Top Agenda: Cut cloud costs, Launch trustless bridge, Grow users. (Jump to: Action Items, Team vs Guilds, User Metrics, Value vs Valuation, Market Opportunities.)
- Cloud cost breakdown and reduction plan
- Trustless Eth bridge launch prep
- Growth Metrics for Network & Ecosystem
We have $10m cash and $170m treasury, but 71 persons on team and $1.58m monthly spending ($631k cloud, $663k payroll). In 2014 Whatsapp was acquired for $19B with only 32 engineers and 22 business persons, but already with 450m monthly users.
Let’s not just read news (market analysis) or discuss ideas (product strategy) – but measure and get obsessed with numbers – that is, user and developer growth!
We will strictly enforce our May and Q2 performance review: 4 strong yes quarterly from core team to retain a fellow and 2 monthly for a contributor. We are going to restructure the team into guilds and hire more managers and business development.
Vision-Mission-Strategy & Traction-Milestone-Roadmap
5/31 Tue
- 12pm: Lunch with full team, fellows and contributors
- 1-3pm /growth strategy: Stephen, Rongjian, Leo, Ganesha, Peter, Giv
- 1-3pm /5 and /q2 review: Li, Sam, Jack lead everyone else
- 3-5pm team vs guild: 1-on-1 among Stephen, Rongjian, Leo, Ganesha, Peter, Giv
- 3-5pm /6 planning: Li, Sam, Jack rotate 1-on-1 with everyone else
- 5-6pm: Frisbee/soccer break
- 6-9pm: Team whiteboard sessions over dinner on /growth, /6 and guilds
6/1 Wed
- 11-3pm: Guilds, product user rentention, business development
- 5:30pm by ball court: talks by Giv on user growth, Ganesha on trustless bridge, Peter on game studio, Stephen on project strategy
- 7pm by ball court: 70-people tgi sandwich picnic
6/2 Thu
- 11-9pm: 1-1 work sessions with senior team, Code Red
33 Attendees
- 19 Core: 15 local + 4 Remote (🛹 Peter A, 🎥 Adrian R, 🎬 Danny C, 🦒 Brian F)
- 5 Fellows: ⏳ Zi W, ⚛ Jackie W, 🐇 Rachel R, 2 Remote (🌀 Bruce D, 🥤 Jeremy S)
- 9 Contributors: 🐐 Mikey B, 🚜 Demetre G, 💿 Kelly T, 🌳 Al C, 🔫 Tim P, 👁 Eilam M, 🎬 Wanhi L, 📶 Richard G
🥊 Action Items
- Peter: Add estimated user growth for Game Studio; how much traction the first 3 games can bring – that is, the amortized cost of ($1m / 10 over q3+q4 + $50k) = $150k per _ user acquisitions.
- Giv: Dashboard for Messari’s Key Metrics for Layer 1 and our “Top 3 Metrics” using Footprint; with Brian and Al Cheung
- Li: Change roles for 5 fellows & 10 contributors.
- Brian: Per proposal or event, track wallets, deposits, trades, names, nft sales, safes, votes, daos, testnet/mainnet dapps, hires.
- Adrian: Launch video for trustless bridge
- Tom: 90% focused on hiring for 10 core team by q3 (20 weeks left); likely need 10 weekly interviews for each of 3 senior team, 10 interviews * 20 weeks * 20% offer rate * 30% acceptance rate = 12 hires.
- Giv/Kelly: hire 3 top PR firms (Web3, Asia, Web2).
- Li: everyone in Bay area comes to office three days a week.
- Li: Convert more treasury to $30M for 12-month hard-cash runway; hire CFO or protocol treasury services to manage ours over long-term
- Li: Q3 budget for $250K Game Studio, $250k of $1M ZKU, $250k investment of $1M DeFira, $150k of $925K Blu3, $50k of $250k Ghana Unity, $0k of $750K 88, $50k of $500K Lobby 3
- Jack/Peter/Sahil/Richard/Al (Venture Tiger Team): Plan of attack to partner up with Tier 1 investors with Venture Fund ($50m) talk pipeline (Games, DeFi, Infra, Wallet, Bridge, etc.)
- Tom: For TGI and all events, install 1Wallet & Proof-of-Attendance at door
- Leo: Stricter rate limit on RPC calls to lower 600m daily requests, add paid-tier to earn fees
- Sam: DeepDAO for monthly member actions.
June Proposals
- Giv/Kelly: prepare an investment deck and quarterly reports (along with Messari’s) for institutional investors
- Li: Aggressive raise $50m with multiple brokers at 1% commission rate with 30% discount for 3-year locked up.
- Wallets (Leo): Protofire (Gnosis Service), Wallet Connect
- Media Partners (Giv): Opolis launch
- DAOs (Sam): Messari Governance, Aave’s Lens
- Adrian: 30-second showcase videos (DeFi Kingdom, DeFira, MAD, Blueverse, Evoverse) for Game Studio Initative
July Proposals
- Media Partners: Trustless bridge launch
- Fiat gateways (Tom): Alchemy Pay
- Stablecoins (Jack, Al Cheung): Frax, Stably, USDC, UXD (delta-neutral via perpetual derivatives position)
- Ganesha: Cryptofees, L2fees, Openorgs
Exit Criteria for Code Red
- June 1 to 30th: 15% growth (Ycombinator’s benchmark is 20% monthly)
- By 9/1: publish 1.15^3 = 50% growth as a Messari’s Q2 Report
- By 11/11 Annual Conference: 1.15^5 = 100% growth
- Mid Dec: celebrate with core team and family at offsite
Radical Proposals
- Pay-per-API, Metamask-authenticated access only for Explorer / Dashboard
- Convert many of our internal developers to Application Developer Relations
- Monthly bonus based on user/developer growth metrics
👨👩👧👧 Team vs Guilds
71 persons = 25 core + 15 fellows + 19+6+6 contributors. (Astericks * below denote half-half time split.)
26 Technical
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42.5 Business
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New Ownership and Roles
- User Experience: end-to-end from wallet creation to first trade/dapp/fiat actions, track metrics for user growth
- Developer Success: (Jack)
- NFT Partners: (Brian)
April 2022 Milestones & Deliverables
May 2022 Milestones & Deliverables
Team Performance Review & Peer Feedback – Q2 2022
📈 User Growth & Metrics
- Monthly NFT Sales (_ artists): _ total, _ MAD, _ NFTKey, _ DeFira, _ Blueverse, _ Evoverse.
- Monthly DeFi Trades (_ users): $_ total, $_ Sushi, $_ Curve, $_ Aave, DeFi Kingdom, $_ Tranquil.
- Monthly development: _ code commits, _ testnet deploys, _ mainnet deploys.
Monthly: 20.5K users, 20 code commits, $717m DeFi trades, $1.80m NFT sales, 996 DAO actions.
- Users: 218K monthly active users (317K peak), 600M monthly requests (_ peak), 1.10M wallets.
- Developers: 87 mainnet applications, 20 code committs, $50.3M grants, $_ investments.
- Assets: $186M Total Locked Value (TVL, $1.41B peak), $230M bridged tokens ($414M peak), $280M staking ($1.48B peak) via 25.3K delegators.
💰 Value vs Valuation
FDV ratio / TVL = Y2050 market cap as fully diluted valuation / Network’s total value locked
- Harmony / Bridges: 1.005 / 0.1864 = 5.39
- Near / Aurora: 20.25 / (0.67425 + 0.59927) = 15.9
- Polygon: 5.77 / 3.310 = 1.76
- Avalanche: 17.10 / 5.65 = 3.03
- Solana: 40.69 / 4.280 = 9.51
- Monthly: Revenue, DeFi Trades, NFT Sales, NFT Unique Buyers, Active Wallets
Polygon currently has roughly 400,000 daily active addresses.
🌊 Market Opportunities
The “daily unique fee payers” metric consists of the number of unique accounts that pay for at least one transaction per day. Network usage continued upward as unique fee payers reached an all-time-high of 280,000 in January. For perspective, Solana had more unique fee payers during January than in all of Q3 2021, when the network also experienced triple-digit percentage growth in market cap and revenue. The network averaged around 160,000 unique fee payers during Q4 and stabilized at about 205,000 during Q1.
The average validator count grew from 1,255 to 1,579, representing a 25.8% increase in network security participants. The average number of delegators grew significantly from 426,370 to 654,279, representing a 53.5% increase.
Moonpay, a money services application for buying and selling crypto, announced its support for USDC, the most popular stablecoin on Solana. Further, a new version of the Unity-Solana wallet was rolled out, which featured password encryption and NFT loading optimization. Shortly after this development, WalletConnect, an emerging protocol for connecting wallets and applications, announced support for Solana.
The GameFi sector ushered in launches of applications like Wasder, Trash Pandas, and MechaFightClub, while Web3 brought launches of messaging application 4thTech and social platform Rally.io. Rally.io is a leading Ethereum-based platform for creators to launch their social tokens. It plans to use Solana to launch projects that tap into the RLY Network. Lastly, the Solana network also made strides in the stablecoin space with the launch of UXD Protocol (UXD), an algorithmic stablecoin, and Hubble Protocol (USDH), a censorship-resistant stablecoin.
Another major development involves Neon, a Solana project building a smart contract layer that utilizes the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). According to Neon, its implementation of the EVM will be able to process 4,500 TPS. This could be a significant catalyst for growth as we saw other EVM Layer-1s acquire developers, users, and considerable market share during 2021. Solana's Neon EVM is expected to launch by the end of June.
Expect many NFT-based games to launch, developed by founders with backgrounds at top game studios… Expect many more creators to embrace NFTs in their own communities as they discover how much better they can monetize by selling digital goods directly to their fans vs banner ads and other web2 monetization methods.
Expect many more experiments with DAOs, social tokens, decentralized social networks, web3 media, and other emerging categories. Some of these might break out the way NFTs and web3 games did earlier this year.
Follower Scarcity — Limit the number of premium followers and monetize via Harberger tax. This effectively introduces an order book price discovery mechanism for the creator’s premium content where followers self-set the price they are willing to sell their membership. The creator earns tax payments from the going membership price (introduced by Golden Circle).
Curation-as-a-Service — Lens Protocol’s mirror (retweet) function allows the curator to earn a referral fee from any NFTs bought via their feed. Essentially, users can get paid if their follower buys an NFT post of another user they have reshared.
DAOs are social organizations at their core and natively belong on social platforms. Currently, the DAO experience is fragmented between Twitter, Discord, and various governance and treasury management solutions. Lens Protocol enables any profile to become a DAO. People can join and contribute to a DAO all on the same platforms they hang out on.
Each Lens profile can also be a DAO where its followers or a subset of its followers can be members of the DAO. Proposal interaction and general DAO activities can then be gated by holders of the follow NFT. As a result, DAO formation and operation can happen on the same platforms other social activities take place.
"Pangolin [Avalanche-based DEX] has plans to build on NEAR and will launch airdrop campaigns to market its new platform. To execute its cross-chain strategy and ensure smooth airdrop operations, Pangolin will embed Axelar and Wormhole bridges in its platform’s user interface (UI). Pangolin can use Wormhole’s cross-chain bridges to move native assets on other chains. Axelar’s cross-chain capabilities will add yet another layer of interoperability for Pangolin. It is not simply a bridge but a security mechanism that validates cross-chain asset movements because assets can only be moved across chains when the network reaches consensus.”
Today, Cronos has roughly $2 billion in TVL, down from a high of $4 billion at the start of April. Four protocols dominate the ecosystem, controlling over 90% of the outstanding TVL… ranking in the top 10 in total value locked (TVL) and top 20 in market capitalization.
GameFi Rollout: Cronos Play launched in April 2022. The platform will allow developers to utilize population engines like Unity and Unreal to build new games. The team said they plan to continue to build out integrations with Cronos Play in the future including adding integrations with Crypto.com. There has been strong interest from some well-known studios including Revolve Games and Decentral Games.
Defi Expansion: The ecosystem has laid the groundwork for broader DeFi expansion with the rollout of a decentralized exchange and borrowing/lending protocols. The team thinks the next evolution will be more advanced financial primitives like structured products. Single Finance and Thetanuts Finance (options vault) are some protocols to watch in this vein.
We’ve been investing in crypto since 2013, and today we’re announcing our fourth crypto fund, totaling $4.5B. Of that, approximately $1.5B will be dedicated to seed investments, and $3B to venture investments. This brings our total crypto/web3 funds raised to over $7.6B.We’re going to use these funds to invest in promising web3 startups at every stage. We are excited about developments in web3 games, DeFi, decentralized social media, self-sovereign identity, layer 1 and layer 2 infrastructure, bridges, DAOs & governance, NFT communities, privacy, creator monetization, regenerative finance, new applications of ZK proofs, decentralized content & story creation, and many other areas.
the 1970s… the first cameras had a resolution of around 0.0001 megapixels, and it took about 23 seconds for an image to pass from the buffer into memory… modern iPhones use CMOS and offer camera quality of around 12 megapixels [or 120,000 times improvements].
… an ASIC rig for mining Bitcoin can compute around 90-100 terahashes/second — about 5 billion times more powerful than a CPU chip.
Newer projects like the privacy-preserving cryptocurrency IronFish drive this value of decentralization even further, by making it possible for anyone to mine and run a node directly from their web-browser.
ZKAutoChess was based on a popular game that originated from a custom map created by Drodo Games for Dota 2. This project implements the game fully on-chain. Players’ moves will be verified, sealed and committed on-chain so no centralized judge is needed while no player can cheat.
Another couple of our DAO governors have been porting the popular ZK game Dark Forest over to the Harmony testnet. They are also working with the original developers of the game for this exercise.
"Matic keeps building momentum as a challenger to the leading gaming ecosystems of Wax, Harmony, and BNB Chain from a blockchain activity perspective. Game dapps on the Ethereum sidechain attracted 114,000 daily UAW on average during Q1 and an impressive 173,000 during March. Play-to-earn games like Crazy Defense Heroes, Pegaxy, Arc8, and Aavegotchi have fueled Polygon’s gaming activity by 219% from the end of December.
[This month, May 2022] Sequoia sent to its startups: This time, many of those [monetary and fiscal] tools have been exhausted. And sustained inflation, and geopolitical conflicts further limit the ability for a quick-fix policy solution. As such, we do not believe that this is going to be another steep correction followed by an equally swift V-shaped recovery like we saw at the outset of the pandemic. We expect the market downturn to impact consumer behavior, labor markets, supply chains and more. It will be a longer recovery and while we can't predict how long, we can advise you on ways to prepare and get through to the other side.
Medium to long-term: durable growth with improving profitability is always the path. But, what works in any market, is consistent growth and disciplined. financial management that translates into improving margins. ServiceNow, like the example Roelof shared on PayPal, has continued to compound revenue at 30%+ over the last decade and each year consistently improved free cash flow margins. It might not translate into your valuation overnight, but over the medium and long-term, disciplined, durable growth is always rewarded and translates into meaningful value appreciation.
Past episodes of at least a 15% decline showed favorable returns over the subsequent 7-months (the equivalent of through year end). With our forecasts implying nominal GDP growth of 9% this year and mid-single-digits next year, an earnings’ recession is highly unlikely.
“Decentralized Society” (DeSoc), a co-determined sociality, where Souls and communities come together bottom-up, as emergent properties of each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences, at a range of scales. Key to this sociality is decomposable property rights and enhanced governance mechanisms—such as quadratic funding discounted by correlation scores—that reward trust and cooperation while protecting networks from capture, extraction, and domination. With such augmented sociality, web3 can eschew today’s hyper-financialization in favor of a more transformative, pluralist future of increasing returns across social distance.
Your Career: To Yearn for the Vast and Endless Web3
zkDAO – Succinct, Private, Fair
Leadership Meeting (5/31/22)