Avocado DAO: Inaugural Treasury Report 2022

8 min readMay 9, 2022

Since the formation of Avocado DAO in July 2021, we have experienced rapid growth in our scholar community, capital base, and investment portfolio. This culminated in Avocado DAO ending 2021 as the largest gaming guild with over 10.5k scholars. This is our first quarterly Avocado DAO Treasury Report as of 31st March 2022. Our aim with this report is to provide our community with greater transparency on the financial performance of the DAO. We suggest that this report should be read in conjunction with our recent post of the DAO Roadmap. As this report will attest, through Q1 we have been busy deploying capital into strategic investments and expanding our gaming operations and NFT assets.

Overview

We use the term “Treasury” to encompass all assets of the DAO and all income generated by those assets. When we make investments, share scholar earnings, or realize gains on sales of assets, it all takes place in the DAO Treasury.

As of the 31st of March 2022, our Treasury stood at ~$36m USD which was seeded by our successful Initial Coin Offering that concluded in January of this year. The following table breaks that balance into categories:

We will now elaborate on each of these categories in terms of what they contain and how they have performed:

FIAT

As a legacy from our Seed and Series A funding rounds, we hold FIAT which is held entirely at call bank deposits.

StableCoins

We hold USD denominated StableCoins since the vast majority of our holdings are in USDC. Where we hold BUSD, its purpose is to support operational needs on the BNB Chain. Through Q1, our StableCoin balance has been falling as we invest capital into Web3.0 projects (detailed further in this report). This use of funds is partially offset by proceeds from the DAO’s share of our scholarship earnings which are typically sold down from their native in-game token to USDC.

Unencumbered Layer 1 Coins

Our unencumbered Layer 1 coins are almost entirely ETH, but what is ‘unencumbered,’ I hear you say? It means these assets are not pledged as collateral to third parties such as DeFi lending protocols — the DAO is free and clear to deploy them as it sees fit. We hold ETH to support operational needs across our portfolio of games. Through Q1 our underlying balance in ETH has broadly been stable with its USD valuation sensitive to the market moves.

Treasury Investments

This category comprises both the ETH liquidity provided to UniSwap v2 and discretionary Treasury investments of our excess liquid assets into DeFi lending protocols. These investments are all ‘at call’ and therefore can be redeemed at any point by the DAO, and have been made into protocols with an outstanding security track record, not to mention borrower collateralization and liquidation methodology which protects depositors like Avocado DAO. In consultation with our advisors and strategic investors, we carefully deliberated this decision both in terms of the size of this investment and which protocols we should make use of with consideration for the risk/reward trade-off.

Game Token and NFTs

The Treasury holds Game Tokens to support the operational needs of our active scholarship programs, where balances fluctuate as we periodically sell down our in-game earnings to ETH or StableCoin or reinvest to support breeding. Since inception, the Guild has earnt ~121m SLPs from Axie Infinity, with newer games like CyBall now dominating the USD denominated earnings. As of the 31st of March, Game Tokens represented ~1m USD of the balance of this category and spanned ~15 distinct gaming tokens.

In contrast to Game Tokens, NFTs are a structural feature of our Treasury and underpin our ability to operate as a Guild with a current value of ~2.4m USD. The DAO currently holds NFTs in both characters and land, with a weighting to the former, in support of the 5 games we are actively yield-farming. Our current largest character NFT positions are in Axie Infinity and CyBall — holding in excess of ~33k Axies and ~3k CyBlocs. Axie valuations have performed poorly through Q1, while our CyBlocs have generated significant value reflecting the attractive entry prices we achieved from our early-stage investment and subsequent breeding. Beyond our inventory of character NFTs, we also have significant Land positions in Axie and expect that as our Investments mature, additional land parcels from other publishers will enter our operating balance sheet. Encouragingly for Avocado, where we have made early-stage investments, we are often seeing positive valuation outcomes for the DAO when those investments vest into our operating balance sheet as Game Tokens and NFTs.

Web3.0 Investments

Since Avocado DAO’s inception, we have made 46 investments spanning games, platforms and protocols, with a strong weighting towards games. Q1 was particularly busy with 34 of the 46 being made in Q1 alone. In all cases, these investments have been early-stage investments which range from the project being little more than an idea in the minds of founders, to the project having functional alpha versions to demonstrate their vision. We have loved the opportunity to partner with so many passionate projects who are as excited as we are about the prospects for onboarding more users into web3.0 gaming. We use the term partner quite deliberately because that is our investment ethos — to add value to the projects we invest in and support them in realizing their ambitions while simultaneously creating new gaming opportunities for our scholars. We are proud and grateful that in many cases these projects have approached Avocado DAO to solicit investments and perceive us as their strategic partner of choice because of our community centric approach and commitment to sustain our engagement through the good and the bad times of market cycles.

Of these 46 investments, 4 have now crystallized into launched products, all as games including CyBall, Elpis Battle, Karmaverse and Wasted Lands, with Avocado scholars now active on all of these games, in addition to our active scholarship programs for Axie and Pegaxy. CyBall is the most recent and prominent of these launches where Avocado DAO rapidly scaled to more than 1k scholars. The program is generating significant financial value, as such we expect to recover our original investment by the end of Q2 while continuing to support the game’s evolution as it executes its exciting roadmap. In other cases such as Karmaverse, we have yet to scale our scholarship program to the same extent but nonetheless have benefited from significant unrealized gains on the NFTs we acquired as part of our original investment.

Of the 41 investments that have not yet crystallized into operational assets, we remain optimistic that, as a portfolio, they will deliver strong returns for the DAO. In many cases we see strong price signals which suggest significant unrealized gains on this portfolio. Two such examples are Bigtime Land where the DAO invested ~500k USD, and Heroes of Mavia where the DAO invested ~300k USD to acquire 159 plots of land (84 common, 50 rare, 25 legendary). Marketplace activity suggests that on vesting, the DAO may benefit from significant unrealized gains in both cases.

Where an investment has partly vested, consistent with our approach for NFTs and Game Tokens, we continue to take a conservative approach to valuation of the residual investment, only recognizing unrealized gains if there is sufficient liquidity to support a potential sale. More broadly, we continue to observe a wide range of practices adopted by guilds in valuing their balance sheets where we believe that we have taken a more conservative approach than most which considers the amount of liquidity available for a given asset (token or NFT) which therefore informs what value could realistically be achieved on sale. We believe this approach is consistent with our aspiration to successfully operate the DAO through all market conditions.

As our investments evolve into operational games, they will feed into our scholarship programs and our aspiration to be actively yield farming at scale more than 15 games by the end of 2022.

A holistic view on Performance

Increasingly Avocado DAO is focused on operating assets in games in which we made early-stage investments. We also increasingly have the ability to assess performance of an investment through its full lifecycle — from initial capital injection through a SAFT, to subsequent acquisitions of further NFTs to support scholarships and then through yield farming in the scholarship program. Where the Guild did not participate in early-stage investments, such as Axie and Pegaxy, we have not generated value across the full lifecycle. In other situations where we did participate in early-stage investments and are now running significant scholarship programs — such as CyBall — we are optimistic that we will generate significant value. As games mature in their lifecycle through Q2, we will have further data points to test our strategy that driving sustainable returns requires great investments upfront, followed by prudent choices at each stage of the game lifecycle.

Conclusion

We are excited by what Avocado has achieved since its launch and believe that the investments we have made will deliver significant value to our scholars and token holders. Crucially, we continue to be prudent in our investment decisions in recognition that the market remains volatile, not every investment opportunity is a good one, and of those that are, only some are consistent with our community-centric ethos that focuses on delivering sustainable returns.

We look forward to providing growing transparency to you every quarter on Avocado DAO’s financial performance. This will become increasingly important as we launch our staking programs which will create a vehicle for us to share Avocado’s financial success with our token holders.

About Avocado DAO
Avocado DAO is a Web3 gaming guild that provides rewarding experiences for its 10k+ scholars and facilitates entry to GameFi to empower more users.

Find out more about Avocado DAO and join the community here:

Unlock life-changing opportunities with Avocado DAO Tokens (AVG):
AVG can be found on Ethereum and BNB, the contract address is the same for both chains.
Smart Contact address: 0xa41f142b6eb2b164f8164cae0716892ce02f311f