A Tale of Two DAOs

This week has been pretty exciting for me. While in the pursuit of financing to properly support FiHub and myself, I was approached by The Abominable Sasquatch to support the initiation of an algorithmic art DAO on Avalanche, tentatively called, Rithm. The goal is to use the debut pieces, First Strokes, as the Founder’s Pass. This would provide access in perpetuity to 1st access to mints on the future Algorithmic Art focused marketplace. In this role I will be providing smart contract support and organizational support. As an existing supporter of Gen Art through membership with GEN.ART, Grailers DAO, and Doodle Labs, I am really happy to bring the lessons learned to Avalanche and expand the reach.

Rithm is meant to support the development, curation and acquisition of algormithic art on Avalanache. Algorithmic art include art created through generative art, computation and machine learning.

Separately, I was able to receive some phenomenal strategic advice from existing FiHub Stakeholders. I am really appreciative to Sam Onat Yilmaz who took the time to approach FiHub through 1st principles. Through the various conversations, three core lenses and value propositions were identified to process the next steps for FiHub.

• Trust
• Coverage
• User

Trust is becoming increasingly eroded due centralized entities recently. As was seen with FTX — Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange, Three Arrows Capital, Celsisus and a host of other centralized organizations, these centralized entities while trusted were not transparent or readily audible. Thus, FiHub is designed to provide transparency and support to users in understanding the protocols they interact with in the web3 and DeFi space. It is my belief that by creating a more accessible layer to smart contract interactions, it is possible to not only mitigate phishing, but provide vital information around risk, audits and various other important attestations. This is why the smart contract lists are such an important pillar of FiHub. Smart Contract lists provide an open source means of creating an information layers created by trusted sources. However, the lists alone are not sufficient to get the type of traction necessary. Thus, the next pillar is where strategically I will be focusing: Coverage.

For FiHub, coverage is the number of assets and platforms we are able to cover with our smart contracts and interaction lists. Currently we cover about 10 platforms and two primary assets. We need to cover at least 20–30 assets to demonstrate the viability and gain traction from various discussions made. Thus, my time will be spent in building that foundation of interactions manually. There is a process which I was investigating to scale to 100s/1000s of assets, however, this requires resources which we do not have available until additional funding is acquired. The other approach was to introduce additional incentive mechanisms to get projects to create their own tracks and mappings for their particular asset/platform.

The introduction of the lists to other parties was determined to be premature in the conversations I had with various stakeholders. Also the further development of the foundation can be an important guidepost to future contributors. This also mitigates the premature launching of incentive tokens and other governance functionality. Suitable coverage is foundational to validating an improved user experience.

User Experience is considered one of the largest barriers of entry into the web3 and DeFi space. With over 300million digital asset holders, less than 5% leverage decentralized finance protocols. This is due to the lack of clarity and complexity of engaging. Through FiHub, this barrier can be substantially mitigating through providing asset based recommendations. This means of discovery can greatly increase the accessibility of the space and build traction not demonstrated