Call For the Best Product Thinkers in DeFi

Best Brands & Brightest Minds

To encourage new products, the Coop has allocated 7.5% of the entire $INDEX treasury to go towards Methodologists that successfully launch products with the Coop over the next 17 months.

A core goal of Index Cooperative is that we want to work with the best brands and brightest people in order to create insanely great products. In this post you will learn exactly how the program works, and how you can launch a product with the Coop.

• You can earn a lot of $INDEX for successfully launching a product with the Coop

• Index Coop has broadened beyond indexes to a diverse array of structured products

• Software engineering skills are not required

• Join the Index Coop forum or Discord to start the conversation

Motivation

The Index Cooperative was started as a joint collaboration between Set Protocol and DeFi Pulse. The value of working collaboratively and sourcing the best ideas has been ingrained within our community from the start. Since then, we have continued to engage with the brightest people and the best brands in crypto like CoinShares and Token Terminal to create other innovative products.

But we want to do more. How the Coop wins is by creating the best talent and brand moat the industry has ever seen — one that continues to ship the greatest products that transform finance as we know it.

Index Cooperative is built on Set Protocol, which is the most powerful asset management software that exists on Ethereum. With it, our products can access anything in DeFi. Be it leveraging on Aave, trading on Uniswap, hedging themselves using Opyn, or yield farming on BarnBridge. Set Protocol powered products are limited only by the designer’s imagination.

Our community continues to be the most organized and effective in DeFi. Since day 1, the Index Coop has constantly been reinvesting $INDEX tokens in contributors in order to produce true long term alignment. We have organized sub-teams, weekly standup calls, and project channels in Discord to do what it takes to support Methodologists. On top of that, we are constantly thinking of ways to help improve, educate, market, and distribute the products that we launch in order to make them as successful as possible. The DeFi Pulse Index continues to see adoption and growth, in part due to these efforts. We work with you to turn your product idea into the biggest thing in DeFi.

Insanely Great Products

Index Cooperative started with the DeFi Pulse Index (DPI) to fill a gap in the market and provide a thoroughly researched, vetted, and stable methodology for tracking the performance of the DeFi market. However, since then we have realized the products we can build are so much more than just industry tracking ETFs.

In this post, Felix illustrates an expanded vision of the Index Cooperative that broadens the scope of the products we want to build and support. These include:

• Leverage Tokens

• Bond ETFs

• Collateralized Insurance Products

• VIX

• Hedged AMM Market Making

• Automated Basis Trading

• AMM Positions

Our goal is to provide access to the DeFi market and the protocols that compose it by developing products that: reduce gas costs, reduce operational overhead, and reduce risk. Any great product that does those three things has the potential to significantly accelerate the usage of DeFi protocols and provide an amazing experience for our users.

That is what we are here to do.

Methodologist Reward

We are willing to put our money where our mouth is. The Methodologist program allocates 7.5% of all $INDEX tokens to be distributed monthly to methodologists pro-rata based on the amount of revenue they generate for the Coop.

This is approximately 42k tokens per month, which, at current prices ($5 INDEX), nets out to ~$210k distributed monthly to our methodologists. On top of that, the fee generated from the products is split between the Methodologist and the Coop so it also represents a further monetization opportunity.

Methodologists act as the initializer of the strategy or, in the case that there is some active management required (i.e. rebalancing weights of the DPI),a data oracle to the Coop. This significantly reduces the operational overhead that they would otherwise typically have to do.

The ability to write code is not required — the engineers at Set Labs are investing time into helping launch products. What a Methodologist needs to provide is an idea, implementation/methodology that makes sense. If you do have your own engineering resources though, great! That will expedite the process.

Becoming A Methodologist

The Index Coop has put together documentation detailing all of the steps and work required for a product to be added to the Coop in addition to the considerations that the Coop makes before agreeing to add a product.

As adding new products is the most complex, time consuming, and critical part of the Index Coop’s operations, it is expected that Methodologists are thorough and detailed when they submit their proposals to the Coop. Token Terminal provides a good example here.

The high level process for getting a product added to the Coop is as follows:

• A product idea is specified and discussed within the community.

• A ‘Product Addition Application’ is completed and submitted to the forum.

• A Snapshot signalling process takes place FOR or AGAINST the proposal.

• If it passes, the product moves onto being vetted by various work teams within the Coop.

• A final Snapshot signalling process takes place where INDEX token holders can vote FOR or AGAINST adding the product to the Coop.

• If it passes, the Coop and Methodologist will work together to launch the product.

While we enjoy working with organizations because of the brand, longevity, and resources they tend to have, there is certainly room for brilliant individuals to either work with existing brands like Set Protocol, or pool resources together from members of the community who really believe in the idea.

Getting Started

For anyone interested in becoming a methodologist or getting involved in the community, please join our Discord and Governance Forum. For business inquiries, please contact Punia at @puniaviision on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord. Let’s finance the new renaissance.

Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

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