Dr. Nick Almond on building internet organizations with finance.vote

0:03i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have dr nick almond the founder of finance.vote nick welcome to the show pleasure to see you and i'm excited for this discussion into the world of governance in d5 great to meet you ashton yeah thank you for inviting me along

0:25you're very welcome let's dive straight into this because i know your team has a suite of decentralized applications that is impressive really but there's only so much we can talk about because it seems your team is expanding into every faucet of solutions that are needed in d5 there is a lot to solve right now if you could kick it off for the viewers with just a high level

0:48overview of finance dot vote and some of those solutions then we can dive into those details sure so yeah we're like like you've mentioned we're quite a broad spectrum kind of d5 project i would say very high level what we're interested in is decentralization so all of our applications facilitate the creation of new decentralized applications themselves

1:12new ways of doing governance and we think the route into decentralization is by incorporating more people in getting involved in their projects and that requires voting technology so we're kind of building everything that daos need through the medium of being giving people a voice giving people a vote and building new and interesting ways of doing blockchain

1:36governance definitely and thanks for that nick and you know the dows have been around since people have heard of the you know the ethereum dao back in five years ago now but it seems there's still a lot to be done can you talk about in the defy industry you know in the more recent years and endows what are some of the problems that your team saw pinpointed and some of the

2:00solutions that you're looking to grow so we can really take both of these to the next level sure so yeah i mean it was the dow that probably made me really fall down the crypto rabbit hole so i was interested in bitcoin for a long time i used to teach cryptography but i ended up working in governance in large institutions and the potential to build organizations

2:24on the internet is the thing that i thought is really gonna change the world completely and so the dow as as we kind of know ended very badly through to a kind of smart contract bug which we see all the time but that was particularly bad one because it had you know a huge amount of the ethereum assets at the time locked in it and it was all very traumatic for everyone

2:46involved and it kind of put everyone off for a few years but very recently over the last year or two they've started to kind of really rush back into the scene so what they facilitate is i think some of them as hubs as hubs of human coordination so there are ways for people to collaborate on the internet in ways that we've never been able to do that before

3:10so organizations they're basically a blank canvas to do in any kind of collaborative activity people can work together in them create value productive outcomes and endows allow that to happen on the internet with people we don't necessarily trust or know so the potential of them is just absolutely amazing that kind of organizations are like the building blocks of humanity

3:38so but they're very very early at the moment we've just been using them to pool assets and decide how to spend them together with very rudimentary voting technologies and we're basically trying to build the upgrade so we can do much more stuff endows we can collaborate more effectively and they're all implicitly built around tokens and they have their own crypto economies

4:03so what we've been trying to build is the things that will build sustainable dows so things that will allow them to bootstrap bootstrap a new economy manage their tokens effectively reach consensus be able to come to good decisions and also manage the assets that they've got so there's a lot of foundational work that needs to be done to really take these

4:27Take this idea of decentralized organizations into the into the where it needs to go for really be transformative for how we work and collaborate on the internet so we're building these individual little modular applications that each do something that we feel the these kind of organizations need like organizations need a payroll department you know they

4:48they need ways for managing their assets for coordinating people and each of these dapps do one of those things that we think decentralized organizations will need yeah well said and yeah there are so many functions that normal centralized organizations do that need to be programmed into a decentralized autonomous organizations and the dow really was so rudimentary

5:13having only a couple functions as more people start to move organizations onto the internet they're gonna need all these functions and there are so many of them and i know your team's already been working on some of the foundational gaps for you know building a little bit more functionality into into dao's maybe you could talk about where you started

5:36building those gaps and what you saw as most important to expand into the dow functionality sure so organizations in the centralized world and i've worked in big ones in the past and been involved in governance systems but i'm very aware that what needs to happen in dao's is very different so you know in conventional organizations you can kind of be with this

5:59in the same building as everyone you can you can manage them in very different ways and they don't generally have tokens so they're much more implicitly about digital assets and so it's about managing those assets and being able to work with people that you might not even be able to look at and they're just accounts so you have to deal with

6:24things like civil resistance which is when people settle multiple accounts and start to attack governance systems with them so each each individual individual bit of what we've created is designed to at the moment go through the life cycle of these organizations so everything from being able to raise some capital and vest the tokens properly so we're

6:47starting to see as the markets got a bit more dicey the summer teams are dumping tokens and you know rug pulls are starting to happen so we've got a application called bank which is about storing those assets and admitting them in over time in a way that the users can trust so the teams can't dump them because they don't have access to them and the initial investors are vested in

7:14a way where they don't have huge amounts of liquidity that allows them to control the market so the kind of first component is managing the initial asset asset distribution well and then bootstrapping liquidity so we've got a token auction which is a bit like an ideo launch pad but it's built around token price discovery and the ether collected with that

7:38goes to bootstrapping a decentralized market and then we've got a liquidity mining solution called yield which then goes on to build exchange depth for the size of for the size of the organization and it all implicitly linked to governance so the yield application is liquidity mining but that the users control and it stops huge token whales

8:03coming in and taking all the tokens so that's the kind of bootstrapping suite that gets gets everything up and running and then we've now got a developing governance suite which uses quadratic voting to reach consensus in a really interesting way so we've got everything that gets you to take off now and then in the future we've got these voting systems that allow you to make good

8:27decisions and decide how to spend your assets properly and manage your treasury properly definitely yeah that makes total sense in starting a company you're going to need to raise capital you're going to need to make sure that it's allocated properly and that there are the proper treasury rules so that the team isn't you know dumping or moving to

8:51funds and tokens when it's not authorized so that's really interesting to hear definitely an improvement from the current models and a lot of it's just on handshakes and safs that may or may not be enforceable with non-anonymous or even anonymous teams so you know with the internet as you mentioned with the civil attacks people

9:14could set up multiple accounts and pretend to be multiple people and gain more control and it's hard to tell if it's on the internet and you're not in person and seeing that's actually only one person so yes it's interesting to see how there's those different rules once you move it on to the internet and people can hide behind their keyboards

9:32absolutely absolutely so as you continue to develop this out and now roll it into the market how do you see this as a top to bottom movement into the market where teams will just start adopting it because they see the incentives or more of a bottom up where people will actually be requesting hey you need to if you want us to invest in a project you need to be following

9:58the rules of finance.vote and make sure that it's all done properly how do you see that playing out as you roll into the market i think it's both i think it depends how deep into a bear market we get the tougher times get the more it will get to a point where the user side will start demanding that these things happen so we're already starting to see

10:20the trust models fail on quite a lot of crypto projects and that just gets worse and worse if the market conditions get worse so hopefully we don't get there but i think we'll increasingly see teams choosing to adopt good practices because it makes it genuinely makes the system more sustainable into the future so you know we'll we'll increasingly

10:44move into a an environment where if you haven't raised and haven't set up the project with good practices originally the market can change from underneath you and then you're stuck with a project that no one trusts now so in a kind of trustless environment it's best to set it up in a way that you can provide good assurances you'll find if you're sitting in a

11:07telegram room and users are asking you difficult questions over and over again it's better that you've got a good answer or you can say look look at our vesting system this is how you're gonna get a voice this is how we did our token launch and it was all fair and it's just easier to run a project in a long-term sustainable way if you've got good answers to all

11:26those questions and you know use using our dapps allows you to answer those questions effectively so i think it'll be a combination of both i think you know teams will get more mature i think a lot of these things people didn't even realize that they were good practices but i think that kind of market intelligence is starting to emerge now that it kind of need to do

11:47it that way so a bit of vote for thing yeah great answer nick and you're right i think you know sometimes people don't realize how good they have it or in this case how bad they have it and what actually can be improved in the system and when they take a look at how governance really should be in proper internet organizations they'll realize how how early on the

12:07crypto industry is right now absolutely you mentioned the launch pad helping incubate projects and get their tokens locked in having testing and i also want to talk about the finance dot vote token as well because i know that's integrated into the dap suite and into the ecosystem can you talk about the fvt token how it integrates how it plays a role in

12:30these dows starting up yeah sure but yeah i've been very very interested in token economics for a long time so there's there's lots of different reasons for different utility for the token so we started the network with what we call day one utility which was like we wanted something the token could do from the very first day of the network launching

12:53and the fvt token is essentially spent or burnt for setting up an identity in the system so you can buy an id which is an nft so we create one of the first nfts with both aesthetics and utility so they're kind of beautiful bits of art but also it's a voting id that you can partake in our systems with so as a kind of slightly tangential project for now we've got a prediction

13:20market where users can vote on the future performance of tokens and this will eventually trend into being a kind of treasury management type tool so fvt is used for burning you know to gain one of the to transform the fungible token into a non-fungible token which gives you voting rights from the system makes it makes you a citizen in our system so

13:43it's a voter id and then the fvt token itself is used for token weighted voting like in other governance systems but because we use quadratic voting even small amounts of tokens can give you a meaningful voice in the system so we use a combination of these nfts and the token to its power in the system the more of the fvt token you have the

14:10more influence you'll have in the system in the future but elsewhere we really like this kind of burning mechanic and the tokens are spent rather than as collecting them back into the dow quite often we will take percentages of the dapps as they're deployed so for example if someone does a token launch on our platform the fvt token will

14:35either be burned or stored in the dow depending on the governance decision we've also got an auction system for selling nfts and we've got an actually new primitive which we're quite excited about called the incinerator which allows people to pay in ethereum but then we'll in a from a decentralized exchange by our token and burn it in fees

15:00so we think our token essentially the fees get sort of equally distributed to everyone by burning the token so that's our kind of fee model and there's kind of going to be a lot more to come down the line but that's the kind of broad utility set at the moment the incinerator very cool nick that's that's great to hear and yeah i you know i just want to go back to the fact that

15:26you know you're building out all these functionalities for taos you mentioned there that fet works within the finance dot vote dao and you really want the gut the community to help shape the future of this as well and be a part of it and it's not you know some small centralized project it's actually a community governed project and you also have the decentralized monetary fund as

15:47well the dmf maybe you could just talk a little bit more about you know the long-term vision of the finance.vote dao and the dmf sure yeah so the dmf is a to play on the imf that we thought that would be pretty funny and that's it's kind of takes on a similar sort of role it's it manages the monetary policy of our system so our token holders in order to for

16:15this be sustainable in a long period of time we want the users to have full control of the token economy so we're burning a lot of tokens they can essentially create new tokens so there's an inflationary deflationary dynamic that only the users will control so we might want to give more tokens for liquidity mining in the future for example and the users can control that and

16:38we've all of our systems have these dials that allow them to tune the token economics so rather than it being fixed for forever the whole token economy has these kind of movable dials that the users can tune by token voting and that's kind of what our sort of decentralized monetary fund will do it controls the monetary policy it'll also control our treasury so

17:04in the future we're hoping to have quite a substantial fvt treasury that we can pay people from and they will also be able to choose the kind of distribution system so our bank system will be a kind of decentralized payroll and the dow there will decide who gets paid for what projects go next and we've got a kind of dynamic road map that if you look at our website you'll

17:26see a little skill tree-like non-linear road map and our users can steer us around that so yeah we're quite excited about our dow it's it's not open yet but it will collect treasury assets in a way that we can hand off power to the users without it being a massive risk to the system so it will pick up more power over time so yeah we're hoping to do some

17:52interesting new things in dow design then very cool and yeah i'm looking forward to seeing that open and seeing the community flood in and i really do i looked at the website i saw the tree map that you show all the different functions for the different dapps that are coming out and it looks extensive and i'm excited to see it come to fruition it's not gonna

18:16take a day but i know your team's working hard and maybe you can give a quick high-level overview of what you and your team are focused on for the next few months and then mainly the rest of 2021. sure so yeah we've we've been working incredibly hard to kind of get the first sweep the first iteration of the dap suite together which has got

18:38the moment five five daps and we're just over the next few months kind of getting them into a nice working order that we can start to push out to our partners and start launching dows but we've got some more plans in the future there's actually some apps on there that aren't even in the road map yet we've we've got about 12 or 13 road maps out

19:00some of them are kind of iterations of previous ones so we have a kind of whole governance suite so our first one influence is a kind of signaling app and then we've got proposal and decision which is a three-step decision-making process where decision is the really high-stakes decisions where we're changing our monetary monetary policy and paying out

19:22large amounts of money and that's our kind of governance suite in that there's a we use quadratic voting to do amas so we've got an ama platform in there which will allow the community to be able to ask questions to their partner projects and all that sort of stuff and then we've got two other components one is what we call market discovery

19:45prediction market discovery so i'm super interested in where futaki might go it's very early but the merger of prediction markets and decentralized governance is going to be huge in the future and so we're exploring prediction market design and also discovering the price of new assets so dows will want to collect things like nfts and then auction them

20:08to find out what they're worth and that's kind of what that whole sweet bit stores and then we've got a kind of another period which is more about social trading and social consensus so we've got a system called identity.vote which is going to use our nfts to do some decentralized reputation and we've also got systems where people can collaboratively trade

20:31together and that's our kind of whole treasury stack where being able to not just sit on a load of network assets but be able for a dow to hold quite a diverse treasury of lp tokens partner tokens nfts and we've got a suite of application that leads to a kind of decentralized fund system over time so they're all different sub components that

20:58sort of stick together to create one big mega dow i would say in the end all very exciting i'm looking forward to following that road map and it's crazy your team has what i've seen such a larger and more precise road map than most projects because there's just so many things that your team has planned it's very ambitious for the viewers that are looking to

21:22follow along with these daps as they roll out learn more about the finance dot vote dow what's the best way for them to get involved in the project sure so good place to start is our twitter account which is at finance dot vote with the dot one one big long word and then join our telegram so again finance finance dot vote and you'll be able to find our

21:47discord there and our discord's just about to get exciting we've got a kind of a growing governance system in there we've got these identity gated rooms opening up and there's going to be lots of opportunities for people to come along and do some work for us so we've got a whole kind of work based system coming out where there's people can turn up and do

22:08little bits of work and we're trying really hard to be as inclusive as possible get people of all skill sets to come in and get involved so yeah find our discord join our telegram the best way to find us great thank you so much nick i will leave those links in the description box below as well all the best with all the continued work that your team is working on

22:29and let's follow up in the near future yeah great talking to you ashton you