Optimism Rises, Tribe Accelerator, & NFT Credit Markets

Chart of The Day: Optimism Prepares for $OP

• AIRDROP ALERT! Optimism has just announced the release of $OP and will be airdropping tokens to Optimism users. See here to see if you’re eligible for the drop.
• An ongoing rumor has been circulating regarding the release $OP fueled by this recent thread alongside a Coinbase listing tease of $OP. It is likely we will see $OP be listed on various tier 1 exchanges once the token becomes available.
• Launching a token before its closest competitor—Arbitrum—Optimism’s $OP could provide a first-mover advantage. Optimism can utilize its tokens to incentivize protocol yields to attract TVL across all chains. It looks like Arbitrum will be facing fierce competition for its TVL soon.
• Furthermore, Synthetix, an OG DeFi protocol on Optimism has been earning good yields for its stakers as protocol transaction fees are increasing. This has helped push $SNX prices upwards as more users mint synthetic assets with their $SNX stake.
• Metis seems to have lost steam after its run-up from the launch of Hermes, a Solidly fork on Metis. Additionally, Agora DeFi, Metis’ native money market platform, underwent an attack. The attacker drained tokens from Starstream Finance and used those tokens as collateral to take out loans from Agora.
• For more on L1 vs L2, Delphi members can see our Delphi Pro report here.

DAO Insights: Active Votes & Forum Chatter

[Excerpt from Apr. 25th DAO Insights]

• Aavegotchi is voting on two proposals.
  • Lending Limit: This proposal would limit Gotchi lending to a single Gotchi. The proposer points to large accounts lending their numerous Gotchi’s and not using them to play as the motivation for this proposal.
  • Land Sale: Aavegotchi has scheduled their third land auction and raffle for June. The auction will occur within the first two weeks of June. Aavegotchi will auction 5600 land parcels and raffle the remaining 2400.
• Gnosis is currently voting on a grant proposal for Erigon. If passed, this proposal will grant the Erigon team 2m DAI and 24k GNO vested over three years. Erigon, previously Turbo-Geth, is working to “re-architect” Ethereum to make it faster and more modular.
• Kwenta is voting on the launch distribution of their token. Kwenta proposes allocating 5% of the token to Synth traders that traded between Jan 2020 and Feb 2022. Additionally, Kwenta is allocating 30% to SNX stakers who were active between Sept 2021 and Feb 2022. The DAO will distribute the remaining supply to the treasury.

Forum Spotlight

• Tribe DAO Onboarding Accelerator
• Synopsis: Tribe DAO created La Tribu sub-DAO in early March. La Tribu is a project within Tribe DAO dedicated to onboarding solidity beginners to contribute to the DAO. This thread is a longer explanation of how La Tribu will operate. In particular, the lead will present quarterly updates to the DAO. If the DAO feels that La Tribu is underperforming, funds will enter a timelock. If the issue is not resolved after a month, the funds can be clawed back by the DAO. The lead has apparently found individuals interested in the project who may begin working with La Tribu. The recruits will initially build out a list of training resources on Github, which different teams can also use. The training so far looks to consist of short online courses (like CryptoZombies) and projects assigned by the Tribu lead. Notably, the devs onboarded through this process will be asked to exclusively work with Tribe DAO.
• Our Pro Arguments: The forum post has no responses voicing approval or disproval, but we think some pro-arguments are to be made for this project. The first is that attracting talent in the space will probably require novel onboarding techniques. The technical skills needed for dev work in crypto are extensive, and attracting people from the highly-paid traditional world will be challenging. Additionally, there is a lot of uncertainty in transitioning to DAOs. The structure of DAOs are often ambivalent, hierarchies are unclear, the work is complex, communities can be hard on devs, and the safety net isn’t robust when earning a living through contributing to DAOs. Additionally, there are also unknown future challenges regarding regulations and legal liabilities for contributing to DAOs which also act as barriers. Hence, novel techniques like these will be needed to bring the next wave of talent.
• Our Con Arguments: Although an exciting project, we have some criticisms. The first is that the deliverables seem pretty vague. In our experience, DAO projects need to have clear KPIs and funding schemes to ensure their success and accountability. For example, with this project, we would want to ask, what does success look like? How does Tribe DAO judge that onboarding and training these devs was the right move? Secondly, there is no practical way that La Tribu could force the devs to only contribute to Tribe DAO. Thirdly, there is a missed opportunity if La Tribu decides that dev onboarding should consist of outside training resources. This would be an excellent opportunity to develop their own training regime and practices. For example, shadowing Tribe DAO project teams or a Tribe DAO mentorship program.
• Our Position: We think this is a project to watch. Solidity devs, and crypto devs in general, are currently worth their weight in Bitcoin. Every team and DAO is looking for more technical expertise and struggling to fill roles. This is why we think people should watch how this project performs. Using DAO funds to train and onboard contributors is a novel approach to solving a challenging human resources issue. Other firms could leverage this approach to build a pool of contributors to work on their platforms.
• DAOs live and die based on their contributors. DAOs that aren’t tackling contributor acquisition, streamlining onboarding, or creating new ways to attract talent face a bleak future. Contributors will be needed to take up the torch if the core team leaves or retires. Additionally, a thriving contributor pool is also a factor in decentralization. Relying on a centralized core team is a considerable risk in today’s increasingly unfriendly regulatory environment. If your DAO risks collapse if 3-4 people die in a bus crash, then onboarding a pool of contributors should probably be a priority.
• For more, Delphi members can see the latest DAO Insights here.

MetaStreet: Establishing a Liquidity Base Layer for the NFT Credit Market

[Excerpt from The Delphi Podcast]

• In this episode, we sit down with Conor Moore and David Choi from MetaStreet, a liquidity routing and scaling solution for peer-to-peer (P2P) NFT-collateralized loan platforms. We discuss the problems with scaling NFT lending, how MetaStreet vaults work, gamifying governance, and much more. 
• Resources: 
  • Conor’s Twitter
  • David’s Twitter
  • MetaStreet Twitter
  • MetaStreet Discord
  • MetaStreet Website
• More
  • 📺 Watch Video Interviews
  • 💬 Follow Delphi Podcast on Twitter
  • ✅ Follow Delphi Digital on Twitter
  • 🧠 Access Delphi’s Research
• For more, you can see our latest Delphi Podcast releases here.

Notable Tweets

$USN Thoughts

Some quick thoughts about $USN (the $NEAR stablecoin):

1/6

—Route 2 FI (@Route2FI) April 26, 2022

Analyzing the GEM Acquisition

Analysis of OpenSea’s Acquisition of NFT Aggregator GEM: A Monopolist’s Move to “Root Out the Threat”. Gem’s data is excellent. This also became a huge threat to OpenSea. On the other hand, GEM cannot generate revenue by itself.

—Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) April 26, 2022

Devconnect Highlights

Devconnect has come to an end and there have been so many incredible events. They’ve all had amazing talks and panels, but what were some of the most interesting talks/panels that we saw this week?

Here is a🧵 thread w/ some of my favourites from this week! All packed with alpha

— rain&coffee (@0xRainandCoffee) April 26, 2022