The Tokenomics Crew | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
The culture of our DAO was on full display this week, with many projects releasing content across the creative spectrum. The Making Bank podcast released three new interviews, the dreaded crypto taxes have been turned into a crowdsourced NFT project, MetaFactory brings us a handmade Bankless crochet hat, and Fight Club is up to... something; read on to find out what and get involved.
Bankless Brasil bounced in to the Community Call to announce their new NFT project, Odyssey. The NFT is minting from a contract and front end developed by bDAO’s own 📰ᵍᵐⁿpub 🇺🇦. There is also another Language Roundtable event scheduled for March 22 at 17:00 UTC — this week’s will be in Spanish.
Following the strong theme of cultural content during the Community Call, it was fitting that the roundtable discussion focused on the importance of establishing our own branding. There is a new Forum post proposing a four-month season. Finally, don’t forgot to vote — there are three snapshots currently up for consideration. Have a great weekend frens!
Contributors: theconfusedcoin, AustinFoss, EthHunter, Trewkat, d0wnlore, siddhearta, hirokennelly.eth, Dippudo
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🗓 Weekly Recap
BanklessDAO Weekly NFT Showcase 🔥
🧑🎨 Artists: Sinjun and Crypto Bushi
🏦 Auction Type: Open Edition, 100 Total
💰 Price: 0.03 ETH
The Merge
A cascading collage generated from the many voices of the Bankless community. DAOs are chaotic and The Merge captures that in this 3D expression of our community. Much more than just the screenshot below, make sure to check out the full animation where you can hear and see the voice of BanklessDAO.
“BanklessDAO holds a historic place in the space as a whole and I hope this captures some of the people-powered magic that runs through it all.” - Sinjun
Community Highlights
🇧🇷 Bankless Brasil: The Bankless Odyssey
Bankless Brasil has put a huge amount of effort towards launching their NFT project: Odyssey. This NFT project stands out because it was built from the ground up — no OpenSea, no Rarible, just their own minting platform running on Polygon and deployed on IPFS. Built by 📰ᵍᵐⁿpub 🇺🇦, this process is as decentralized as you can get. The cost is 50 MATIC to mint one NFT. Only 120 NFTs in total, so mint one now! 🙏
🤑 Global Tax Guide
Final preparations for the Global Tax Guide are underway! This mammoth tax guide should be released in April. The Global Tax Guide will be a living document covering over ten jurisdictions, but with a twist.
In an effort to make taxes a little more enjoyable, a little more meme-able, the Metaversal Revenue Service has made Form 69 available. Form 69 will ultimately be an NFT that serves as your key to unlock access to the Tax Guide.
Get creative with your form — there is no wrong way to fill it out. After you complete it, upload it to the Metaversal Revenue Service and have your Form 69 serve as one of the NFT keys! Freaking dope af.
🥊 Fight Club NFT Whitelist and Mint
The whitelisting opportunity for the Fight Club Red Glove NFT 🥊 starts today! This NFT grants you access to the Fight Club Discord and membership in Fight Club. The whitelist will be open from March 18-25. You must be at least bDAO Level 1 (holding 35K BANK) to whitelist.
To get on the whitelist, add your wallet in the fc-nft-whitelist channel located in bDAO Member Perks. The NFT will be minted on Polygon and cost 200 MATIC. Minting will run from March 28-April 4, 2022. Check out the how to mint page for detailed instructions. A flyer will be sent to guild and project leaders.
What’s New
🧠 Crypto Sapiens Podcast
On this week’s Crypto Sapiens episode Humpty chats with META_DREAMER about MetaFactory, a community-owned marketplace and manufacturing platform for designers. The discussion touches on his journey through the world of fashion, being exposed to technology at an early age, and how he became involved in Web3.
💰 Making Bank Podcast
The Making Bank Podcast has shifted its format to multiple shorter episodes spread out over the week, with a total of three interviews this week.
First up was an interview by Benip, who spoke with Michael Kisselgof from PopcornDAO! Second, Lion917 discussed the International Media Nodes project with Jengajojo. Last but not least, Droste interviewed the one and only Perchy.
✍️ BanklessDAO on Medium
📈 Bankless Indexes BED and GMI Are Now Available in Argent
You can now invest in the Bankless indexes BED and GMI using Argent on Layer 2. Argent is a simple, secure, all in one wallet for investing in DeFi. This integration is powered by zkSync, making the fees minimal and transactions instant. Onboarding is possible with fiat using Apple Pay. Download the Argent app and start investing!
🎩 MetaFactory Gets Green
This limited-edition crocheted bucket hat kicks off Bankless x MetaFactory's rollout of 100% custom cut and sewn garments. Each hat is produced to order and crocheted by hand. Order yours today and receive 42% back in ROBOT.
Get Involved
📜 BanklessDAO White Paper
Members of the BanklessDAO Legal Guild have prepared a White Paper which includes key information about the genesis of the DAO, our token, and the technology that we use. The aim of the document is to answer basic questions that a person may have about BanklessDAO and BANK. Please provide your comments and suggestions!
🌐 Second Language Roundtable Event
Ornella and AnaTech will be leading the Spanish roundtable event, which will take place in the Watercooler voice channel on March 22, 2022 at 17:00 UTC. If you’d like to arrange an LRT in your own language, sign up here. There’s a 1K BANK bounty for the three native speakers facilitating the event.
🎢 NFT Investing Webinar
The Fight Club Education Webinar Series will be hosting a webinar on NFT Investing next week. The team will provide an overview of NFT-specific due diligence and investment strategies for different categories of NFT projects.
Join us in the Fight Club Dojo on Monday, March 28, at 17:30 UTC (13:30 EST).
🙏 Sponsor: Balancer.fi — Automated Portfolio Manager and Trading Platform.
The Tokenomics Crew at BanklessDAO
Author: EthHunter
Off in a small corner of the internet, in a channel inside our Discord, there is a collection of like-minded degens that meet to talk about tokenomics and all things treasury. How do we secure operational security for the DAO and its future? How do we improve the utility of BANK? How do we reward contributors sustainably and incentivize long-term stakeholder engagement? What is the best L2 network for BANK token migration and mitigation of gas fees? These questions and more are on the menu in our channel and in various weekly syncs that the Tokenomics Department holds. The reason for writing this article is to introduce everyone to the team and engage our members to this cause.
Sound interesting? Here is a sneak peak at the alpha.
Icedcool is a founding member of this group and facilitates several weekly meetings. He spun up a weekly sync a couple of seasons ago to keep the conversations going after the previous initiative dubbed the ‘Ministry of Tokenomics’ lost traction. Since then he has been the champion of several Forum and Snapshot initiatives and somewhat of a de facto organizer of the tokenomics team. I asked him what tokenomics means to him:
“Tokenomics is the economics of crypto tokens. In the context of DAOs, it is generally the economics of the native token and its design, usage, utility, and ultimately relationship to governance”
Kouros is the coordinator of the Treasury Guild and another thought leader in tokenomics:
“Tokenomics is the ability that we have to bolster the… token and/or its operability. There are many bright brains out there ideating different techniques and innovating in the space. You can implement anything that you want through smart contracts, and this enables a vibrant and passionate community building great systems in order to achieve all kinds of goals. At the same time there are many flawed systems that with time will be obsolete.”
How does this department play a role here at bDAO?
Kouros: “The Tokenomics Department researches the topic and connects with the different protocols to try to bring value to the BANK token and its holders. With our best interest for the community at heart, this topic has proven to be difficult to agree on by the community for different reasons. I can think of a couple right now. Sometimes it is because of the lack of information regarding a particular protocol and how they work or what the benefit is for us. Other times, the amount of BANK needed to implement any tokenomics might be the cause of disagreement.”
Driving BANK Forward
BanklessDAO’s Tokenomics Department is the place that aims to steer the use of the BANK token and propose mechanisms to further the DAO’s objectives. While the primary focus is the overall usage, utility, and effectiveness of BANK, it is also a forum to explore different aspects of the implementation and present recommendations for more formal proposals. After these are discussed and a basic framework agreed upon, they are brought to the DAO to be discussed and voted on.
What are some of the things the department has accomplished so far?
Enabling voting with BANK for Level 1 DAO members (35K+ BANK tokens) on Snapshot
Liquidity deployment on Uniswap (V2 and now V3), SushiSwap, and Balancer
Enabling liquidity-pooled BANK (on Balancer, Uniswap, SushiSwap) to count towards voting and Discord level thresholds.
OHM bonding on L1, adding over 10% of the liquidity on L1 to the DAO’s treasury, earning fees for market making
80/20 BANK/ETH Balancer pool paying out BAL as rewards to stake.
If you could have one tokenomics goal of yours happen now, what would that be?
Icedcool: “Increasing BANK utility and velocity (purchasing things with BANK, and the ability to do more with BANK).”
Kouros: “To be able to stake BANK and get some reward in return.”
What do you think we may be missing in this space?
Icedcool: “Tokenomics are intricately tied to the aim and goals of an org. It supports the implementation of governance, and alignment of contributors. I think we currently need a better utility infrastructure, and time/research to fully flesh out these next steps.”
Any specific examples?
Icedcool: “One challenge of the contributor membership structure in the DAO, is that there are contributors that have to sell BANK for survival needs, and this creates certain issues.
This ends up having voting power implications, where these members (while skilled and vetted at the DAO) aren't able to maintain votes when the DAO would want them to have a strong vote because they are active and involved contributors. With the current structure being a token weighted system, these contributors have less of a say, because of the need to sell their tokens.
These are NOT simple problems, and have been around for a long time. However, the opportunity and novelty we have are the trust layer of the blockchain and smart contract programmability, which are new.”
BANK Utilization Under Discussion
Voting and Utility
There have been ongoing discussions about how to better utilize BANK for voting on proposals and taking actions inside BanklessDAO. How do we align members in the DAO, and properly reward those with a strong long-term commitment? There are a few layers to this topic, including financial, social, and governance discussions.
To touch on governance for a moment, could the DAO use a veBANK model where tokenholders could lock up their BANK for a set amount of time and receive the “Vote Escrow” BANK equivalent in exchange for additional perks or bonus utility? This would show alignment with the DAO long term, and help maintain value of the BANK token, as locking it up for various amounts of time would take it off the open market. There could even be extra incentives applied with veBANK, where those who commit to hold BANK for the long term by locking up their tokens are given additional voting rights, cheaper L1 membership, or some other special perks. This is just one example of the ways we are considering to better utilize BANK and maintain strong incentives for those who are aligned with the bDAO cause for the long haul.
Treasury Diversification
A major topic in the cryptosphere is what happens to operational viability when we enter the dreaded crypto winter or bear market (are we already there?). How do we survive long term with a treasury that is 90% BANK tokens, and how do we remunerate contributors in a meaningful way while we continue to BUIDL? Some key ideas to further our longevity are:
Token swaps with aligned protocols
Proper seasonal funding amounts and how to plan for future allocations
Utilizing bonding mechanics such as Olympus Pro to gain more protocol-owned liquidity
Creating and managing lending pools to give BANK holders the opportunity to borrow against their BANK to unlock value rather than sell it outright
Investigating yield strategies for stablecoins and swapped tokens through staking
Deciding what a responsible percentage of stablecoins (both backed and algorithmic) should be in order to insulate the treasury from a secular market downturn and preserve operations for a time while the token and other treasury holdings recover.
The Great Migration
The Tokenomics Department has passed a proposal to bridge many of the processes and operations of BANK to Polygon. Due to the high cost of gas on Ethereum Mainnet, Layer 1 transactions were becoming unsustainable. During the first few seasons, the DAO paid thousands of dollars in gas fees to operate.
The idea to migrate the day-to-day transactions and usage to Polygon was brought on by this pressure to make the BANK token more usable. Paying gas sucks, and at the current BANK price, it doesn’t make sense for members to pay high transaction fees to send a few thousand BANK.
Several multi-sigs have already bridged to Polygon to support and maintain their operations with reduced gas costs (IMN, Bankless Consulting, Bankless Brasil). This creates more opportunities to use platforms like the Balancer Pool on Polygon (which is currently incentivized) and eventually Olympus Pro, as well as making smaller BANK transactions more feasible of course.
Other L2 chains are being considered as well. There are lots of scaling solutions that boast low fees and fast transactions, and the goal of BANK is to be everywhere! The multichain future of the DAO may come sooner than later, as we explore the places that BANK can live and where additional benefits can be found.
We Want YOU!
There are so many smart and talented people within the DAO who are creating value and driving the value of BANK for the future.
Kouros: “We should educate people on the subject, or at least each time we have a proposal, have AMA sessions to get all doubts answered. I also think that not many people are engaging with tokenomics in BanklessDAO. We are currently looking for people with a passion in this subject to help us flesh out the strategies in this area.”
Do you have an idea or opinion about BANK or the DAO treasury? Have you seen something work well in your experience, elsewhere in Web3 perhaps? Has another DAO you are part of solved any of the issues that we are facing?
Come and join the tokenomics conversation! Drop a line into the #tokenomics channel and share your 2 BANK. The main Tokenomics meeting is on Fridays one hour before the Community Call (14:00 UTC, 10:00 EDT), and we only stand to benefit if more members contribute to this decision-making process. Most importantly, it's open to EVERYONE. Come hang out and take part, or just listen and learn about some of the intricacies of tokenomics, improving BANK utility, and how we can align incentives to support the DAO’s mission! We’d love to see you there.
#justDAOit
🎣 Phishing School
Authors: d0wnlore and the InfoSec team
Developing a Scammer Mindset
“A hacker walks into a bar. They order a beer. They order -1 beers. They order a ' SELECT LOAD_FILE('/etc/passwd').”
Those working in the cybersecurity industry may be familiar with the practice of developing a "hacker mindset" or adversarial thinking. This is where we assess situations as a hacker would see it. Ideally this is done before these situations have occurred, as part of a preparation exercise. But having a hacker mindset is still a good resource to tap into as we run into these situations.
Let’s apply this thinking to begin developing a “scammer mindset” so we are less likely to fall for scams.
Hacker Groups and the Cyber Criminal
Most hackers fall into one of four groups: script kiddies, hacktivists, organized crime and nation-state actors. For more information about these groups, please read this page on threat actors from Wikipedia. From what I’ve seen in the crypto space, most scammers operate as part of an organized crime group; they are cyber criminals. So let's look at the skills, motives, opportunities and resources a scammer in organized crime may possess:
Skills: They have decades of knowledge of scamming people using TradFi and have made the modifications needed to run their playbooks in crypto. This group is also where we start to see more effort put into social engineering, compared to script kiddies or hacktivists.
Motives: It’s about money. Most scammers are not looking to flex their skills like script kiddies, make a public statement like hacktivists, or perform attacks for geopolitical reasons like nation-state actors.
Opportunities: Crypto is a natural and attractive progression from scamming people in TradFi. Operational security knowledge is still nascent and there are few guardrails to protect users, due to non-reversible transactions and other attributes specific to this space.
Resources: They have more money to spend than script kiddies and perhaps hacktivists. This will be used in paying for Crime as a Service (CaaS) resources, data breach dumps and assets or extra staff to help with their scam campaigns. Money will be spent as long as profit is made.
Now that we know how a scammer operates, we can start thinking about what to watch out for:
Most of their attacks will involve social engineering or other psychological trickery. Watch out for opportunities presented to us where tell-tale signs of a scam might appear: time urgency, appealing to authority or fear of loss (or FOMO as is the usual case in crypto).
The scammers are ultimately after our money, even if they perform unrelated activities like threatening to dox us. We may want to look at ways of hiding our true wealth from the outside world so we are a less attractive target.
The velocity of successful crypto scams reinforces the attractiveness of exploiting people in this space. Watch out if you are part of large communities where scammers will cast a wide net, or if you are a well known personality in the space where there may be transitive targets if you are compromised.
We can't do much about the resources these scammers already possess. But we are now aware of what they are capable of and are less likely to underestimate those capabilities. Be vigilant when unknown URLs and DMs are presented to you.
We now know the typical attributes of a scammer operating in organized crime and some ways of how we can assess situations based on how they operate. Developing a scammer mindset can be a rabbit hole and we have only scratched the surface of how it can be done. But I encourage you to do your own research based on your own interests and as your threat model — refer to our past articles — dictates.
🏛 Governance
Snapshot Proposals
💰 Grants Committee Election for S4 and S5
There are three seats open on the Grants Committee for the next term (Season 4 and Season 5). You can get more information about this election and see all of the applications in this Forum post. Please add your vote for the candidate(s) you feel will add the most value to the Committee.
🛠 Governance Solution Engineer Program: Re-Implementation
This Snapshot is for approving the Governance Solution Engineer (GSE) Program. Five governance-minded DAO members will be elected to design comprehensive solutions for mission-critical DAO social infrastructure challenges. A total of 2.125 million BANK will be allocated to this program.
👷🏻 Governance Solutions Engineer Re-implementation: Election
As proposed by the revised Governance Solutions Engineer (GSE) Program, the DAO is to elect five GSEs. Please read each application thoroughly and vote for your preferred GSEs based on their qualifications and ideas. The decisions made here will have long-term implications for the DAO. Go vote!
Proposals in Discussion
☎️ bDAO Product Support Center Season 3 Proposal [REVISION]
BanklessDAO products are becoming powerful tools for supporting the growth of bDAO and other communities. These products are rapidly coming to market. Being live in numerous servers necessitates having a place where users can seek help, suggest feedback, and help others to create a community of people enthusiastic about the growth of the product. The bDAO Product Support Center will be a place where users can come to get help with any bDAO product. This service would be made available to any project, product, or team within bDAO.
🗓️ Super Season Proposal
Now that the initial proposal of having 6 month seasons has worked its way through discussions on the Forum and Discord, SamanthaJ has submitted a new proposal for a four-month season — perhaps a happy medium between the current three months and the previously suggested six. The break week at the end of Season 3 is still planned for the start of April, meaning that if this proposal goes forward, Season 4 would run from April 18 to August 7, 2022.
✅ Action Items
🥊 Whitelist your wallet for the Fight Club NFT in the fc-nft-whitelist channel
🗳 Vote on the Snapshot proposals
🏃♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.
🙏 Thanks to our Sponsor
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🤣 Meme of the Week
