Food Pyramid | A Food-based Pyramid Scheme

7 min readOct 5, 2020

WARNING: Food Pyramid ($FOOD) & related fTokens have zero inherent value. It’s sole purpose is as entertainment for degenerate gamblers. You can & probably will get rekt. You should not expect to make any profits from purchasing $FOOD, fTokens, providing liquidity, or contributing to the governance & building of this highly experimental protocol.

What Is Food Pyramid?

Food Pyramid is an experimental, hard-capped supply, ERC20 Ethereum token. It is an attempt at pushing the limits of what is possible in advanced ponzinomics & pumpamentals. In the long-term, FOOD will be a fully decentralized & fully community built, own, and ran hedge fund & venture DAO. But in the next few months, it will simply be an exercise in “numbah go up”.

Initial Release — fTOKENS

For the first 4 weeks after deployment, we will release a series of tokens on Uniswap, called “fTokens”. These tokens will feature an elastic supply rebase, like Ampleforth, along with purchases of stablecoins & other crypto-assets from this supply expansion, like YAM. However, there will be one key difference: unlike AMPL or YAM, which target a price of $1, the price peg of fTokens will grow every day… exponentially. And a portion of those purchased assets will be awarded to those who stake the Uniswap LP tokens, along with $FOOD.

Will these fTokens work out in the long-term? Probably not. Will it pump in the near to medium-term & fund our DAO’s treasury? Of course it will, this is crypto, the refuge of degen whales, rekt plebs & all that is unholy. To understand Food Pyramid’s fToken release cycle & ponzinomics in more detail, check out this post.

Mid To Long-term Roadmap & Vision

While we have a special place in our hearts for a well designed ponzie, Food Pyramid has at its core a long-term vision. Yield farming has had a great run & probably isn’t over yet. But the problem with chasing yield is that it’s fundamentally a long-biased strategy. When the crypto market is bullish, demand to borrow rises which pushes yields up, along with trading fees capturable by liquidity providing. When markets drop, however, those yields collapse.

To solve this problem, instead of creating yet another YFI yield farming fork, Food Pyramid will build a diversified collection of strategies that can profit in multiple market conditions. Long-short directional trend-following, market neutral relative value, options volatility trading, and dynamic & opportunistic liquidity providing to name just a f̶e̶w̶ food. Of course we will also farm fat yields when they’re available. But our primary focus will be developing new strategies that provide good risk-adjusted & uncorrelated returns to what is already available on the market.

In the longer term, after growth of our treasury’s asset base & income generation from diverse trading strategies, Food Pyramid will transition its focus more towards a venture & grants based DAO structure. Along with specific product releases still in stealth mode to be revealed later, we will fund promising new projects that align with our interests & values along with unconditional grants to Gitcoin & other communities involved in growing our shared digital commons.

We will focus on building primarily on Ethereum, as it has the lion’s share of the liquidity, network effects, and a wide community. However we are ultimately blockchain agnostic. Exploring new opportunities on other chains maximizes our options for unknown future scenarios & reduces risk, from both a financial & systemic perspective.

Governance & Token Distribution

Food Pyramid will be community ran from day one. Before raising any funds for the initial liquidity pools & other operational expenses, a multisig wallet will be created & key holders will be elected from our fledgling community. During the fToken release cycle, we will research & build out a full on & off-chain governance system that best meets all our criteria of what a governance system should provide.

"Fair Launches”

Fair launch is a meme. While there are notable exceptions, it has become a narrative tool used by VCs & whales to co-opt & profit off of a movement that was primarily about cutting those same VCs out from disproportionate ownership of crypto protocols to begin with. We believe that a wide distribution of ownership, while being inherently more fair, will also create more value in the long-term.

Also important, and usually given less attention than founding team allocations, is their vesting schedule. Having founders with skin in the game & incentives aligned for the long-term growth & stability of the protocol is arguably just as important as the size of their allocation. With that, the founding team’s allocation of FOOD will be locked for a minimum of 1 year. After that, it will vest over the course of the following year at an evenly divided rate every week.

A Novel, More Balanced Method of Distributing Ownership

Most new projects lately have followed a typical, highly inflationary method of token distribution. While this can be effective for quickly raising funds & achieving high rates of growth it puts considerable downwards pressure on a token’s price & can create large supply barriers to overcome in the future. It also distributes the vast majority of supply to fickle & non-loyal liquidity providers, who will leave in a moment’s notice to chase whatever shiny new project offers higher yields.

Instead of solely basing our token distribution on liquidity providing, we want to also distribute to builders, governance participants, and active participants of the community. Liquidity & capital contributions are vital for the success of any project but if we aim to build something with long-lasting value accrual we will need to incentivize those that will create it.

To do this we will integrate SourceCred into our governance & budgeting process. SourceCred is an amazing tool; it will enable us to track contributions small & large, from governance forum proposals & Github commits, all the way down to just being an active & welcoming member of our community Discord. For a brief FAQ & list of resources for understanding how SourceCred works, check out this post. We think it’s a revolutionary project & are excited to see what new forms of value creation & distribution it enables.

Tokenomics — By The Numbers

$FOOD will have a maximum total supply of 100,000. Our token distribution will be as follows:

10.0% (10,000 FOOD) — Founding Team
10.0% (10,000 FOOD) — Pre-Launch Fundraise Contributors
12.5% (12,500) — fToken Uniswap LP Staking
22.5% (22,500 FOOD) — LP & User Incentives for Future Product Releases, Marketing & Promotions
45% (45,000 FOOD) — Food Pyramid Project Contributors

Because of the unpredictable nature of work output that will be done by a decentralized community, we can only provide estimates of the next year’s token issuance rates. We expect by the one year mark for total FOOD issued to be between 56% and 85%, with a likely median of 66%.

Operational Budget

Note that this budget is provisional & will be subject to community discussion & consensus building, and potentially modified or even outright rejected before being finalized.

Pre-Launch Budget (from fund-raise)

15% to 30% — Operations (development costs, website, incidentals, etc.)
70% to 85% — Uniswap Liquidity Pools

Initial Operations Budget (from weekly income)

(first 4 to 5 weeks, until all fToken release cycles are complete)

20% to 30% — Funding Upcoming fToken Liquidity Pools
20% to 30% — Operations & Development (including an audit)
30% — Paid Out to FOOD Holders
10% to 20% — Withheld for Treasury Growth

Budget After fToken Release Cycle is Complete

(during build-out & release of trading strategy products, approximately 2 to 4 months)

30% to 40% — Operations & Development
40% — Paid Out to FOOD Holders
15% to 25% — Withheld for Treasury Growth
5% — Gitcoin Grants and/or Other Donations

Budget After Trading Strategies Are Mature

35% — Operations & Development (note that at this stage the 35% earmarked for O&D is a maximum; if there are no promising new initiatives to fund then any remaining funds shall either be distributed to FOOD holders or added to the Treasury, subject to community vote)
50% — Paid Out to FOOD Holders
10% — Withheld for Treasury Growth
5% — Gitcoin Grants and/or Other Donations

That’s what’s currently on the menu at Food Pyramid. Below you can find a list of all our official social media account links & other resources. Be sure to join our Discord & feel free to ask us any questions you might have.