A Foundation to Build On
With the release of our Beethoven-X crypts, we begin a new chapter in Byte Masons history.
Since the last update, we’ve left our big rescue behind us, secured our fellowship in the Yearn Academy DAO, began training 10 new team members, and re-organized our business to prepare for growth. A lot has changed since the start of this market run, but our long term vision remains the same. As we focus on legitimizing ourselves within the greater defi ecosystem, it’s more important than ever to focus on the values that have carried us to this point: Security, Community, and Creativity.
Who are the Byte Masons?
Byte Masons are the team that maintains Reaper.Farm, but we’re also a lot more than that. We’re technical advisors, security consultants, engineers, teachers, and friends — to each other and to the greater Fantom ecosystem.
I’ve spent the last couple weeks training 6 new software engineers and thought deeper about what it takes to be a developer in this space than I ever have. The breadth and depth of knowledge necessary to innovate is staggering, and to do so while keeping users safe is a gargantuan task. It’s a task that each Byte Mason will be taking on together.
Bug Bounty Program
As part of our perpetual effort to mitigate risks to our users, we’ve placed a $200k bug bounty on our Beethoven-X crypts with Immunefi.
As we venture into more experimental territory, we are going to enforce increasingly strict bounty, auditing, and testing practices. It’s important that we have as many eyes as possible on our code, and a formalized process for rewarding hackers will help keep the number of surprises to a minimum.
We are honored by the trust you place in our team and will do everything we can to make your defi experience as safe and secure as possible.
Governance
Though we’ve operated as a DAO thus far, bringing on team members from all over the world has made decentralization more important than ever. Managing these new perspectives and tempering them against our community’s will is going to be a challenge, but it’s one we’ve been preparing for since our launch in April.
We believe handing ownership of our protocol to the community is an important step toward our ideals. We’ve spent 6 months building a Discord full of intelligent, good-humored people so that we can achieve Sybil resistance and decentralization from our token’s first mint.
This system is a work in progress and will control Reaper.Farm and all of the software Byte Masons build in the future. We have an audit scheduled for December 13th and will provide more updates as launch nears.
The Future of Reaper
As many of you know, we launched Reaper.Farm because we wanted to get our company started quickly. Since then, we’ve fallen in love with the Reaper brand and it’s become much more than a means to an end. In light of this, we want to give it the facelift it needs to rise above its competition.
We’ll be totally redoing our vault architecture to support more robust analytics, possible NFT integration, as well as focus on novel, composable strategies that you won’t find anywhere else. With Yearn on the network, we believe we can settle into a new niche making novel high-yield strategies and look forward to unveiling them with our new vaults in early 2022.
General Updates
We’re leaving a couple interesting software systems sitting on the backburner while we build out our new business and engineering units and prepare for governance launch. We expect to begin polishing them off after we release our new Reaper vaults. These would include our ‘only up’ reserve currency and the mythical v2 system, which will probably require a new round of hires to support.
Crow, Goober, and I will also have permanent housing for the first time in many months next week so bear with us while we get everything set up and stabilize ourselves. We are excited to finally have a home base and expect productivity to ramp up significantly. Thank you all as always for your patronage — we’ve got an extremely exciting 2022 planned.
