A Rising Tide Raises All Ships
Since you guys are probably used to the way we do things around here, I’m not going to get too deep into finances this month. The team was paid market rate and treasury funds were stored in a USDC-FTM crypt position to earn income and help lengthen our development runway. We also migrated all of our crypts and strategies to a multisig wallet.
This month I want to update you all on life, V2, and plans for a token.
After over a month of being on the road, I’ve finally landed semi-permanent housing in the beautiful state of California. While driving and riding Amtrack trains across the country, I listened to some good books, did a lot of thinking, and wrote a neat little software development kit for use in creating and interacting with complex test environments. I’ll polish off the documentation on that and fire off a formal announcement when I’ve got time in the next couple weeks.
As you might expect, the focus of my thinking was our Reaper V2 system.
In reality, Reaper V2 is just Reaper. Currently we’re using modified Yearn architecture so it’s hard to feel real ownership, and V2 has evolved significantly throughout the design process — away from Yearn’s micro-kernel architecture toward a services-based system, with strategies coming from an orchestration engine as opposed to vault plugins. I’m very proud of where we’re at currently and think we (the Byte Masons) are setting ourselves up for long term success.
Because we can only deploy our system once, long term success is a hard thing to achieve without careful planning, lots of risk-storming, and a wealth of second, third, and fourth opinions. As we head into final implementation, it’s becoming very clear that a 6-figure audit will be absolutely necessary to maintain Byte Masons security standards. This leads us into something you may all enjoy hearing about: our token.
With hours upon hours of research and discussion under our belts, I think we’ve landed on a mechanism that could help take us to the next level. Funny enough, for all the brainstorming we’ve done this past month, our most promising idea coalesced within a few hours after I pulled up to the apartment here in SoCal, scribbling math formulas while I waited for my crazy new landlord to come over.
Without getting into too many implementation details, I’ll explain which problem areas we’re trying to address with this neat new “Rising Tide” algorithm:
Liquidity —Liquidity is a hard problem to tackle. Oftentimes, low liquidity acts as a barrier to entry for larger balance sheets and high liquidity can hinder early stage price discovery. We believe we can tackle this issue by programming liquidity into the contract itself, while still maintaining the tradability and flexibility of the token.
Volatility — Part of the excitement of crypto is its volatility. It’s what makes it extremely profitable for traders and the reason for all this upside. The problem here is obvious: it’s too risky for most investors. We want to capture the beneficial effects of crypto volatility without hurting the average person’s experience speculating on or using the token.
Elasticity — Anyone who’s designed a token will tell you: it’s extremely hard to predict demand. Emission curves, total supply, and valuations can oftentimes be thrown out the window once price discovery starts. We want to create an asset that grows organically with our community and as the value of our work appreciates.
Usability — We want our token to plug into any financial protocol out of the box. From a technical standpoint, that means no strange fees, broad EIP support, and a rich interface. From a financial standpoint that means stability and at-a-glance valuation. This is especially important to us because we’d like it to be an asset people love holding onto for use in our products and elsewhere.
Value Capture — After coming up with solutions for the last 4 problem domains, we had to ask ourselves: would we buy this token? Whether we like it or not, ROI is one of the most important aspects of an ecosystem token. Speculation creates interest and allows the community to tie themselves to the protocol on a deeper level than simple community engagement. We believe that giving our users the tools they need to flourish financially will serve to benefit Reaper and the Byte Masons greatly in the long run.
Simplicity — The great thing is, our mechanism for solving these problem areas is pretty simple. Once I’m done with implementing and testing our algorithm, I’ll write up a short whitepaper and start collecting feedback from other security professionals.
In summary: we’re workin’ on it.
We spent July beefing up and polishing off V1 as well as brainstorming our future plans. Our backend infrastructure is getting better, our skills are getting really sharp, and we’re ready for an important transitional month here in August.
Wen Token? Soon.
Wen V2? fSoon.
Wen Future of Finance? We’re living it, baby!
