I've been locked into this app all day for the last 2 days since I announced the
@pumpcade ACE round. I'm reading EVERYTHING related to ACE, even if I don't reply to it.
I wanted to talk about a few things that i'm seeing.
1. ACE did not create equity at Pumpcade. Equity existed the moment I raised a pre-seed round. That is not some special thing ACE introduced after the fact. That is just how startups work. If a company raises venture capital, there is an equity layer. That was already true here.
What I think people are missing is that this equity layer already exists in almost every company in crypto that has both a company and a token. Usually it is just not visible to the public. The private investors sit on one layer, the token trades on another layer, and most people pretend those two things are not both there. ACE did not invent that structure. ACE makes that structure transparent and gives token holders the option to access the same equity layer that Pumpcade investors have. That is the key point. Not creating some hidden extra thing. Exposing what already exists and opening access to it.
2. ACE was not a quick and fast decision made to retrofit the 2 fundraising rounds. I was presented with ACE a few months ago, long before I had accepted a single dollar of venture capital. I knew that I needed to raise venture capital to build, scale, and operate Pumpcade. Creator fees alone can not run a company doing what we are planning on doing.
3. I looked at all options that try to align token <> equity, and ACE was the one that best fit what my goals were. I wanted to give the OPTION to have access to the equity layer of Pumpcade. There are a few other options, and I am not against them for certain use cases, but ACE is what best fits Pumpcade. Other options typically result in the token becoming the sole product, which overshadows the actual product that a team is building. This frequently results in teams being pressured into making short term corrective actions to address short term price movement. A team raises capital to build a product. A team should not raise capital to immediately spend buying back their token because prices can be volatile.
The optionality of ACE is the most important thing to me, and ultimately why I decided to do it. I wanted to give the option to have access to the equity layer. I didn't want to force everyone (VCs and the public) into a different path.
We are building Pumpcade for the long term, and everyone involved with Pumpcade (team, investors, advisors) are heads down building this long term future where we put Pumpcade in front of the masses.
Pumpcade