communities.

This phase will mark the launch of the initial version of Creator Coin Community Rewards. Through governance proposals and voting, the Rally community may decide to adjust parameters or add/remove entire categories of Network Usage Rewards going forward.

Phase 5 — Dev Ecosystem v1 for Developers, Creators and Brands

Rally’s data pipeline and developer grant program are designed to grow an ecosystem of engaged and incentivized 3rd party developers. For any Creator or Brand lacking your own army of developers, Rally’s economic network is designed to connect developers with you to build the technology needed to use your own cryptocurrency in your everyday business needs.

Phase 6 — Rally Sidechain Bridge to Ethereum

This phase marks v2 of the RLY bridge and allows users to exchange Creator Coins for RLY on Ethereum.

In partnership with the RLY governance community, we’ll be working with the Ethereum L2 community and Forte to enable Rally sidechain to trustlessly and efficiently rollup such that a bridge is no longer necessary.

The desired end state is for each Creator or Brand Coin to be composable and a new money lego for any other DeFi project. With the rapid technical innovation in the space, we’re confident we can work with the community to be on the bleeding edge of making this happen.

Until then, this hybrid mainnet/sidechain solution will enable a few things:

Ethereum Mainnet — trustless authority regarding token supply, RLY price discovery, ownership of RLY, and network governance
Rally Sidechain — fiat onramps, Creator Coin price discovery, first-time crypto user friendly experience, embedded crypto wallet, no gas fees, and minimal transaction costs

Join Us!

The launch of Rally on Ethereum marks one of the first large-scale attempts at connecting mainstream internet users with the broader crypto community. The economic opportunity related to tokenizing every Creator and digital brand on any social media platform is truly limitless.

We couldn’t be more excited about Rally’s core economic protocol designed for Creators, a token economic model facilitated by the RLY governance token, a novel hybrid Layer 1 / Layer 2 scaling approach, a community generated and managed treasury built on YFI Vaults, and the foundation for a truly community-managed network. We’re very excited about adding to the Yearn community with Yield Delegating Vaults for treasury funding that other projects might leverage as a template, amongst many other innovations that have made Rally possible. We’ll be publishing much more technical detail about Rally in the days to come before the Rally launch on October 15th.

We’ll also publish the RLY token supply, distribution, network economics, and community governance framework prior to network launch.

Apply here if you’re a Creator or brand interested in your own Creator Coin or Brand Coin. In the next few days before launch, the best way to earn RLY is to refer your favorite Creator or Brand to create their token. Currently, we’re whitelisting Creators who have at least 2,000 followers on their main social platform; after Oct 15th, new Creators will need to be approved by the community governance mechanism.

Come join us!

P.S. we’re incredibly excited to have Brian Flynn formally join the project as a Collaborator and Joon Ian Wong formally join as Researcher-in-Residence. Also, special thanks to others that have contributed or inspired us on this journey — Ian Lee, Joe Gerber, Keisuke Honda, Dan Elitzer, Alex Rampell, Chris Dixon, Jehan Chu, Ali Yahya, Jesse Walden, Denis Nazarov, Nick Tomaino, Anthony Schiller, Maha Ibrahim, Cooper Turley, Roger Lee, Josh Williams and many others.