Alright then, Essay time. Thanks Laurence for the ping.
First of all a little about me, and my credentials for a post like this. I’ve been in defi for longer than defi has had a name.
One of the first uniswap and compound users way back in the dark days of late 2018, since then I’ve had my fingers in a number of pies. I’ve ran numerous styles of bots from frontrunners to liquidators to snipers and everything in between, more recently pre-farmed CRV, smash and grabbed the BZRX onchain launch, weeks minting ROOK before anyone understood how and a lot more besides. Basically, if there was profit to be had, I was probably sniffing around. This, analysing onchain data and sniffing out edge has been a 16 hour/day job for the last 2+ years, and I like to think I’ve picked up a few things in that time, giving me an excellent overview of the entire ethereum native market.
My main doxxed wallet, my CV if you like, is arguably proof of this if you fancy digging through it, and I am more than happy to discuss certain things in a non-edge eroding capacity over on discord. I’m the third largest non contract NDX holder after Molly at time of writing, and was one of the earliest larger wallets to take an active farming position in the protocol. This isn’t to say I don’t have my fair share of fuck ups - the largest EMN refundee by over 2x, and I am, as far as I know, the owner of the most expensive failed transaction on a blockchain - ever. Costs of doing business.
From a strategic point of view, any NDX payed out by the committee to farming pools must provide value for the current holders of the NDX token, that is effectively the sole function, and raison d’être of the committee. As such the decision making process, coin and index analysis decisions and everything else that falls under its remit will be undertaken with this in mind. I do feel that security, namely ensuring that an entire index doesn’t get taken down by a single token is by far and away the most important concern the committee must confront. Assuming the projects included in some of the smaller index’s like the proposed DEGEN index were drained and dumped into available liquidity, this could have serious ramifications not just for NDX, but for those projects outside of their inclusion in an index, whilst the obvious governance failure at this nascent stage would have a very negative if not catastrophic impact on the project going forward.
I have watched DAO’s and projects implode before, largely as a function of poor governance. Following DigixDAO as it went under and seeing the mistakes being made in real time… Sometimes experience like that is hard to quantify on paper, especially given this would somehow be my first active public role in a protocols governance, but it does exist nonetheless.
I’m not, and have never been overly interested in cultivating any sort of outside recognition. I’m pseudo-anonymous and like it that way for the same reason I don’t use twitter. Just not something I enjoy doing. There are however quite a few people, some of them here, who do know me on a personal level, and can by and large attest to much of the above.
Lastly, and possibly the most importantly - conflicts checks. This is easy in that I don’t have any - outside of my personal token predilections and innate bias. I do however have a very strong incentive to create value for the protocol, if only because I own quite a lot of it. Whilst I hold these tokens my interests are quite clearly aligned with yours.
If I didn’t think I were able to bring value I simply wouldn’t be doing this, my time is expensive and above all else I’m focused on the bottom line. The numbers. So let me focus on them for you as well.
