Jack and the Beanstalk
Going to now be splitting this into parts:
- Story so far
- Current DAO
- Root
Bean.money
Welcome this will likely be an extremely long article and is part history and part call for change.
It is not easy to write this as I will face backlash and be called a fuder.
There is a lot of groupthink in crypto. Honesty and transparency are less morally good than bag pumping. Fudders are the bad guys.
Once I am seen as an outsider the “bean army” will turn against me. Although beanstalk is known for its strong cult-like community I now believe it will eat itself from the inside.
I was the first moderator of beanstalk. I earned this by teaching many many people about the mechanics and being around early while Publius was busy building.
I wasn’t paid for this position but it was fun and I was happy to support the project.
I am a big believer in founders and the turning point for me will always stick in my memory.
Bean was way below peg and had been for quite some time. I wondered if there was a new term we could use rather than algostable to reduce the mental blocker of buying into a stablecoin sitting at 0.20c.
Publius completely struck down this idea which in my mind was choosing honestly over bending the narrative to entice buyers.
This was also around the prime of defi2.0 hype and Publius was refusing to bend to demands to somehow include protocol-owned liquidity as he saw this as a risk to decentralisation.
In Defi we need more founders who:
- Are independent thinkers
- Ship their ideas
- Don’t bend to every trend
We are at an early stage of tech which barely has product market fit. There is much more value and upside potential in building some cracked-out crazy idea that fails than forking whatever is fetch.
Although beanstalk seemed grim, The BeaNFT marketing campaign kicked off some hype and started to bring it from 20c back to peg.
Introducing beanintern
The next chapter in my bean journey was beanintern. I felt Publius was a calm and realistic voice for beanstalk. I wanted to be chaotic good and deep in the weeds of shitposting.
As I was quite active in the Olympus and some other Defi communities at the time I believe I was a not insignificant part of the protocol growth, especially at the very early stages.
The bean community quickly grew into the most tight knit group of intelligent discussions that I had to date seen in defi. I must clarify I was not a large part of this growth but still maintained a loose presence. I would still often explain to people personally how the protocol worked and what I liked/disliked.
Despite the growth, the DAO felt well managed with Publius at the helm, passing major decisions to on-chain governance.
Beanstalk shipped changes quickly and backed by strong discussion from the community was able to constantly iterate on the design.
New features felt frequent and purposeful.
Real traction
A lot of beanstalks life was in the shadow of OHM fork season.
OHM fork season ended.
A lot of money was hungry for a new design of decentralised currency.
Bean with lots of overlap in the communities was ripe for the picking.
The project grew quickly and excitement exploded.
Good
- Euphoria in the community.
- Massive hype on Twitter
- Bean printer go Brrrrrrrrrrr
- Market cap exploded
Bad
- Community quality deteriorated
- The influx of moonboys with little understanding of the nuance of the protocol
- Misunderstanding of the potential volatility of bean.
- Very little understanding of where the APY came from.
Ugly
- DAO felt bloated
- Typical of bull season large teams with confusing goals
- Brute force throwing money at problems to solve them with
- Beanstalk ballooned to over 30 employees at one point it had its own design team by far the largest I had seen for a 100million market cap project
- More designers than developers in an early stage project.
When I sat in an hour-long call with weird french cartoons about how beanstalk made me feel.
I knew the golden age was over.
The project grew from around 20 million market cap to 40 million from November to march. Then 40 to above 100 million in April alone until…
The hack.
I will only cover this briefly as there are other useful sources.
Beanstalk was Hacked, using a governance exploit every liquidity pool was drained.
Publius and the core team doxed.
Although it was thought the project was dead the community remained confident they could rebuild.
The barn raise was theorised.
Replanting was planned.
