The common wealth thesis

TLDR: Common Wealth in a nutshell

• Launching on BASE through a PAID-exclusive public sale
  
• Built a fully functioning platform before their token launch
  
• Strong token utility, among which you’ll find profit sharing and buybacks.
  
• Common Wealth provides equal opportunity to early-stage deals. Opening up the opportunities of the 1% to the 99%.
  
• Backed by Kyle Chasse (PAID Network / Master Ventures). PAID Network hit an ATH FDV of 3.5B. Yes, that’s a B – three and a half billy’s.
  
• The common wealth platform allows you to invest into investment funds, where your investment is represented by a fund NFT. Which means you are liquid from day one.
  
• The Common Wealth platform is decentralized, and community-oriented. Each fund will have a council that sources and proposes projects. The community (read: token holders) subsequently vote on which projects received an investment from the fund.

Find my full bull-case for common wealth at the end of this article.

The power of VC investment

VCs see some of the highest upside of all web3 market participants.

Naturally, this part of the market is gate-kept a lot. It’s not surprising that most retail investors have no idea how the VC landscape works. Let alone getting access to the same deals.

I cannot make you excited about Common Wealth by simply listing out the features and intricacies of the platform. First, I have to make you understand the power of VC investments.

Outsized risk/return bets, with tremendous potential upside.

Just to give you an understanding of the caliber of returns we are talking about. Let’s grab examples from cryptorank.io:

Solana -> VCs who invested in 2018 earned an ATH ROI of 6490x

My Neighbor Alice -> Early investors saw an ATH ROI of 373x

PAID Network -> 170 — 400x depending on the round you got into

GameFi.org -> 733x ATH ROI for seed investors

I’m sure you understand why the beneficiaries of these VC deals don’t want to open up these opportunities for us normies.

Well. suck for them. VCs can no longer keep it for themselves. No longer will they invest in tokens a 100x cheaper than you.

You will no longer be the exit liquidity.

Common Wealth is breaking the current VC/syndicate meta. Truly taking the sledgehammer to the antiquated VC model.

Leveling the playing field — what is Common Wealth?

Common Wealth provides equal access to high value opportunities that retail currently doesn’t have access to. While these deals used to be for the elite-only, that is no longer the case.

Essentially, Common Wealth is an early- stage investment platform which provides retail investors/traders with access to the same deals that sophisticated investors get access to.

As the team likes to describe it, they are opening up access to the 99%.

The protocol incentivises crowd-sourced due-diligence to greatly enhance the quality of investment and overall education of the platform users. All projects are thoroughly verified in terms of trust, reliability, and security.

The inner workings of the Common Wealth platform

On the Common Wealth platform, retail investors have the opportunity to invest into a multitude of investment funds. Some examples are:

• Themed Funds
  Funds that focus on a specific theme or narrative. Gaming, infrastructure, DeFi, AI girlfriend — you name it.
  
• Evergreen Fund
  The Evergreen Fund takes an initial allocation from each of the themed funds. Consider it a fund of funds for those that like to sit back and watch their money grow. Consider this the S&P 500 of crypto. Gain exposure to a diverse range of assets in a single investment vehicle.
  
• Community Fund
  Platform transaction fees and royalties on secondary NFT sales are funneled into the Common Wealth community fund. 50% of the profits from this fund are distributed to $WLTH holders, and 50% burned. Both bring tremendous value to the platform users and token holders.

Platform participants

Let’s dive deeper into the inner workings of the funds. The best way to do that, is by highlighting the ecosystem participants and their role within the platform:

1) Retail investors Let’s start with our precious young padawans; retail investors. Guys like you and me who stand in the center of the ecosystem.

Common Wealth allows you to invest into early-stage opportunities with high potential upside, while simultaneously diversifying your portfolio. In the words of Tyrese Gibson: what more do you want from me?! 

However. Just giving you the ability to tap into these opportunities is not enough. Common Wealth wants your voice to be heard. 

As the heart of the ecosystem, you get to participate in fund governance to ensure transparency and community-driven decision-making.  Other than participating in governance, staking your tokens allows you to reduce the carry fees.

2) The council and mentors

The platform introduces a council to govern the funds. The council contains members and mentors who suggest investment opportunities. These council members take the charge in sharing their knowledge and fostering innovation.

Council members and mentors are rewarded for their performance and positive contributions to the platform.

3) Founders and projects

Common Wealth is a tremendous resource for early-stage projects. They receive funding, but most importantly, they gain exposure. Any VC can throw a bag of money at a founder, but how many can help bootstrap a strong community at the same time? Early-stage projects use Common Wealth to tap into:

• Funding
• A network of potential partners
• Co-marketing opportunities with vetted projects within the ecosystem

Ultimately, Common Wealth creates a highly valuable environment for founders to thrive and their vision to flourish.

4) Community members

We touched on the community aspect of the platform above, which is an extremely valuable asset for early-stage projects. A thriving community is one of the hardest things to grow during the early phases of building a project.

Common Wealth community members propose projects for the community fund and actively participate in protocol governance. Thus directly impacting the growth and quality of the platform. 

As a community member, you are rewarded for active participation and promotion of the platform.

5) VCs 

VCs invest and run syndicates within the Common Wealth ecosystem. They even run co-branded funds and receive a share of the carry fees. 

Carry fees aligns the VC incentives with those of the projects they support, as well as the community members who invest in the fund.  

Are Common Wealth NFTs the best way to get in at the ground floor?

Short answer: yes. Though, keep in mind this article is written on December 1st, 2023. The WLTH token is not listed yet. The second best option is most likely through launchpads that WLTH launches on.

I do believe that Common Wealth NFTs are THE best way to get involved right now, and I have bought a few of them myself. The NFT sales were Common Wealth’s version of a seed round, open to anyone who believes in the vision.

Literally getting in at the ground floor. In line with the project’s core thesis, the sale was open to all. Additional benefits:

• Each NFT comes with a base amount of tokens
• You stake the NFTs to earn tokens leading up to the TGE
• The NFTs receive a larger share of the platform revenue

 There are two generations for the NFTs. Here is a breakdown on each series, courtesy of Jones’ research list. 

Series 1:

• Max supply: 2,000
• $WLTH per NFT: 44,000
• Revenue share: Share in 12% of platform profit for the lifetime of the eco-system
• Governance rights: Token allocation, token-gated access to some channels in Community, additional utility TBC, invite-only AMAs

Series 2:

• Max supply: 3,414
• $WLTH per NFT: 6,444
• Revenue share: Share in 3% of platform profit for the lifetime of the eco-system.
• Governance rights: Token allocation, token-gated access to some channels in Community, additional utility TBA

$WLTH token utility and value capture

A token is only as strong as its utility. If the value capture is well thought out, then tokens should naturally accrue value from the growth and usage of the surrounding ecosystem.

Common Wealth has definitely got this part covered. Let’s dive into the token utility.

1) Passive income from the community fund

Let’s cut right to the holy grail of token utilities. The crème de la crème. Passive income, baby!

50% of all profits from the community fund are distributed to WLTH token holders. The fund is funded by a 1% fee that is charged on non-investment financial transactions.

If the deal flow for this fund is as good as I think it will be, then we’re in for quite the ride. That’s not financial advice though, I’m just a monkey with a keyboard.

The other 50% of the profits are used for buy-backs. Now that’s what I call DP. Double profit.

That’s what that stands for, right?

2) Transaction fees

WLTH tokens are utilized to pay for transaction fees within the Common Wealth platform.

All actions on the platform, and its associated transaction fees, require the usage of $WLTH tokens. That includes staking, governance voting, or other financial transactions.

3) Carry fee reduction

By staking your WLTH tokens, you reduce carry fees on your investments.

4) Governance

Use your WLTH token to gain power over the platform and its investment funds by voting on governance proposals.

5) Deployment of investment funds

The platform allows you to invest in the investment funds using WLTH tokens.

the bull case for common wealth

• Gaining access to vetted deal-flow from some of the top figures in the industry
  
• Gain acces to real yield (!) instead of inflationary APY which most other projects have
  
• Strong token utility
  
• Your investments are liquid from day one through the fund NFTs which you receive. Quite disruptive, and something I’m excited about myself.
  
• VC investing is not easy, and single bets are risky. What’s so powerful about Common Wealth is that they allow you to gain exposure to early-stage VC deals, without having to bet on single companies. The funds gain exposure to a basket of assets vetted by the council.
  
• Common Wealth is competing with both launchpads as well as syndicates. While those two are certainly not easy to compete with, I would argue they are worthy competitors for both. Both launchpads and syndicates have challenges that they deal with:
  
• Launchpads are the playing ground of the whales. I can cost you huge sums of money to get into the higher tiers of launchpads. And let’s face it — if you’re not in the higher tiers then your launchpad experience will be extremely frustrating as you will have trouble getting allocations.
  
• Launchpads get into projects at way higher valuations than the VCs get in. Up to 10x more expensive depending on the project! Are you outraged? I’m outraged.
  
• While syndicates make a tremendous attempt at bringing top-tier opportunities to the common folk, at times they struggle with the same challenges that launchpads face. They might get a smaller allocation for certain investment opportunities that’s not big enough to give all syndicate members a taste.
  
• Core contributors include Tony Kelly, Tim McCann, Kyle Chasse, Iain McKie and many more. The team is an assembly of ex employees from Facebook, Google, Wyre, Activision-Blizzard, Cardano, Intel, State Street Bank.
  
• You may know Kyle Chassé from Master Ventures and PAID network, which hit an ATH FDV in the billions during the last bull run.

Thanks for reading, anon <3

Disclaimer: I am an investor in Common Wealth. I am not a financial advisor, just a monkey with an RGB keyboard.

Want to learn more about Common Wealth? Check out their channels:

Website: joincommonwealth.xyz

Twitter: twitter.com/joincommonwlth