On 13th Nov, we host a public AMA with Dr. Nick, the founder of Finance. vote to talk about solutions for today’s Defi governance issue. Here’s the recap.
Intro
Elson: Can you please have a short introduction to finance. vote and team behind before we start the AMA?
Dr. Nick: Sure, so my name is Nick I’m the founder of finance. vote which is a network that aims to introduce new voting technology to the crypto space. We’re heavily focused on quadratic voting and governance solutions.
I’m an academic by background and have spent the last 20 years in universities. I started in physics and then later mathematics cryptography and learning theory.
Our goal is to create systems that test out voting tests using a prediction market system that we're very excited about called vote markets.
AMA begins
Q1: Finance.vote allows users to form private groups, that can leverage its voting power. Many holders don’t have the knowledge necessary to wisely choose over a network plan, highly empowering low educated holders would bring negative outcomes for the projects? Do you have some kind of protection against spam and fraudulent activities? There is a feeling that it is too easy to make a vote with the result I personally need. Why then are there oracles? Or do you want to oust Link from the market?
Wow, this is a good question. So one of the things we’re trying to solve is the extreme knowledge asymmetry in the market. There are some people that know smart contracts and 99.9999999% of people who don’t. We’re trying to build a system that aggregates collective intelligence, essentially paying a distributed group of people to vote on which tokens they think will succeed in the market. Those who are correct gain voting power and have a greater influence. You are quite right to point out that there is a potential attack which is that people can buy votes. But that’s what quadratic voting is all about! You can buy votes but you need to burn $FVT in order to get an identity that lets you do it. It’s our Sybil protection mechanism. It’s possible but not easy and it’s costly. Also! You only get higher voting power by merit (by making good predictions) so that should balance out the people spamming. We’re making an adversarial cryptoeconomic game. Play the game or don’t, it’s up to you!
Q2: How are the users encouraged to vote in your rotating consensus? What kind of incentives do you offer for them?
Another good question. We’re all about incentive alignment. We will make it worthwhile for people voting. Presume that no one will do anything in crypto unless you pay them. So we put a pot of tokens on the line every week in our vote markets. If a user makes a correct prediction they get a share of the pot. If you play your strategies right, you can basically guarantee that you win! So there is some $FVT you can win for being correct. There is also something called vote mining at play which means that we airdrop nearly 10m tokens to users in 6 months' time proportional to the number of times they vote. We think it will be a profitable system to use.
Q3: I’ve heard you mentioned NFT as an identifier, any plan working with other projects to design it, or would you (finance.vote) gonna design yourselves? $FVT
Another great question. We’re actually talking to a couple of big NFT players in the space. We’re going to do some very cool things with them. We’re going to make a procedurally generated art system. Our NFT ID’s have a number based on issuance. So I’ve got $FVT 1 :D and everyone who gets one after gets the following numbers based on how they’re issued. So the art will be based on the number in some way. But! We are planning to allow people to customize them with art they buy from NFT marketplaces across space. Should be really cool.
Q4: How will you prevent “copies” of tokens from being included for the purpose of defrauding users? Do you have a system to remove these tokens from the pool?
Actually, we’re working on this! Last week someone set up a fake pool for $FVT with nearly $150k of liquidity in it! The last thing we want is people coming to our platform and ending up buying into a pool that is a fake token. We will be building a cryptographic system that proves that token pools are real with our partner's Commerce Block. They’ve got a really cool time-stamping protocol that should help with this issue.
Q5: ✅ If I donate 1000$ for $FVT or $V, will I get more votes? Or will my vote be more valuable than the tickets of others? 🤔🤔🤔
So you can buy as much $FVT as you want, but the maximum $V you get per identity is 100. You can buy more identities but they will all have the same voting power. The only way it goes up is if you’re correct. Later on, in our second layer governance system, you’ll be able to get your voice louder based on $FVT stake, but we’ve got a system so that whales can’t just buy themselves a voice so loud they break the decision-making system.
Q6: — Dr. Nick Take a moment to step out of your role in Finance Vote, and watch from the outside for a moment…
Would you really invest in this project? What would be the positive points that would motivate you to invest in it? Would you invest aggressively or cautiously?
Sincerely, please!
Ok so I’m out of my role as founder and looking objectively, this is basically impossible of course but I’ll give it a go! My advice is you should be very cautious with investing in early token systems, a lot can go wrong. The longer a system is out in the wild the more it is proven out in the market and anyone that’s going to attack it has attacked it. So honestly, I tend to stay away from the early markets. I didn’t buy any ICOs in 2017 and largely I say away from the early DeFi stuff. However, objectively I would be super interested in this project because it’s everything I love about crypto. Token economics, identity, NFTs governance. It’s something I’ve been looking for for years. I’d buy enough to play with some identities and see how things went.
Q7: What is the special DeFi Of Finance vote?
How does finance vote bring new feature in Defi space?
Yes, so we really wanted to bring something completely new to DeFi, which is quite tricky actually because people like things they know and already understand. There are a few novel things we’re doing. 1/ our quadratic voting tech is designed to upgrade governance and may be used to capture human decision making and dialogue better 2/ we’re introducing a yield farming initiative we’re calling “pulsed liquidity mining” which is designed to allow token holders tune the liquidity incentivizes. 3/ we’re mixing voting and prediction markets, that’s not been done before. 4/ we’re engaging in price discovery systems that haven’t existed before making sure that all the new tokens hitting the market are priced in better. There are loads more but I’ll stop there.
Q8: Liquidity factor is a problem for DeFi projects with their tokens, so does $FVT have any liquidity program to encourage natural token demand and liquidity?
Yes, liquidity is king in the DeFi space. We’re doing two important things. Next week we’re doing an auction of 20m $FVT. ALL of the ether collected in that auction will be sent as liquidity to uniswap. After that, we’re incentivizing LPs to provide liquidity in the FVT pool and letting token holders decide how much rewards they get. We call this the liquidity bootstrapping phase. You can read all about it here: https://link.medium.com/oYVA7cHGnbb
Q9: Why Choosing Finance.vote as a project name?
Good question actually! I discovered the .vote domain name. It’s designed for politics and introducing people to political decision making, which I think is what we’re doing. It was a relatively untapped namespace so we’ve got finance.vote and auction.vote (and a lot more actually) ;)
Q10: What role does Auction.vote play within the Finance Vote platform and how does it relate to the exponential token auction? What benefits does this system bring to you?
Auction.vote is a price discovery mechanism. We think a lot of the ICOs and IEOs went wrong by the team picking their listing price. So we wanted to design a mechanism that allowed the crowd to decide. My CTO and I are auction theory geeks so we invented our own auction system called an exponential token auction. We ran an incentivized test on Wednesday and it went great! You can check it out here https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVSrVmkoTawUU8dj86tdNwiMrk5UDcmBJxMV2qyHsW1Yn
Q11: I read somewhere that the Finance vote will mint a Decentralized Identity token (DIT), so why do you’ll do this? Can you give us more details?
Yes! We’re very excited about this. A big problem in voting systems is identity management. Particularly in QV systems where Sybil attacks are a problem. So we created a system whereby the identities are tokens. It puts a barrier to entry to stop bots spamming the network, they’re auctioned perpetually and you have to burn $FVT to get one. They get exponentially expensive the more you buy them in quick succession. We think it will solve the bot problem. They’re also cool NFTs you’ll be able to build a reputation on and potentially sell in the future.
Q12: Of what benefits is the utilization of both a layer one DAO, the Decentralized Monetary Fund (DMF), and the Layer two $FIN MiniDAO, do you think more projects will adopt it?
A quick note here! We changed our token ticker to $FVT because another project chose it FIN. The community decided it actually in our telegram group. To your question. The DMF is our main high-level decision making DAO. We keep the chat out of there and just make serious monetary policy decisions. We use our miniDAOs to have loads of conversation and only certain players get to make decisions in the DMF. I think that a hierarchical kind of system will become the new paradigm in DAOs and we intend to influence it.
Q13: Q: How do I become a FinanceVote Ambassador? What are the roles I can play in this new protocol and what is the function of each one? How do you think this will make the platform grow even more?
We’ve just launched an ambassador program!
Retweet: (https://twitter.com/financedotvote/status/1326573436123144192) https://twitter.com/financedotvote/status/1327227533671026688
Q14: What is Finance.Vote plan to gain adoption fast enough that the market will not be saturated with other similar projects by now and what advantage could you offer?
This is an important question for every crypto project. For one, we’re sufficiently different to carve out new territory, we want to be the de facto voting platform for DeFi. Obviously, there will be a log of people who might want to clone us or copy what we’re doing, but we want to build a system that actually benefits from this. Our identity tokens could be used in any product. So our adoption is throttled by our token economics. There’s a massive airdrop in 6 months' time and users who get in early on our vote markets can win big shares of the reward pool. I’ve researched technology adoption for 10 years in educational settings so I think we are well-positioned here. We’ve got loads of ideas.
Q15: Voting Power seems to be something important within Finance Vote, can you explain exactly what is the function of it and why users should increase it?
It is very important! Every user with an identity gets 100 $V dropped to their account every week in the vote markets. If you get a prediction right. Say you vote 6 on $COMP and it’s the top gaining token that week, that means you voted 36 $V (square of the votes) and you get 136 $V forever thereafter. It means that voting power aggregates towards the correct!
Q16: Finance.vote will use the Mainstay Protocol provided by its partnership with CommerceBlock. What solutions will this protocol provide to the platform? How will it help make voting immutable and secure?
We’re literally talking with the commerce block team today about how we can use to keep track of token contracts as they hit the market. There are so many fake pools that we want to create a history of truth of what the real contracts are and how they've changed. Mainstay keeps an immutable data history on Bitcoin. I’ve been a fan of it for years so looking forward to integrating this in the future.
Q17: Can you further explain how the DIT/NFTs can be traded and maintain a sense of trust in the potential new holder? Does this mean only verified actors (with certain levels of trustworthiness) can have votes in the voting pool? For example, to get this cred, you have to have some cred already?
Great question! Yes, we deliberated over whether we should make the identities transferable. Essentially this means that you can be a great trader, earn a load of $V power, and then sell your identity to someone else. We realized we couldn’t really stop this, so we thought we’d actually enable it and make it part of the game. The Cred is earned by being correct, but you can buy that cred off someone else if they want higher voting power. It means we get to find out what Cred is worth, pretty exciting!
Q18: You’ve mentioned earlier about plutocracy, which is one of the things you want to fix in blockchain governance. But with your voting system, don’t you think it will just be the same, like those who can vote more are still those (rich) people who can afford to pay more? Each project has interesting stories before it is created. So can you tell people about the story that gave you the motivation to build and develop a great project like #Financevote ?
Great question! There is always going to be a wealth dynamic in any economic system and actually, it’s very very unequal in crypto. That becomes a huge issue in voting systems because it means the government is actually dominated by a handful of people, we think our $V system will do that!
Q19: Token burn” is beneficial for any project, in being able to control the number of token circulation and to provide greater incentives to investors. Does your great project have a plan about token burn?
It’s actually baked into our system. Every single identity created burns some $FVT so the token economy reduced by adoption. It’s inflated by the vote market reward, but these should balance out. Eventually, the token holders decide on the monetary policy.
Q20: What cryptocurrencies are available to make available and earn money by making correct predictions? How do the deposit and redemption work?
To start with we’re doing DeFi tokens. It’s basically the DeFi Top 10 for now but token holders will be able to change the token list with their token votes!
Q21: Can you provide an overview of your tokenomics? Will the design of the token increase and decrease with the success of the platform, does it include any scarce pathways, such as equity, storage, or burning?
I’ve spent years designing token systems and finance.vote system is my best work yet. You can read about it all here. https://link.medium.com/V9f3RhPInbb. The headlines are that we’re releasing the tokens steadily over 5 years not all in one go. The token holders shape monetary policy and inflation. There are airdrops. Voting incentives. And Liquidity Mining. And it’s all designed to be tuned by the DMF. Inflation and Deflation are managed by the community and it will run forever once running!
Dr Nick: By the way here’s our vote market system. https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmeKQ2sFNqLNoNMrk2LAKr7tDMwKdJYZRQBAkXknotVtvS/
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