Really, because I seem to recall a specific moment last year in which someone (whose name rhymes with douche) got himself liquidated for more money than the chain could come to terms with at which point gas fees skyrocketed to Ethereum base layer levels for 1-2 weeks. Are you sure this specific example is not the exact situation a layer two is built to avoid?
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During 2021 I was bombarded with negative sentiment after Eminence, a large part of that sentiment was; “I don’t care about the users” or “I don’t put the users first”, Danielle had managed to build what I considered a very strong community, and having had a few chats with him, I believed he truly cared about community building and his users, he seemed to care very deeply, an element I was told, I don’t have. I was not involved with Wonderland, but respected the work they did with Abracadabra / MIM, and the research he was doing at Popsicle, both of those were/are real products, Danielle had seen Wonderland as a community building exercise, but as you rightfully say it wasn’t sustainable, that’s why I never supported it or was involved with it. Truth be told, if it wasn’t for the events that transpired with Sifu, I would have had no issues to continue working with Danielle. Unfortunately how that unraveled meant that door was firmly closed.
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With Solidly, I had thought I had communicated two things clearly (in hindsight, it seems I should have emphasized these more); 1, Solidly was completely immutable, after I deployed it, I could not, even if I wanted to, update it, so there was nothing left for me to do, the second I deployed it, I had already walked away from the code. I did communicate this and that it would not be a “project” but simply a new primitive, but it seems this part wasn’t stressed enough or I communicated it badly, both faults on my part, that is why I am trying to spend more time creating environments for discussion, since I don’t want this to happen again, and 2, that a user could manipulate the system to their own benefit, but then they would be shooting themselves in the foot, since they would have to amass a large position of Solid (costing them a large amount of money), and then by benefiting themselves, they would end up devaluing their own position, I didn’t think any rational person would do this, but clearly I was wrong as both Bebis and Roosh ended up doing this, depreciating the platform. All the forks since have decided to instead centralize this part, as the decentralized nature was the weakness. I still think (maybe naively) that solidly was a success, since it proved in a real world environment that truly decentralized governance doesn’t work (further the code breakthroughs in terms of the new stable AMM, the new weighted oracle, and the ve tokenomics), and proved that users care more about a “team and a project” than they do about a primitive. That being said though, I do have remorse for how it turned out and that is why I’m focusing on more communication this year (like this very thread)
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I don’t have a relationship with Harry Yeh, I’ve only met him at the Abu Dhabi Fantom conference, but have always made it clear that Harry is not part of the foundation, nor is he a core contributor.
I appreciate the questions, its good to be able to discuss the bad and the good. I believe discussing the bad is better, since we can learn from it.
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Not at all, that was a momentary stress peak, one that with today’s Fantom tech would also have had significantly less impact, an L2 is suppose to alleviate consistent stress, not one small event, and the system still worked as expected, even if gas did peak, that was also a pre-FVM, pebbleDB, flat storage, etc. L2’s are something we aren’t planning on ever exploring as we believe with our tech stack we can manage hundreds of millions of transactions on the base layer.
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We have created a dedicated team currently to focus on first decommissioning fUSD, and then re-activating it under new architecture. The focus right now is simply liquidations and clearing up bad debt and slashing validators with bad debt. I have expectations that this should be resolved in Q1.
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Have you checked out what people call Solidly v2? Is it any good or is it riding on the name of Solidly?
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I have not had a look at code, but I have seen projects like Equalizer / Velodrome / SolidlyETH in my protocol and ecosystem research, I am very happy others are building ontop of the primitive. The only comment I do have, I think people fixate a bit too much on the ve / bribe / voting modification, that was the smallest improvement in the overall codebase, the big items are;
- new stable swap AMM formula
- new time & liquidity weighted TWAR (time weighted average reserves), which are flash proof and slippage including oracles, TWAP assumes infinite depth, so TWAR is a more practical oracle for defi projects
- fee split, the way fees are split means protocols that incentivize liquidity can earn fees, with Curve for example, if you incentivize a pool, only veCRV holders gain trading fees, with Solidly if you incentivize a pool, you can earn those fees.
I hope in the future to see more people expanding and building on those, and less focus on the voting / bribes (since those needed to be centralized to work in forks), but again, I am super happy to see more projects building off of it, but I haven’t yet seen anyone implement it with the vision I intended. There are still lots of improvements I don’t think that have been practically discovered yet
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Hi Andre, Hope you’re doing good!
Excerpts from Sam’s write up on FUSD decomm proposal
“Our concern mainly lies in current fUSD holders that have purchased fUSD at a higher price, and are now waiting for the price of fUSD to return to its peg. Our plan is to incentivize fMint users to repay their debt first. This should reduce the supply of the original fUSD in the market and in turn pushes up the price of the fUSD closer to its peg, reducing disruptions to the people that purchased fUSD.”
What is the current action plan?
Are those people borrowed FUSD at higher price going to loose their FTM or WFTM ?
Please save them! Thanks!
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The current roadmap is to enable liquidations;
So any positions where fUSD debt > sFTM | FTM $ backing, will be liquidated. If this is sFTM, the rewards will also be forfeit, so we highly recommend fUSD minters to pay back their debt. However, we know liquidity is low, so we are working on an AMM for fUSD minters to be able to get fUSD to pay back their debt. Those that do not wish to pay it back, will be liquidated, and if they are validators, the validators and all delegated stake will be slashed.
There is however no need to worry, we will be announcing each step long ahead of implementation, we expect the full process to take ~6 months and will give ample time at each step.
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Andre,
I’m glad you are back in the open and on the frontlines for FTM. January 2021 was great to see price rocketing and moving up in market cap. I’m aware of everything in the works and conservatively see FTM @ $10 next bull if not higher. How do you see us progressing up the ranks, and is it a top goal to be in the top 20? At the right times in the next bull, I believe you can build up the community better than Danielle and see massive growth and adoption. Curious on any thoughts you have, even though the questions are vague. Thank you.
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Hi Andre,
So glad you are back! My question is: what are the further plans for Artion? Will it be actively developed or be something like a community-driven project?
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We tend to not think or worry about price, it is a lagging indicator, our KPIs are the following;
- Number of on-chain transactions
- Gas fee transactions are willing to pay
Our revenue is directly coupled with the above, we don’t earn revenue in dollars, so we don’t measure revenue in dollars.
If we grow those two KPI’s the other lagging indicators follow.
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We have a small (~6 person team) dedicated to Artion, but the goal was always to have this taken over by the community, when we started building Artion we didn’t have a strong NFT marketplace, Paintswap however has doing such a fantastic job I think we will probably just sunset Artion eventually.
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Hey Andre…
Glad to have you back in FTM team.
Im one of a big fan of FTM,
I have only 1 concern to ask, and it’s one only.
So,
I have read your post/ article in Medium about Decentralization and stuff.
I do realize and totally agree with you that The essential of a crypto project is Decentralize System.
But on your post in medium few weeks ago is pretty much trying to say that it is ok to leave and abundant a crypto project like what happened to BTC.
My concern is are coming back on FTM for good or just temporary?
Because for some people including me, investing on crypto project is not only because the technology but also because the Person behind it.
How many of us really adopt crypto technology in real life? If im not mistaken it’s only few of us, most us investing on crypto or a project just to get a ROI.
I know you probably don’t care about this area, and u ever mentioned that you’re here to build, but most of investors are here to get more return.
Thanks for the opportunity to reaching u out.
Stay healthy and keep building Man, we’re here to support u in any kinda way.
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Temporary, my goal is, and has always been, to decentralize any projects I’m involved with. “Decentralized” and “team” are antonyms.
And history has proven, while I am committed to the technology, I’m far too emotional and take things too personal, so if you invest in a project because of me, I would suggest you rethink that investment. I will choose my mental health every time, and if that means I need to periodically “rage quit”, I will unfortunately keep doing that.
Edit: I also want to point out, I am not the Fantom team, its over a hundred people at this point pushing it forward, just like when I took my sabbatical the project kept moving forward, so too will it if I leave in the future.
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Andre, this is a great forum, already learned more about FUSD plan and fvm then anywhere else.
Assuming that fantom will be one of the most user-friendly,cheapest, secure, fastest and highest throughput blockchains that exists, eventually one would expect use cases for this blockchain to emerge outside of defi.
Do you think we’re close to that in any area? Supply chain, voting, proof of concept electronic medical records etc? And does the foundation have a team that’s focused on selling these capabilities and/or potentially building middleware products for companies that enable them to use fantom to do whatever it is they do?
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Its a natural evolution of a technology like this;
Bitcoin ← original broadcast internet, this version of the internet was not consumer friendly, it was a broadcast protocol to share critical static information during war times
Ethereum ← step towards interactive internet, AOL, IRC, message boards, etc, the web we have today wasn’t possible during this time, not until the software / hardware stack scaled
Fantom genesis ← step towards dynamic internet, early ebay, myspace, amazon (at this stage high frequency systems like facebook / twitter / tiktok / instagram / etc can’t exist)
Fantom future ← high frequency and accessible decentralized web
The first application of any technology is almost always monetary (financial products), until the barrier to entry (fees) decrease to the point where accessibility is freely available. Early internet, we use to pay insane amounts of fees for access (Use to cost dollars per megabyte), this is no different than gas fees. Today we can get gigabytes of data for cents (this is our future).
The problem is narrative is a lot faster than implementation and accessibility. If you look at inception to current;
Bitcoin 2009 - Ethereum 2015 - Fantom 2019, it took almost 30 years for Amazon and other products we take for granted on a daily basis to get to where they are today. Blockchain as a whole is only ~14 years old, we are probably another decade away from reaching the technological point where any application becomes available.
So do I think we are close, yes, but I think “close” is within 5-10 years, no months.
The apps (outside of defi) can’t exist though until the base layer is ready, that’s why we are pushing so hard for FVM + flat storage + etc, we know our consensus can handle the throughput required to support the demand, but the EVM simply isn’t. So expecting those apps to be built now, isn’t really feasible, since the base layer needs to first enable them. We will focus on removing the EVM limit this year, which will push us towards our cap, then we can start seeing apps like those.
Trying to create the apps of the future, without the right foundation, is a recipe for disaster, so now is the time to be patient and cautious.
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Hi Andre,
Glad to have you communicate more frequently with fantom community.
With the advent of ethereum layer 2 that are cheap and fast do you see alternative layer 1s such as fantom having issues with adoption - what are your plans to improve adoption?
Also have you considered institutional adoption/use cases. Its an area i believe we are falling behind when compared to other layer1s/2s such as polygon. Again goes back to my adoption point. Technology is great but we need to improve adoption.
Lastly, its good to have you back. Keep going and dont let any negative sentiment impact you.
Thanks
SSS
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I don’t consider any other blockchain, side chain, or layer 2 as giving Fantom issues with adoption, blockchains are not a zero sum game, just like all other industries, you don’t only have 1 phone brand, or 1 car brand, or 1 internet provider, there is more than enough to go around for everyone.
Fantom isn’t currently focused on “adoption” (also, I think by now this word has been solidified as a meme), we haven’t even finished our product yet. With changes like account abstraction, economic abstraction and FVM there will be breaking changes that create hard forks. For this reason, we don’t think its wise to spend time and energy on on-boarding, as you say, institutions. When I refer to institutions, I refer to slow moving entities that don’t like being forced to make changes to their product. Once they are deployed, they won’t want to update / migrate. It would be irresponsible to push them to onboard currently.
I would like to throw it back to you, you say “we need to improve adoption”, why? Doesn’t it make more sense to finish our roadmap before we change focus to onboarding? You finish building the car/phone/computer first, before you optimize your sale cycle.
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Hello Andre ,
Just wanted to say hi and i admire your style truly…
very few people understand what you are trying to accomplish …
people like you are the saviors of crypto truly , not just #Fantom !
Quick question about #fantom wallet if i may ask good sir …
you aim to make crypto adopted and for users not to even notice they are using web3 , i think for that level of adoption we need another kind of wallet structure .
Any plans for fwallet or a whole new wallet from #fantom fdn where perhaps such wallet has 2FA protection , non seedphrase / private key backup / restore option , maybe some kind of trustee or smart contract protection etc…
i often feel afraid using DEFI just because it is so easy to lose it all if my private key gets compromised , and it has and i already lost some $$.
they stole my private keys from metamask store file , i don’t know how they did it , all wallets on metamask were drained … eversince i really hated metamask , the password i set in place is a joke really …
Anyway … forgive me getting carried away , i just think this is a major problem that needs addressing , even the best of us crypto peeps aren’t able to keep our coins safe , how can we expect the Norms to even begin to understand crypto and trust it …?
Thank you !
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Sorry to hear that, but yes, that is what we are trying to achieve with base layer economic abstraction (not a relayer layer)
We wrote a bit about it to our letter to the staff; Letter to Fantom Foundation team. A few days ago we shared a letter with… | by Andre Cronje | Dec, 2022 | Medium
It’s one of our milestones for this year
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