finance.vote: update from the crypto dungeons

We’re in the run up to our TGE and I thought it a good time to provide an update on the progress of the finance.vote network.

It has been an interesting time. Intense, exciting, strange and even a little bizarre at times.

I’ll fill you in on development activity as well as some broader work, with a few hints to how the rest of this month will play out.

AMAs

It has become vogue it seems, for startups in the cryptospace to visit various telegram communities, be bombarded with an almost absurd amount of questions and then go away, hopefully bringing some interested users to our home telegram group. Internally, we’ve come to fondly refer to this strange loosely connected group of international telegram bubbles as the “crypto dungeons”.

The crypto dungeons are a weird, below ground section of the internet that take place in chat rooms, where people exclusively talk about crypto. Some of these rooms are great, with knowledgeable people creating well curated educational experiences. Sometimes they’re led by an avatar, who has a strange command over their army of crypto gremlins. Some are home to skilled traders, providing genuine market insight. Sometimes it’s like walking into a nightmarish digital pachinko room, with hundreds of greedy mouths performing tasks for a fraction of a DOGE coin.

Those kinds of rooms leave you feeling like you’ve caught a glimpse of our digital future, a weirdly dehumanised experience with people working for crypto tips. Nevertheless, there’s something very interesting about it as a learning experience both for us as a team and for the users. There’s a lot of power in these communities and when it comes to blockchain governance, those that capture this vote share will win.

Vote Markets

For purely symbolic reasons, we wanted our first votes on-chain on the 3rd November. On this day voters in the States cast their votes in the most contentious election in history. You could see it coming, those postal votes, still done on paper and practically unverifiable in their provenance. It’s an important time to be working on blockchain voting.

So we burned some serious midnight oil on our development trajectory to get there for that day, we were going to do the full TGE and launch on this day, but based on a whole lot of feedback from people who know the markets, we decided to not do our auction and issue a pre-TGE version of our vote markets, and boy, are we glad that we did. Thanks to those who gave us the heads up.

The crypto dungeons were dead on the 3rd. The silence was deafening. Bitcoin ripped through $15k and continued to vacuum liquidity out of the altcoin space. When bitcoin is on a run, it’s the bitcoin show, don’t even think about doing anything else.

The good news is, that running for this deadline has got us entirely ready for deployment. Our vote market contracts are on mainnet and we cast our first quadratic votes as a team and some prize winning community members using our digital identity tokens and all tests are coming back well so far.

The first vote will close this Sunday and early holders of our digital identity tokens will be able to bid for a share of the first $FVT rewards pool, which will be available for withdrawal the moment that our token contract is deployed.

Decentralised Identity Tokens

Using NFTs as identities has massive potential and we are putting it into practice. At finance.vote they are the portal into our ecosystem. You can’t take part without one.

We don’t intend for these to be crazy expensive, but they are a key component in our sybil protection mechanism. In periods of successive demand, their price goes up exponentially. This is like a cryptoeconomic firewall designed to stop people sybil attacking the voting system for free.

This is a big topic and one I’ll go into in great depth in the coming months but for now there’s a window where you can get one for free and vote in our vote markets before the token goes live. Either ask us a question, or just apply for the draw to get one.

Post TGE, the only way to get an identity is by burning $FVT in a perpetual auction. This is actually a great example of how utility tokens can be used to move away from centralised management keys. Remember all those people that said “utility tokens will never exist!” in the bear market? They’re about to be proven massively wrong.

Partnerships

We formed an early partnership with Kira network who are doing cool stuff in the interchain space that we plan to use in our social trading system and we have formed a very close partnership with CommerceBlock who are doing some of the most important work in Bitcoin out there. They will be supporting us in our technical infrastructure development and we plan on integrating their Mainstay protocol for NFT and vote provenance. Check out their CTO Tom, discussing their tech on the awesome Tales from the Crypt Podcast.

Community

We’ve picked up around 4k members in our telegram group and we’re putting considerable effort into curating some fun experiences for our community members there. I’ve spent as much effort developing enhancement processes for meme competitions as I have done in my previous life building educational quality assurance processes as an associate dean. This is my life now.

The reason we’re spending time on this, is that blockchains are socio-technical systems. Without a community, they’re just empty digital ledgers. The really successful ones are cults with coins. For us, and any other governance platform for that matter, an engaged community is a foundational component of their value proposition. Building a funnel from chat group to on-chain activity is a huge work package for us. Besides, I’m convinced solving high fidelity meme voting is the key to blockchain governance. Meme vote markets coming soon.

The TGE

We have designed an entirely novel cryptoeconomic auction mechanism for doing our TGE, which is a decentralised application called auction.vote and we’re super excited about it.

Auction.vote is non-custodial, decentralised and built for price discovery and. bootstrapping liquidity in new markets. It is potentially a hugely important piece in the process of kickstarting new digital asset markets.

AMMs have done great work in replacing (or at least supplementing) the work of market makers in the DEX space, but the decentralised release of new tokens is still a bit of a mess.

If you look back through the history of ICOs, IEOs and more recently IDOs things go wrong when teams decide their listing price. Bonding curve contraptions are interesting, but tend to be overly biased towards the upside and the instances where you can sell back to the curve seem to be over now due to flash loan exploits.

We think our system solves some of these problems. What is evident however, is that you can have the best auction system in the world, but it’s who‘s in the room that matters.

Clearly, the market has a significant impact on whether people are willing to take part in new crypto systems. We will fine tune our auction mechanism with a Ropsten testnet version and launch when the community thinks it’s the right time to do it.

What next?

The TGE will happen imminently, potentially this week. Our first phase of product development is complete and it’s in the fine tuning stage. So that means we’re doubling down on education, community building and awareness building. Come and join in on our discussion group on Telegram, which is where most of the action is. You can earn a share of $1000 USDT in our test auction, earn money making memes and pester me with questions.

Fill out our form to get a special preview of our vote markets and get notified on telegram when our TGE is taking place.

Play the game or don’t, it’s up to you!