wagmi is the most powerful meme in crypto and — so far — it’s still sincere. wagmi captures the optimistic-but-achievable positive sum thinking that is the best part of the crypto revolution. wagmi is about abundance and inclusiveness— we’re all gonna make it.
The best projects in DeFi are starting to reveal the shape of the future of finance, and it is incredible. It is inclusive. It is fair. It is abundant — it lacks the endless value capture layers, intermediaries and inequalities of the old system. And most of all, it is ours — all of ours. The whole concept of ownership is being redefined in front of our eyes, where users are owners, and there is real alignment of purpose and incentive among all the participants.
But these are shark infested waters. We all try to work toward a future where the fair, the good, and the revolutionary protocols of DeFi are well established and the bad actors are easily avoided, but it is still early, so in the meantime we must contend with a landscape riddled with unfair systems, rug-pulls, and scams. Even leaving aside those explicit traps, platforms created with the best intentions may have bugs or sloppy designs, or they could simply be poorly positioned to out-compete alternatives. Investors get rekt every day, and if that weren’t bad enough, every ETH lost in such a way is not available to help support development of the fair, good, and abundant future we desire. Separating the future from the fuckery is unbelievably difficult, even for the pros, and since the world of DeFi turns every user into a potential investor, DeFi has a well-earned reputation for being incredibly risky.
Even so, the best builders in DeFi are designing for wagmi; they are planning long term, thinking fair and permissionless, and building projects that provide real, valuable services for the long term, helping to bring the promise of DeFi to everyone. We have already seen incredible achievements by wagmi thinking teams: UniSwap’s AMM, Compound’s lending market, MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin, and in many of the spectrum of incredible systems and economic experiments they have spawned, but there is much more to come.
The core concept of AladdinDAO is generally given as “curating the best DeFi projects,” but really, it is to bring wagmi thinking to yield farming; to connect wagmi-minded investors with wagmi-designed protocols. When this happens, everyone wins.
wagmi for investors: positive sum yield farming
The main problem for all crypto investors, especially for new or part-time crypto users, is a problem of information. DeFi is full of information asymmetries, overload, misinformation, and an overwhelmingly bad signal-to-noise ratio. Crypto Twitter, for example, is characterized by incredible, insightful perspectives and discussions drowning in a roiling ocean of shitcoins, shilling, bag pumping, and FUD. Separating the wheat from the chaff takes a keen mind, long experience, careful research, and frankly, a full-time commitment.
This is where the AladdinDAO Boule Council comes in. The Boule Council is a diverse, democratically elected group of DeFi Big Brains: investors, researchers, thought leaders, and builders, that work together and compete in a system whose game theory incentivizes them to help us all make it, in the long term. The value for investors is clear: AladdinDAO shares detailed research and ultimately endorses, by way of a vote by the Boule Council, the best long-term, wagmi yield farms in DeFi. More than that, by staking in AladdinDAO vaults, investors become community members as they gain both a stake in the DAO and smart diversification through exposure to the AladdinDAO treasury which, due to its curation and farm-and-hold approach, is sort of like an ETF of top DeFi projects.
wagmi for protocols, or, what’s wrong with farm-and-dump?
Yield aggregation is fundamentally extractive, at least where it involves automatically selling protocol rewards. While it’s entirely fair to take profit, the reward being distributed by the protocol must be held, or better yet, used, if it is to have any value.
Farming-and-dumping, in the context of legitimate, long-term promising protocols, represents a classic tragedy of the commons style coordination failure. If only one participant does it, it can be very rewarding for them, and has little impact on the protocol. If everyone does it, everyone loses, as the reward token value is sold into oblivion. Sadly many new protocols launching liquidity mining programs see this play out. Protocols want their empower their users to be owners and help with governance, they want to incentivize beneficial behaviours, they want to support their own development and their community, but a worthless native token makes these things difficult or impossible.
Farm-and-dump is a lose-lose proposition for the protocol and the participants, yet many DeFi users take this approach by default. The blame falls on the preponderance of low-quality short-term yield farms that pollute the DeFi world. For such useless farms, the only winning strategy is to get in early, farm, and dump on the bag-holders coming after. The hard lessons learned by watching or participating in such farms have placed many DeFi users in a farm-and-dump mindset. We can do better, but we need help.
wagmi capital 🤝 wagmi projects
AladdinDAO brings visibility and high quality, sticky capital to projects who can pass the rigorous review process and impress the Boule Council. If Aladdin succeeds in gaining traction, it will be a sought-after partner to many new projects and protocols, since this type of capital is so valuable. Selected projects will know they have been evaluated based on their long-term potential, and can be assured that AladdinDAO’s intentions are of long-term support. AladdinDAO’s governance power, gained from holding these tokens, is fundamentally good for the protocols it holds.
join us
It is early, early days for AladdinDAO, and there is much to be done. The first Boule Council was elected on September 30th after a liquidity mining program to get governance tokens to users which — you guessed it! — left AladdinDAO’s ALD token price beat up. This is not financial advice, but at the time of writing ALD looks like it’s on a Black Friday sale. The first Boule Council is incredible and the work has already begun to find, evaluate, and vote on farms for listing. The process will take time, but already parallel opportunities to harness the power of the Boule Council and the AladdinDAO community are being explored.
For example, recently a program called Boule Plus was launched, which gives Aladdin community members who stake some ALD the chance to vote along with the Boule Council, helping to provide some wisdom-of-crowds input to the council, rewarding community members for long-term successful picks, and spinning up a fun competition among the community, to see who can create the best long-term project picking track record.
Currently Boule Council research videos are freely available on YouTube, and so anyone anywhere can tune in and capture incredible alpha, and learn something about how the brightest DeFi minds think.
Everything about AladdinDAO is designed to improve over time. The treasury will continue to accumulate top-quality DeFi tokens, and the Boule Council and Boule Plus will preferentially reward members with the best long term track records, which will feed a positive feedback loop and productive competition.
If the raw value that has already begun to be created through the open research and presentation process can be well harnessed for the community, and the mechanisms aligning incentives for community members, boule members, and the team can be tweaked so they function optimally, the future of AladdinDAO looks bright. And if AladdinDAO succeeds, it will help create the DeFi future we all want. wagmi.
If you’re interested drop by the AladdinDAO discord and introduce yourself: https://discord.gg/mJvGPVnyEC
