Index Coop (INDEX)

 Basics

• Based in: San Fransisco
• Launched by Set Protocol
• Announced on: 6-10-2020
• Mainnet release: 7-10-2020
• From their announcement (6-10-2020):

"A global community that will launch and maintain the world’s best crypto index vehicles on Ethereum. The Index Coop is the first community-led initiative focused on enabling the creation and adoption of crypto index primitives. With community leadership, the Index Coop has the opportunity to develop into one of the largest crypto capital allocators in the world."

Governance

• From their announcement (6-10-2020):

"The Index Coop will follow the principles of progressive decentralization. To that end and to ensure a safe and secure transition that allows the community time to adopt governance responsibilities, there will be an initial transitionary period where the Set team has the ability to make technical and safety-related decisions via multisig before governance is transitioned completely on-chain and over to the community.

What we imagine the governance process could look like:

• Discussions begin on Discord (anyone can bring up a governance topic)
• Proposals can be moved over to the forum for formal discussion if there is enough interest from the community
• Eventually, proposals can then be moved to Snapshot.page for token holder voting (non-binding)
• For now, the multi-sig will implement changes that reach both voter quorum and minimum threshold (which will eventually be moved to on-chain token voting)

INDEX holders are responsible for important decisions including:

1. Adding Indices: INDEX holders are responsible for sourcing, developing, and supporting new index strategies that have broad market appeal.
2. Controlling the Community Treasury: To attract a robust set of participants and methodologists, INDEX holders will devise incentive programs to attract and retain index methodologists, liquidity providers, marketers, community, developers, and other experts.
3. Updating Fee Configurations: In the traditional financial world, index vehicles monetize through an expense ratio/management fee and/or via asset lending. To enable sustainability, the community will be responsible for finding the correct balance in deploying value accrual mechanisms.
4. Enhancing Indice Performance: As components in indices can be used in governance, staked, or lent, INDEX holders will be responsible for determining how to best allocate constituent assets for achieving greatest yield, proper influence, or to satisfy other community-determined goals."

DAO

• DeFi Weekly (10-7-2021) went into how the DAO works in practice.

Treasury

• From their announcement (6-10-2020):

"52.5% of all INDEX tokens have been allocated to a community treasury. 5% of these tokens are available starting today with the remaining tokens (47.5%) being vested linearly at every Ethereum block over a period of 3 years (starting today) in-line with the schedule below.

1. Year 1: 50% of the treasury tokens vested (2.375 million tokens)
2. Year 2: 30% of the treasury tokens vested (1.425 million tokens)
3. Year 3: 20% of the treasury tokens vested (950,000 tokens)"

Token

Token allocation

• From their announcement (6-10-2020):

"There will be a total supply of 10 million INDEX tokens with the following distribution:

1. Community: 70% that is allocated across an initial distribution, liquidity mining program, index methodologist program, and community treasury
2. Team: 30% that is allocated to Set Labs and DeFi Pulse

On top of an initial INDEX distribution to past DeFi Pulse Index holders (as of Ethereum block #10980212), there is an initial DPI/ETH Uniswap liquidity mining pool."

• The community is in the midst (12-2021) of discussing to airdrop and give a portion of the INDEX treasury to long time contributors.

Utility

• From their announcement (6-10-2020):

"$INDEX is the Index Cooperative’s native token that enables community ownership and governance, of which 70% is allocated to the community."

• However, it is clearly stated that INDEX token holders do not earn money (11-2020). 

Coin Distribution

• The Yam Finance community voted to purchase $250,000 worth of the Index Coop Set for the Yam treasury (6-10-2020).
• The number of addresses holding DPI tokens is currently 2600+ (24-10-2020).
• From their October update (9-11-2020):

"At a $15M market cap, DPI index controls ~0.5% of all DeFi governance tokens in circulation for our index ($3B combined market cap). This makes Index Coop the top holder of DeFi’s biggest tokens and the #4 largest holder of YFI excluding exchange."

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on: Ethereum, ERC20, Polygon

Liquidity Mining

• From their announcement (6-10-2020): "Liquidity mining starts on October 7th at 12PM PDT."

Other Details

Index Methodologist system

• From Bankless (29-4-2021):

"These methodologists are the designers of the Index Coop ecosystem and are responsible for researching, compiling, and publishing the data that underpins Index Coop’s index token strategies. A recent example was the launch of the Metaverse Index (MVI).

In exchange for their service to the protocol, methodologists 1) earn from a bounty pool that was composed of 7.5% all INDEX tokens and 2) streaming fees, which are paid steadily over time. Bankless is currently exploring this program with the proposal of the BED Index too!"

Their Products and Projects

CoinShares Gold Index

• From EthHub (2-3-2021):

"Using volatility harvesting, CGI yields a superior risk-adjusted return over holding cryptoassets or gold alone."

DeFi Pulse Index

• From their announcement (6-10-2020):

"The first primitive governed by the Index Coop is the DeFi Pulse Index which was jointly launched a few weeks ago by DeFi Pulse and Set. The DeFi Pulse Index has garnered $2M in assets locked and 1.3k unique holders, demonstrating early product market fit."

• From Bankless (11-11-2020):

"The biggest assets in the index include Maker, Aave, Synthetix, yEarn, and Uniswap, which aggregate for 66.7% of the index. It’s important to point out that all the assets held in the DPI are actually redeemable for the underlying assets, meaning you can always redeem 1 DPI for the underlying basket of tokens."

Flexible Leverage Index (FLI)

• From Yield Farmer (21-3-2021):

"The token lets traders easily “target leveraged exposure in a decentralized manner.” The first FLI available is the ETH 2x FLI, which offers one-click exposure to a 2x leveraged ETH position."

Investment Committee (IC)

• From the announcement (23-1-2021):

"The main goals of the IC are to analyse the underlying tokens in our funds, their business models and value propositions. To dig into their governance proposals and share the analysis with the community. To create investment insights and educational resources that, combined with our products, make it easy to get on-board the crypto train and become a fully-fledged participant in the DeFi ecosystem."

Metaverse Index — MVI.

• From the announcement (8-4-2021):

"MVI is a basket of 15 tokens, designed to capture the trend of entertainment, sports and business shifting to a virtual environment."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Audits

• Bug bounty program can be found here (11-2020). "Rewards range from between 10-20 $INDEX ($70-$140 at the time of writing)" (22-11-2020).
• From their announcement (6-10-2020):

"Note: These smart contracts have not been audited, but are currently using minimally modified Solidity code utilized in the Uniswap and Compound codebases."

• Scored a 49% on DeFi Safety (16-3-2021); "​There have been no audits preformed on the IndexCoop contracts. The reasoning behind this is because they are mostly a fork of Uniswap and compound with minimal changes." With the comment: "Few docs, weak testing and no audit dragged the score down. More effort needed guys."

Usage

• From Decrypt (8-12-2021):

"Since its launch, the DAO, which is really more of a decentralized asset manager (call it a DAM), has accumulated hundreds of millions in assets under management, briefly surpassing the $500 million mark before the recent crypto correction brought its war chest closer to $400 million."

• From DeFi Weekly (10-7-2021):

"Currently has $185m+ of financial value locked in its financial contracts and thousands of users using their products."

• From twitter (28-4-2021):

"Currently, the Index Cooperative generates nearly $4,000 per day in revenue from its various products. Compared to other index-focused protocols, the @indexcoop leads other protocols and its TVL is nearly twice large as its next competitor. Additionally, the second and third largest index protocols both launched in 2021, BasketDAO of which vampire attacked DPI from Index Coop."

• From this tweet (24-10-2020):

"The Index Coop community forum has been on fire since launch with over 20,000 pageviews and close to 100 active community members! The Discord channel also has over 700 members."

Competition

• From DeFi Weekly (12-12-2020):

"Where I see [Powerpool] deviating from INDEX is that they’re more aggressive in launching indexes and using that voting power more aggressively rather than being an ETF. Maybe a better way to put it is that INDEX is an ETF with some voting power and Powerpool is tokenized aggregated voting power."

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Set Labs and DeFi Pulse are considered the starters of the project.

Funding

• From Decrypt (8-12-2021):

"It has raised $2.25 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital India, Blockchain Ventures, and White Star Capital."

• Closed a $7.7 million funding round led by Galaxy Digital and 1kx (7-7-2021).

Partners

• Partnered with Argent (15-3-2022).

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