FAQ

Table of contents

1. Legal action against Kairos
2. Immunefi bug fix delay
3. What is the core team?
4. Capital efficiency increase (Actions from SIP-19)
5. Other protocols (Geode, Apestake)
6. Core team member compensation
7. Reducing marketing spread and current marketing channels
8. Complexity of migration and vote escrow process
9. What is happening with vETH2

Common frequently asked question

• Why are we not pursuing legal action against the known insider who rugged the project?

While we know the individual behind Kairos personally, and his name and information has been doxxed by his previous employer, here’s some things to keep in mind.

The other founding developer and I do not have a strong legal background or the fiat financial resources to pursue a full blown legal case.

The cost of litigation in N. America is $250k and up. His theft of $128k is below this so pursuing litigation would be a net negative.

The individual already has an open case against them for defrauding a previous investor in one of his projects and has so far evaded any issues. We do not expect this to be anything other than a long drawn out case. And they could’ve fled to Singapore and no longer be in N. America. And we’d rather focus on rebuilding SharedStake, in which Ice Bear and I have invested significant time and effort unlike Kairos.

At the same time, we will not dissuade anyone from the community from attempting to reach out to him to try to convince him to return the funds, or pursue legal action via their own means or lawyers. We are also open to incentivizing this with at least 10% of any returned funds.

If you ask in the community Discord I’m sure someone will be able to point you to all pertinent information that exists on him. But Ice bear and I will refrain from any doxxing or personal attacks.

• Why didn’t you fix the Immunefi discovered bug in the vesting contracts sooner?

I was working on a v2 of the SharedDeposit contract meant to address issues with the protocol. And wanted to wrap it up and hoped I could delegate this smaller solidity issue to Kairos, who decided to rug it after seeing the Immunefi chat demonstrating how to exploit it.

I was also in the same city as the rogue dev at the time and had literally helped him move into his new place a couple of days ago. I didn’t think he’d turn so quickly with the market downturn and start rug pulling the project we’d spent so long on, that was still paying out via vesting contracts quite well.

In hindsight I trusted too much.

I tried to push for a community multisig but was met with pushback, and warned the community before it happened when I realized he had started dumping unauthorized treasury tokens he hadn’t sent to the multisig onto the market, leading to a dextools warning.

• What is the core-team? Who is Defi Fry?

It’s important to note a distinction between the core team and the actual 3 founders who created and worked on the project. The core-team were basically volunteers working with the DAO. People who volunteered to help us with various marketing and necessary tasks and were given SGT for their efforts. Anyone who helped out could be and was promoted to a core-team member from the discord community.

Similarly, Defi Fry is not central to the project, he offered his marketing services and we took him up on the offer in exchange for SGT.

• How are we improving capital efficiency?

As such the DAO was not very capital efficient with it’s treasury. As can be seen from the look-back article: https://medium.com/@chimera_defi/a-look-back-at-sharedstake-ec7d25cbaa76

Capital efficiency will be increased using 2 main methods:

• Cutting down core-team size to only developers that have driven value and created the protocol. I.e. Ice Bear and Chimera
• Cutting marketing spread and spend as we’ve experimented with different avenues and discovered there is no ROI

We hired too many people too fast and did a poor job of recording performance in line with KPIs. While early volunteers like Jawesome did serve to bootstrap and increase TVL and token price, in retrospect, recent marketing hires did not have the same effect, and in fact caused our token price to drop precipitously with ill planned SIPs. They also failed to deliver any partnerships with other protocols and needed a lot of oversight with articles, snapshot votes and announcements.

With the DAO being insolvent, it lets us cut a lot of extraneous spend and encourage people to find more gainful pursuits elsewhere. We had some 15–20 people other than the founders being paid out in SGT who will no longer be continuing with us. This is in line with the DAO vote for SIP-19 where the DAO overwhelmingly voted against it:

Snapshot

SIP-19 — Core team compensation snapshot.org

Some core-team members didn’t really seem to believe in the protocol and sold all SGT right after receiving it, and tried to get paid more ahead of a revote on compensation to bias it towards their preferred option. Most likely their preferred option would’ve passed if they hadn’t sold. Case in point, DefiFry asking for upfront tokens to bias the vote and me declining, which probably caused some of the rift between him and I & the protocol.

We will also no longer spend large sums on traditional marketing outlets that have been proven to deliver 0 ROI such as our Genius Monkey campaign.

• Other protocols. What is Geode? What is Apestake

Geode finance is a different protocol some of the core team volunteers are working on. So far they have a forum and a twitter account. I’m not sure what exactly it is.

It is in no way affiliated with SharedStake. I wish them the best of luck with their endeavours. And Sharedstake community members could very well get tokens airdropped to them.

Apestake, is attempting to create a fork of Sharedstake with the same pooled ETH2 staking offering with security guarantees like a multisig of known people and a preset ETH1 withdrawal address from the start. Similar to Geode there may be token airdrops from this project in the future.

• I was a core team member! Am I getting paid?

Unfortunately with the DAO and treasury currently being insolvent, we can no longer afford to retain the talented individuals who helped us get this far.

While there is no incentive, we welcome you to continue to be community members and volunteer any time and effort you want to. The treasury is now vested and we can look into remunerating any costs sustained as the treasury vests.

We paid out a 500 SGT retainer to any and all “core-team” members on discord, but as of this moment, please consider finding gainful employment elsewhere as we cannot incentivize anyone further.
We hope the 500 SGT (peak of $40k USD) was a worthwhile compensation for your support. And any quarterly refreshers we gave out.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped us get this far and stuck with us till the end. Specially the following Discord core-team community members:

Exiton — Dev, community support, discord administration

North — Writing and editing our articles from Q1 2021

Sushi — Chief accountant, for helping me keep the rogue devs expenditures in line and keeping track of them and helping us realize where we were at any point with token disbursals. And for creating a great Dune analytics dashboard for us

LeafSays — Designing our brand identity, Cometh spaceships and marketing material

SuperFly — For the price bots on discord and discord administration

Shogun — For helping set up the discord with its rooms and user roles and discord administration

And also:

Oranges — Tokenomics, community calls, articles

Defi fry & Cryptopher Robin — For help with the community calls, organizing the team, writing articles, marketing

Mangoeater — Tiktok, Instagram and email marketing

Sherrie — Design of our website and logos

On top of this, Kairos had hired 4 friends, 2 for design and 2 for marketing that did not drive much value.

Reducing marketing spread

We’ve managed to spread ourselves too thin and with just the 2 core developers remaining on this project we’ll be taking actions to focus in more on what really matters. This will also help with capital efficiency and development velocity.

Twitter — Our main twitter @SharedStake was banned a long time ago, while we managed to overturn this ban, having a backup twitter created by our marketing team got it flagged again.
We will continue to use twitter as our main social media and announcements outlet. You can follow me @ChimeraDefi

Telegram — Our official unofficial TG was started by a community member. We never moderated it and will continue to take no actions to moderate or maintain it. You can find it at https://t.me/SharedStakeClub

Instagram, Tiktok — We experimented with ads and social media posts on these platforms. We’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no ROI on marketing here and will discontinue any more activities.

Reddit — We created a reddit but failed to find someone to moderate or post to it and the creator of it, Kairos, also rugged the project and disappeared. We will discontinue it.

Facebook — We never had an official Facebook account so if you see one it was most likely created by a community member and I wouldn’t trust it.

Medium — We used to post marketing articles at sharedstakedao.medium.com and had a “Monthly main course” campaign with monthly articles. We overall did not see much ROI on this marketing avenue as our TVL stayed the same. We will discontinue non-technical marketing activities here.

Mailing list — We did not make good use of the mailing list we created and emails we got from sponsored events. As such we did not see much ROI in it either. Traditional marketing doesn’t seem to work as well in DeFi overall and therefore we will be discontinuing it. For email enquiries you can email me at chimera_defi@protonmail.com or Ice Bear at sharedstake@gmail.com.

Weekly community calls — We found the weekly cadence to be far too frequent and takes focus away from development activities. Additionally the time no longer works for Ice Bear and I. We will announce and host community calls only as needed at a new time from now on.

Discord — We’ll try to keep active on Discord but will attempt to focus on protocol upgrades and the technical steps forward we’ve outlined above. So don’t expect to see us online as often

Why is the token migration and vote escrow so manual?

We wanted to launch quickly to let tech savvy users who want to vote in the future of the protocol onboard quickly. We have a UI in progress. And a video guide currently out.

The future of vETH2

Example validator

To be clear, vETH2 is not going anywhere. All 16k ETH deposited for validators is currently being used via Prysm and accruing rewards.

You can check individual validator states using our graffiti on Beaconcha.in e.g. https://beaconcha.in/validator/115208

Additionally a dashboard has been added on our landing page which shows the current total ETH rewards accrued and the virtual price of vETH2 i.e. what 1 vETH2 will be worth at the time of the merge in terms of ETH.

We will put up a snapshot.page vote for whether the community wants to continue minting more vETH2 or a different token when protocol upgrades with a preset withdrawal address are added. The preset ETH1 withdrawal address is basically a guarantee that ETH staked cannot be withdrawn by the admin or node runner. This was not a feature when we launched but will greatly re-assure new investors and we hope help more funding flow into the project.

The downside of continuing with vETH2 in this case will be that it may scare new investors as it is interchangeable with ETH staked without the same security guarantees.