Over the last 2 weeks, I teamed up with a group of engineers, marketers, and operators to create and launch Unipool.Finance. The crazy thing is that I have never met most of my partners in this endeavor. We came together organically, virtually, without hierarchy and in a distributed fashion.
If you’d like to learn more about Unipool and our goals, you can read our launch post here; however, this reflection is not meant to explain the project, but more the experience of creating and launching it. This is the most exciting part because it is representative of the future of work, distributed communities, stakeholder economics, and the open-source ethos.
About one month ago, a friend and I were discussing the current crypto market excitement. We agreed that although we were enjoying investing and passively participating in new projects via “liquidity mining” or “yield farming,” the coolest thing for us to do would be to launch our own network. Given the rapid pace of experimentation and adoption of new ideas over the last few months, we believed it to be the perfect time to try something new.
We landed on the idea of coordinating a disparate group of high-value network contributors known as liquidity providers or LPs. Our goal was to start small in order to minimize risks to early participants, so our $UNP token would be a valueless token used first and foremost as a tool to bring LPs together to communicate in a token-permissioned governance forum.
I believe that, at its finest, the crypto market is ground zero for experimentation in economic and social coordination. The idea of stakeholder capitalism has existed since the 1970s, but it was not until the launch of cryptonetworks that we gained the technological tools and frameworks to make it a reality. Whereas traditional startups are primarily built to create value for shareholders, crypto utilizes new economic incentives to create and share value across all stakeholders.
So my friend and I began to pull all of the Unipool pieces together including an engineering team, a copywriter, and two marketing experts all of whom I have never met.
Together we explored questions on the appropriate structure for Unipool’s launch. We wanted to design the launch in a way that kept us all motivated, so we debated raising a small amount of outside capital and/or including a “team/advisor” allocation of the token supply. While these financial incentives are one way to create long term buy-in, we believed that if we rejected these more traditional methods in favor of a fair launch, then ultimately we’d create more value for early community members (who we also do not know). When you create value for early participants, many of them pay it forward and become valuable contributors to the future growth of a project.
In short, a fair launch means that a cryptonetwork is earned, owned and governed by the community from day one. There is no early access, no pre-mine of tokens, no private sales, and anyone with a crypto wallet and a few shekels can participate. If you’re interested in the concept of a “fair launch,” you can read up more here.
The fair launch was really pioneered by Satoshi Nakamoto when he created Bitcoin – anyone with a computer could “mine” (earn) bitcoin by running its core software. The best execution of a fair launch in recent memory is that of Yearn.Finance. Yearn was founded by Andre Cronje only two months ago (about 15 years in crypto land). It is an open-source, permissionless, asset management platform that as of this writing has $770 million in assets earning returns and generating millions of dollars in earnings that are then distributed back to YFI token holders (as governed by the code). Over the course of the last 2 months a strong community has formed around Yearn. Yesterday a new budget was approved by the community that compensates a core team of around 10 contributors who have created the most value and signaled their long term intention to move the project forward. It is interesting to note that a few of these contributors work under pseudonymous Twitter and Telegram aliases, so the broader Yearn community actually does not know who they are in “real life” (similar to Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin).
On Friday, taking inspiration from these two projects, we launched Unipool, and ike many open source projects it was a mess from the start. For example, our Twitter account was shadow-banned because we had too many login attempts from around the world and launched a sixteen tweet Tweetstorm without having any followers. Note: I discovered TweetDeck thanks to this issue, which every decentralized team should know
We also had one or two engineering issues: early users needed to pay 0.175 $ETH to call their UNP balance. This led many to immediately write us off as a “scam project” trying to steal their $ETH. Naturally, our early advisors and evangelists were hesitant to publicly announce their support because of these early problems: we even had one advisor request that we remove his name from the initial launch post. This compounded the external perception that Unipool was a scam.
But what happened next reinforced my belief in the power of distributed teams who have a deep-rooted interest in the power of community and open-source software.
The Unipool “team” rallied and sprung into action. We immediately revoked the smart contract functionality from our website and changed the UX so that users could see their $UNP balance without paying. We all shared the administrative function in our Discord channel by fielding all questions and accusations from our new and growing community. We openly invited this community to support software improvements in our technology channel. We delayed the ability to claim tokens until Monday (today). We also managed damage control both with our early advisors and on Twitter.
As of this writing, only three days later, Unipool has nearly 500 followers on Twitter, and over 200 members in our Discord channel (without a live token or fully-baked financial incentives). We will incorporate the early feedback and questions that we received into an updated user flow on our website, and the FAQ on our Discord to clarify our intentions and future goals.
You can’t really call the ragtag group of individuals who built Unipool “a team” in the traditional startup sense – there is no corporate entity binding us, no salaries, no equity rights, etc. At the same time, in just a few weeks, we launched a new coordination tool into the wild and have built a small but growing community of evangelists around it. It might easily “die on the vine” over the coming weeks, but if the protocol is adopted as we hope, we may end up creating substantial value for all users.
This is why crypto is so exciting: the pace of innovation is unprecedented, the compounding effect of open-source technology that can be stacked together like digital money legos, and the community’s willingness to experiment in a virtual sandbox that’s purpose-built for “trustlessness.” All of this and more will only accelerate crypto’s growth in the future.
As I have seen with Unipool, there will be inevitable missteps a lot of volatility, but I truly believe what is born out of this petri dish will help answer centuries-old questions on social and economic coordination that incentivizes pro-social behavior in a zero-sum world.
This Week’s Podcast:
Food & Justice with Eve Turow-Paul, Author, Food Culture Expert, and Founder of Food for Climate League
“The largest population of vegans in the United States is from the African American community. 3% of the US is vegan and 8% of African Americans”
In this episode, Eve and I cover a lot of ground.
We evaluate how COVID19 has highlighted socio-economic differences and tie it back to Eve’s work on food culture. Access to nutritious food is such a clear representation of the bifurcation of our society as is the way we engage on social media.
It may seem like we cover too many varied topics here, but it is all connected: diet, food supply, climate, capitalism, social media & the attention economy, and mental health. The more of these episodes I host, the more I realize the connections.
What I’m Reading
IDEAS
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant, by David Graeber
Paying My Debts to Her, Andrew Murray Dunn
The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods, Douglas Rushkoff
Managing Complex Change, Nick Francis
MARKETS
Market Crashes Through Last Week’s Levels, Panic Ensues, iBankCoin
CRYPTO
Stani Kulechov (founder of Aave) on the FTX Podcast
A Defi Roundtable at Smart Contract Conference w/ Stani, Andre, Sergey & Kain
Cornering the Ethereum Fee Market, Amber Group
Fast Follower Forks in DeFi by Ian Lee
How NXM Accelerates with Scale, Yan Lieberman
NOVEMBER ELECTION
Are Election 2020 Poll Respondents Honest About Their Vote?, Leib Litman, PhD
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