April 8, 2022: ETH, Not EF πΈποΈ
Should Curve support ETH Core Devs if the Ethereum Foundation won't?
What could become the second veFunder proposal is live.
ETH is great, but EF is increasingly rotten. Despite the Ethereum Foundation sitting on a treasury worth over a billion dollars, they allegedly pay developers in the same range as a Walmart truck driver. Core devs are steering us towards the merge, but will things go smoothly if they canβt afford to eat?
The issue was highlighted a few weeks back when the community teamed up to personally donate to core dev @vdWijden to put a roof over his head.
Now, maybe thereβs an argument that the EF should be functionally weak for the interests of decentralization. Perhaps. If so, then a good way to achieve this would be a transfer of wealth from the treasury to developers in order to dilute their influence.
The Protocol Guild was announced early this year to attempt to address this and other problems. Theyβve made progress since launch and yesterday became the subject of what could be the second veFunder grant.
However, unlike the overwhelmingly popular Vyper grant that kicked things off, the Protocol Guild grant is more contentious. Funding the underfunded Vyper community directly benefits Curveβs mission. Itβs not necessarily Curveβs job to pick up the Ethereum Foundationβs slack.
This was made explicit by Curve founder Charlie in an epic clapback against the EF.
β[Vyper] has direct impact to our capacity to keep building out the Curve DAO. Weβve recruited Vyper contributors before and will keep doing so. Itβs also a non profit which doesnβt receive funding, acknowledgement (except if you want to count that one article written by a moron called Piper which addresses Vyperβs technical debt and many bugs) or love from the EF so that endeavour makes sense to us (mainly because the SC dev team would rather quit than write Solidity).β
A veFunder stream of $CRV tokens is not free money. It dilutes inflation that could be direct to other pools.
Itβs also not the ideal form of funding for every organization. It works for organizations and entities that are invested in long-term engagement with the Curve community, because it requires continuous governance pressure to keep the $CRV flowing. Some organizations may be better off with up-front grants from the community fund, rather than rely on an uncertain trickle over time.
The signal vote is narrowly split in early returns. If this actually hits a gauge vote, this may be too close to call.
Drop your thoughts on the governance forum. No sense in decentralizing if we donβt make use of collective governance.
Thanks for the π!
Trigger Warning: The remainder of the post is very self-focused. Haters look elsewhere.
Over the past week, I was amazed and humbled to read so many wonderful endorsements of this newsletter. Especially coming from people whom I deeply respect.
An actual deity in the space, whom Iβve followed for years.
Also with exactly 69 likes, the co-author of the top cryptocurrency Substack, one I extensively study and heartily endorse.
To keep my contrarian streak active, Iβll have to dispute the wise owlβs argument. @CurveCap is not underrated but in fact properly rated.
Owlβs argument would suggest that the free market for eyeballs is inefficient. Iβd argue it must efficient. If Twitter in fact had significant inefficiencies at directing followers to the best content creators, these content creators would migrate to a better platform. The lack of competing platform implies Twitter is efficient.
Truth is, my myopic focus on Curve carves out a very narrow niche. $CRV is a token outside the top 100. Only about ~10K addresses have staked $CRV as veCRV. My total addressable audience is quite small. Doing some math: expect thereβs perhaps a 10x wider audience of lurkers. Maybe I capture about 5-10% who enjoy reading long-form and arenβt put off by my abrasive personality and checkered past. It totals to a number quite close to my current following. Ergo, properly rated.
If the goal was followers, the setup would look quite different. Iβd use a gorgeous female avatar, post brainlet platitudes about Bitcoin, and follow subjects like price swings and pop culture. Thanks, but no thanks.
I prefer this smaller niche because itβs simply the room I want to be in. The audience interested in Curve is incredibly sharp and possesses a phenomenal understanding of the deepest recesses of DeFi. I like an audience that can teach me, and willing to learn about subjects outside the mainstream like Vyper upgrades and Brownie code snippets.
So thank you to all who post these comments. I hear you, and it means a lot to me:
While the sentiment is certainly appreciated, know also youβre under no obligation to post such content. It never crosses my mind that Iβm βunderfollowed.β In fact, it feels quite the opposite, the numbers keep climbing quite consistently. Time to party like itβsβ¦
When fewer people were reading, Iβd be more likely to drop experimental content or shidposts. Now I feel more a burden to self-censor myself and actually deliver quality content. Come to think of it, maybe itβs time to prune the follower count a bitβ¦
If you nonetheless are concerned with increasing my follower count, the best way to do so is not so much to pump this blog, but to push $CRV and $CVX to their rightful place in the top 10 on CoinGecko. My follower count will always be at some percentage of the market cap of these tokens. Focus on growing the Curve market first and the followers will come to all of us.
Therefore, building new protocols on top of Curve gets us there. The myriad new v2 pools launching gets us there. Innovations like veFunder gauges gets us there. Growing our amazing ecosystem gets us there.
Finally, Iβll argue that Iβm in fact overrated. Yet Iβll drop these reasons behind the paywall. After all, if Iβm going to give my numerous enemies ammunition, Iβll literally make them pay!