The Power of Nobodies: Why Community Matters - Red Foreman

all right hello everybody um i'm red from harvest finance and also uh ap wine finance um and this talk is on the power of nobodies so i myself is a am a nobody um that actually comes in like two different groupings that i'll talk about um first i'm some random on the internet um to most people who see me i'm that front image of a chimp smoking a cigar that's my chat room image so whenever you're doing conversations or business with red on the internet you're usually talking to an ape so that means i'm not defined by my like age race or gender a lot of things that are very topical in the news today um things that may prevent you actually from getting a job in the world today um so ultimately like stripped of all these identifiers i am what i contribute right like an ultimately a very level um playing field um within the the field of like cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance um but ultimately we do see a lot of negativity in mainstream media today um about this um because of mr wonderland over here who was kind of hiding behind a pseudo-anonymous identity and happened to potentially take a bunch of money from people within that project but i would also argue that outside of an anonymity there's plenty of people who scam people today um like at the banks you hear a lot of uh investors or people in suits like at the deutsche banks or whatever in the world um ripping people off and then you also have people like this uh influencers and cryptos that are pretty well named known in the industry but you're still willing to give your money away to these people who have two billion dollars of your money so ultimately again the argument really isn't that anonymity isn't the problem it's people right and ultimately as we all know kind of in the crypto field it's all about uh don't trust verify we're trying to get away from people and in order to get away from people you kind of need that anonymity to force people to look at code as opposed to just trusting somebody in a nice suit who's ultimately going to steal your money and even vitalik kind of sends it to himself ethereum community should do more to be friendly to on on contributors again because there's like this specter if i don't know who you are or i can't see your face that you're potentially going to rob me of all of your all of my money um but in the second category and really the basis of this talk i am not a developer so i'm i'm a nobody in crypto um i don't have a revolutionary idea to tokenize and to make you rich so essentially i'm a nobody feel free to head for the door um you're not gonna get much more out of this right but i am actually foundational to every single d5 project that's out there and especially if you want to call yourself a dao i am the community i'm your protocol user i'm your liquidity provider i'm your coin holder um and if we're talking about dows um you probably have some kind of governance mechanism within your coin and so you're voting and that's what a lot of people are calling themselves a dow today because you have this voting mechanism but ultimately the question is is that truly a dow right so i asked the question you know what is a dao you know most straightforward it's a decentralized autonomous organization right um but ultimately very much in crypto we talk only about the first two letters decentralize an autonomous essentially a self-governing group of people but we don't really follow through on the acronym and says that self-governing group of people is the business organization around the protocol that generally these dows are connected to right so does voting really mean dao i don't see a v in that acronym right although you can pull it out of autonomous but really you need to think about your organization as a whole not just voting why well everybody kind of is long known within crypto there's a disparity in voting you have a concentration of voters pre-sale token holders fans of the project people that got in early or whatever who have very large bags of these tokens that essentially can outweigh any vote that any little tiny guy like myself can and then you also have just low overall voter participation where you see probably no higher than 10 to 15 percent of people voting within a protocol so not only do you have low participation then basically one or two people's votes are just going to wipe out any of the participation within the vote and then jokingly um friend of mine george harrop notorious crypto troll you're still going to want to manage you're still going to want to govern your favorite dow when it's down 90 um so ultimately that speaks to token ownership and voting people don't really vote right and especially when the market's going to hell you're probably going to get even less voter participation so how is that again decentralization and then ultimately voting only affects the protocol level like what about again the rest of the organization who's doing the marketing who's doing the treasurer management who's doing the customer service who's doing the hr who's writing all of your articles is it the same three people that launch the protocol is that a decentralized organization if they're still doing all of that work but they give you a voting mechanism so let's put it this way what if jp morgan launches some code on the blockchain issues a governance token and says you can vote are they now a dow right like is that what we're going for in this industry and obviously the answer is no which means voting cannot be the solution or ultimately what a dao is and then andre kronji makes a snarky comment about dao's picture your government now imagine if every policy had to be voted on by every citizen and if only quorum was reached if it would pass how does that picture look this is a dow vote no to daos that's an extremist take on dao's because everybody thinks of taos as voting and in one sense andre is correct if you kind of had that system or every little facet had to be voted on that would you would have like procedural paralysis so what truly is a dow and decentralization so let's not take the random nobody's word for it let's listen to somebody really important sec commissioner hester pierce known as crypto mom somebody who has extremely friendly outlook um or disposition towards crypto i should say and ultimately gives us feedback about decentralization if you want to be decentralized you really need to be decentralized and that is going to put you in a different category from the perspective of regulators because that's not just something that we've dealt with before if regulators can find a centralized part or group of people that they can grab a hold of they will grab a hold of them so i think it's good to have be cautious about how you build these things because down the road it could have regulatory implications so you think if the sec comes knocking at your door and say well we have voting mechanism we were decentralized like is that going to fly well no she just said it right there if they can find you they're going to get a hold of you and they're going to do what they're going to do so ultimately it's extremely important that the organization should also be decentralized to protect the developers and help ensure the longevity of the protocol so i you know i say bitcoin dow people don't really think of bitcoin as a quote unquote dao um partly because they have the perception like a dao has to be like silent group of people within like one discord kind of pushing in the same direction but bitcoin itself has become so decentralized like everybody's the marketing department everybody's writing the documentation everybody's a customer service and it is this huge massive organization that cannot be shut down and is no longer dependent on satoshi nakamoto so what does this tell you well long term that us nobodies that are doing all of these things outside of just protocol development once satoshi let go of the code and everybody else in a sense took ownership of bitcoin long term nobodies are equal to or greater than the protocol developers themselves who originally deployed the code so a community know of nobodies your protocol users your liquidity providers your coin holders your security layer from regulation where your marketing team your customer service your networking your collaborations and your alpha hunters and yes also your new developers new community-wide developers who come in and contribute provide that fresh eyes perspective that even the vitalikas himself has said is so many things have come out of ethereum that he never imagined and that was because of community developers not just him like ruling with an iron fist in this fight dumb and it's only governance voting that you can do within ethereum daily operations managed by your community includes them in every facet of the organizational decision making process eliminating the centralization decisions without the over reliance on voting if your entire organization structure is constantly flowing with people from the community doing the marketing sharing in the various ideas i don't need to be like andre crongy says and i need to vote on every single decision you already see the will of the people already acting out within your organization so there is no need to take a little a vote on every little step that you're taking yes maybe at the code level you need voting to ensure that nothing is going to change and impact some people's money that are deployed within that protocol but when it comes to things like marketing writing a new article sending out a tweet those are things that you do not need to vote on specifically and then when prices crash contributors work harder as opposed to voting less so think about the georgia's comments saying are you really going to vote when your tokens down the antithesis is i see developers mention all the time i'm so happy we're out of this bull market because now we can go focus back on the code instead of focusing on price talk all the time voting is still very important i know i talk negatively about voting because it's the because it's the over reliance on just a voting mechanism to call yourself a doubt and instead of true decentralization and spreading amount the organization among people so voting is still important but it's secondary to fulfilling the need of operational roles with non-founding members of the protocol so harvest finance a little bit of a shill here but just talking about how we accomplish this at harvest finance so it was uh initially started by a hundred percent unknown devs they deployed the the code in august 2020. i was just a guy who showed up in the discord week one was like hey i want to use this protocol there's a bunch of farms out there i would love somebody to help me aggregate all those different yields i started helping answering questions in the discord myself because people tend to ask the same 10 questions over and over again even though it's just asked literally three sentences above so i would just start answering questions the discord started writing articles myself just based on my own enthusiasm and a year later here i am in a sense acting as like the the face of the community because those developers are on on but daily operations are managed by us community where 95 of the protocol today is actually handled by random nobodies on the internet i'm doing a podcast or a presentation here somebody else handles our twitter handle account somebody else does treasure manager management we have developers that write new codes for new strategies that when our yeomans come in with a brand new collaboration that we've never heard about we can build a strategy in a vault like that we were one of the first people that deployed a looks farming vault and nobody else has done that and now looks rewards is ending and we were one of the few ones that did it because one of our community members brought that to us and we couldn't have done that without a community member because you guys know where all the alpha is so just being able to utilize people like cultivators translators imagine as a traditional business you had to go out and hire five different people that spoke the 25 30 different main languages that are out there and you need to translate your documentation all that constantly we have people that are extremely happy to do it for 25 dollars a document and those constantly get churned out and it's like it's almost like very inexpensive very motivated helpful work um to our dow that otherwise in a traditional structure would it be extremely cost prohibitive and then we also have things like a community manage multi-sig treasury so when the protocol is making money from new deals or collaborations brought in by our community members that money flows to a multi-sig wallet which then can be managed by multiple people multiple sign-offs to ensure there's checks and balances and then my my main show that's coming with this talk is actually about ap wine finance because they go hand in hand with harvest finance so if you deposited harvest finance or you deposited any yield farm there's hundreds of billions of dollars locked in defined yield farming today but a lot of the percentages that you see are actually figures of annual percentage rates right so i deposit my money there if i want 50 percent return on my money i essentially have to leave my money there for an entire year so that means billions of dollars are locked in defy and while they are earning a good rate of return on their money ultimately that money is unusable ap wine finance and like an eli 5 explanation lets you do a payday advance on your yield so you can get up to 90 days in advance today on your yield that doesn't even exist today and then go and buy other things with it so you can like yolo into another farm so on a higher level it's almost like a walmart of yields because people can come in there sell their yield and try to buy sell their yield early and then there's other people that are buyers who may want to buy yield directly instead of visiting harvest finance wiring you know whatever 20 other yield farms are out there you have to individually deposit at those spend gas and transaction fees at each of those individual farms or you could go directly to ap wine as one market place and buy that yield directly so those two have a very huge synergistic effect and why i kind of work for both of those protocols ap wine finance just started within the the past like month they launched their their v1 it was about the end of december they launched and so i'm trying to steer them in the same direction as harvest finance yes start out centralized but as we build up more people within the protocol more users as we bootstrap in other projects that we utilize their token like stakedown or idle finance we bring in those communities who then become enthusiastic about us who want to do future payday advances on their yield they become part of our community and start contributing and now we have this huge organic operation at ap wine finance as well so basically to wrap it up community very much does matter um you know again i know a lot of people think communities just a bunch of moon boys and uh coin holders but ultimately um utilizing the the various skill sets of your users members beyond just protocol voting voting will truly decentralize your organization and it'll create longevity and a security layer from regulators again very much think back to what hester pierce is saying and if she says if she can find a group of you they're going to grab a hold of you so while you may start out decentralized really making sure you're utilizing people outside of that original structure will help you get to that decentralized layer it also builds a support system that's not solely motivated by market factors again a lot of chat rooms you see are purely driven when the devs going to do something so the price is going to go up right but ultimately if you replace those factors and give them to something to focus on you have true buy-in and ownership of this protocol because your artwork is what we're tweeting out or is what we're using on the front of the website the article you just wrote is what we're featuring and talking to journalists about and representing your work and that gives those people immediate buying enthusiasm that goes way beyond just a token price so again end story dows are more than just voting and ultimately like hester pierce says if you do not decentralize they will find you and you will die that's it thank you [Applause]