Ex-Revolut Exec Launches Governance Token With Backing From Galaxy Digital

Revolut’s former growth lead is turning his crypto project, Gro, into a DAO.

Sep 28, 2021 at 7:21 p.m. UTC

Updated May 11, 2023 at 6:01 p.m. UTC

Hannes Graah, former president of Spotify Japan K.K., gestures as he speaks during a news conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2016. Spotify Ltd. is bringing its popular online music service to Japan, a large and lucrative market where fans have demonstrated a continuing fondness for CDs and even vinyl records. Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

U.K.-based decentralized finance (DeFi) startup Gro, founded by former Revolut growth lead Hannes Graah, has launched a liquidity mining product and a governance token in a bid to turn the project over to the community.

Gro was launched by Graah in 2020 and received $7.1 million in seed funding from Galaxy Digital, Framework Ventures and Northzone. The firm runs protocols aiming to give users a simple DeFi experience.
The firm has also appointed Jake Chervinsky the general counsel at Compound Labs, as a strategic adviser at Gro.
Graah told CoinDesk the xGRO governance token will be used for on-chain voting ahead of its liquidity mining program for users of the protocol’s two main products – the Gro PWRD and Vault.
Graah said the xGRO token was distributed to members of the Gro decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which includes early users and the Gro team, and early-seed investors. DAOs, whose decisions are carried out by software rather than human managers, and governance tokens play an important role in the execution of DeFi.
Two million GRO tokens (2% of the total) will be distributed as community incentives during the first month. Liquidity mining, where users earn an additional token on top of the regularly expected yield just for putting assets into a funding pool, will be starting Friday with four incentivized staking pools.
“Using two tokens allowed the community itself to launch the DAO,” said Graah. “Neither VCs nor team took part in the DAO establishment votes, so it was really driven by the community.”

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