Jan. 26, 2022: A Bankless Task 🏦📝
Crowdsourcing Notes for Curve’s Bankless Spotlight
Bankless has become a megalith within the world of cryptocurrency. Their highly active community is at the forefront of pushing the concept of sovereign finance. Their core mission is:
Bankless is a movement for pioneers seeking liberation from the tyranny of the traditional financial system. Going Bankless means adopting decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant technology. Through these means we will achieve financial self-sovereignty, security, and prosperity.
Sounds like a ton of overlap between the roughly hundreds of thousands of members of the Bankless army and the Curve flywheel community! To date, however, there’s been relatively few bridges between these worlds.
Until last week, when Bankless asked for a representative to discuss the “Curve Wars” on their popular podcast.
Curve’s community has a no shortage of extremely brilliant and wealthy individuals who could represent the community. I was surprised and deeply humbled when the community nominated me for the honor. Whenever people start spelling my name correctly, you know it’s serious business!
I consulted with Michael and accepted the challenge. I’m scheduled to record the podcast tonight, though I’m not sure if it’s broadcast live or recorded and broadcast later.
The Curve community is brimming with chads. One of the things I most enjoy about Curve is how much I learn from all of you on a daily basis. In turn, I simply document my learning in a highly public fashion along the way. I feel it’s my responsibility to repay everything I’ve received from the community by properly pumping your bags tonight!
So I’m taking this very seriously, even cutting my festivities short to prep. No more canyonposting for me!
I’ve already assembled a few pages of notes, but I’d like to crowdsource the rest to make sure your thoughts on the flywheel are well represented. It’s a good way to reflect the fact that this has been such a community effort from the beginning.
Shoot me some notes anywhere you like… the comments here are great, but will also be sweeping Twitter, Discord, Telegram, email (if I don’t respond quickly it’s because I’m too cheap to pay for airplane WiFi, not because I wish you offense). Tell me anything you’d like me to mention about Curve/Convex/Votium. Even for a long-form podcast, Curve is sufficiently complex we certainly won’t be able to get to everything, but I will do my best to have your comments at the ready and provide attribution where possible.
If you need jumping off points, think of common podcast questions (search/replace Curve here with Convex/Votium as fits your preference):
In a few words, what is Curve?
What interests you about Curve?
Why did you start using Curve?
What is Curve’s role in DeFi?
Where do you think Curve is going next?
How has Curve changed your life?
How does Curve align with the Bankless mission?
What are your favorite facts or stories about Curve?
If a lot of people drop such comments on these subjects, the thread will itself become a valuable resource for newcomers, and really show off the power of our community.
I think a narrative of how Curve is set to take over sushi and uni, especially highlighting a lack of revenue share with Uni
In a few words, what is Curve?
- a decentralized exchange, a place to swap tokens on Ethereum and many of it's other chains / networks
What interests you about Curve?
- Tokenomics, team, it's differences from other decentralized exchanges, how other teams build on top of it in different ways
Why did you start using Curve?
- Curiousity, saw lots of confusing token symbols on yearn and wanted to understand what they meant, dove into the docs and have been fascinated since
What is Curve’s role in DeFi?
- For swappers / arb bots, massive liquidity + efficient swapping algorithms = low slippage for very large transactions
- For protocols, a place to put your liquidity to allow users access to your token, as well as a way to make profit off of providing that liquidity by means of CRV emissions (Curve governance tokens that are distributed to pools for providing liquidity on Curve)
- For owners / investors / veCRV holders, a place to share in overall protocol fees as well as to have a say in which pools get gauges (the ability to receive CRV tokens) and how many tokens each pool receives per day (gauge weight). Other protocols have started to incentivize veCRV holders to vote for their pool, creating greater returns for veCRV holders
Where do you think Curve is going next?
- Forex
- Cross Chain Governance
How has Curve changed your life?
- Opened up my mind about economic concepts and how incentives drive behavior, the tokenomics are so interesting and new to me
- Takes up a lot of my time to continue to keep track of what's happening, not always a good thing!
How does Curve align with the Bankless mission?
- Haven't watched much Bankless, so I can't say, other than maybe the fact that I think many people have been using Curve as a bank, putting a lot of their net worth into stables and generating much better returns than traditional banks
What are your favorite facts or stories about Curve?
- tree fiddy meme
- The knowledge and talent on the team is the true alpha imo
- that everyone asks the same questions in the discord for a year straight, seems like no-one reads the docs, just stake unstaked already!
In a few words, what is Convex?
- a DAO designed for users to share in veTokenomics together, sharing overall boost, profits (whether it's from protocol fees or votes / bribes)
What interests you about Convex?
- Which protocols it will look into in the future
- How it will hold up in the long term, will it remain the king? will it keep it's pegs to it's underlying protocols
Why did you start using Convex?
- Airdrop from Curve
- Understanding about the power of votes and fees from it's system
What is Convex's role in DeFi?
- Allow investors to take part in the benefits of systems that have veTokenomics (making a user lock up it's tokens for a set period of time) but stay liquid, or at least more liquid than going to through the veProtocol
Where do you think Convex is going next?
- Cross chain governance
- making FXS a full product
- hopefully more underlying ve projects but I won't speculate on which
How has Convex changed your life?
- Similar to Curve in expanding my mind in tokenomics and economic incentives
- Teaching me how to stick with winners, I've sold low and bought higher a few times with it, naturally being conservative as an investor it's taught me how to ride out winners better
How does Convex align with the Bankless mission?
- Same answer as above
What are your favorite facts or stories about Convex?
- #cvx-trading is hilarious
In a few words, what is Votium?
- a central place for protocols to bribe / incentivize vlCVX holders to gauge weight vote their underlying veCRV for their Curve Pool
What interests you about Votium?
- How it's grown over time, and how much more it can grow, also wen VOTI ;)
Why did you start using Votium?
- Day 1
What is Votium's role in DeFi?
- same as answer 1
Where do you think Votium is going next?
- Token?
- no idea really, seems like a great product that's doing everything it should be doing
How has Votium changed your life?
- it made me more aware of Thursdays
How does Votium align with the Bankless mission?
- no idea
What are your favorite facts or stories about Votium?
- llama.airforce is so useful and awesome, also the Union is an interesting new project and I hope that continues to grow and do well as well!
bribe.crv.finance should probably be mentioned directly somewhere but yeah also a useful part of the ecosystem