Baoman’s AMA Transcript with Reflexer Labs (RAI)
Here is the transcript of the AMA Baoman did on the Reflexer Labs (RAI) Discord server.
There is a lot of insights and information about Baoman’s vision of DeFi, synthetics, the DAO and a retrospection of the last year !
Questions
Bao Finance started during the height of Defi Summer. Can you talk about what that time was like and the journey you and the team have been on since then?
How has your vision changed (if so) and have you had to adapt to the market at all?
What has it been like working as an anonymous team?
If you had to do anything different, what would it be?
Would you consider Bao a DAO in its current state?
If not, what needs to happen to get there?
I’ve included some starter questions, and we can have a conversation from the answers there
BaoMan
Sounds great @lightnode thanks for having me. Shall I dive in on the starter questions?
lightnode
yep!
@here feel free to jump in whenever
BaoMan
I actually took some time to prewrite some bits for your starter questions:
For the defi summer was honestly an overwhelming time. We had launched before that moment but we mostly flew under the radar and then for no reason at all spread like wildfire.
It is something that I wasn’t actually a fan of. While we grew quickly I think our DAO attracted a lot of users who weren’t there for the right reasons and refused to take the time to understand the product. With Bao we’ve always had lots of clear messaging and warnings that we are a community project and not something users should just buy a token and expect a return. We’ve set up our incentives that way and even have pages in documentations that tell you the reasons not to buy Bao.
This didn’t seem to stop some of the shilling people and so that was very time-consuming trying to deal with those people in our community.
It also made it really hard to find talent as the price to afford any good developer was up a larger amount.
Since that time I think our community and product have evolved a lot and I am very proud of that. The DAO has multiple people full-time and many more volunteers who have helped deliver strong products and continue to set a great vision.
Our product on Polygon “Polly Finance” is a good tribute to this, as I was on medical time off for part of that process and came back to this new protocol component ready to launch with very little oversight and involvement from me. That is a huge power of decentralization.
lightnode
who led the charge on Polly?
BaoMan
Honestly, it was pretty across the board. We organize ourselves into these independent teams we call galaxies, and the idea is that anyone can start up a galaxy that focuses on specific needs. It’s made up both of members paid by the DAO and volunteers.
We call them galaxies as they exist in the ‘universe’ of Bao, but unlike most projects which are more like a solar system where everyone rotates around a leader, each galaxy has its own goals and purpose. A lot of volunteers played critical roles in pushing forward their own goals. Our community manager Baowolf was a great organizer, Fresh Pizza helped lead the charge on finalizing code, Vex and Vital on the frontend, Fabiaz on managing our quality assurance, and tons of other volunteers on managing community and documentation, I’m sure I’d forget to list someone if I tried, but it really was a community effort.
lightnode
what tools do y’all use to coordinate between galaxies?
BaoMan
Right now we primarily use Discord and each galaxy chooses tools right for them to coordinate internally. I think we still have lots of learning to be doing with this system, but what has made it powerful is we have tried to focus on lowering coordination rather than increasing it.
Just like Reflexer focuses on ungovernance we want to focus on lowering the need to coordinate. The goal should be that galaxies have clear roadmaps that are not tangled with each other as much as possible, so they can more smoothly operate with just minimum communication between them.
Maybe that is a silly dream but that is the hope we have for them anyway
lightnode
where’d the idea come from around galaxies having a goal/purpose as opposed to a leader?
BaoMan
I think it came from people trying to make me a leader in the first place.
The reason I decided to be an anon is that I don’t think a community should be ever about one person. I would rather that one-day Baoman be a role title for whoever leads the ‘maintainer galaxy’.
Decentralized communities need leadership but they don’t need a leader. They need many strong voices.
When I was thinking of how to communicate this concept it just reminded me of old cultural stories about how different leaders were at the center of their solar system. I wanted to make the values we have the opposite of that and so our galaxy analogy was born.
lightnode
what galaxy in the Bao universe are you currently focusing on?
I’ve found that decision-making in DAOs always seems to be a pain point. How do y’all handle disputes?
Dr. Ghosto
Any ideas for what other nests you would like or expect to see, on Polly finance in the short or medium-term?
BaoMan
So I personally lead our ‘maintainer galaxy’ which has the specific goal of:
1. Ensure the project has the resources, reliability, and roadmap to achieve its vision.
This means I spend a lot of my time focused on process and planning. Making sure we have the right talent, and stable designs of governance and economics to be successful. It also encompasses things like making sure the site is accessible.
I think also contribute to a Solidity Galaxy which managed backend code.
Right now, it really comes down to processes. Anyone can put forward a proposal to be voted on and votes are the ultimate decider.
But before that, different galaxies often work together on designing new proposals and the disagreements in there are usually just long discord debates. We try and be very focused on data and not allow personal arguments. We’ve done pretty well with this so far and not had many big disputes, but I guess if we ever did then they would just be two proposals that move on to votes.
That’s something I haven’t focused on too much. I know our next nest is planned to be an nSTBL nest which will be stablecoins (with RAI as the main allocation) but beyond that our bigger priority is making it more of a platform for communities and other projects to design nests through a factory.
We see Polly the same way we see something like Curve. In the end, it should be a factory creation mode.
For us the Polly system was more about creating good tools for our longer-term synth goals.
lightnode
is there anything happening on Ethereum main net or is everything on Polygon currently?
BaoMan
We launched the Polly franchise on Polygon because the past few months Ethereum gas has been rough and Polly’s system actually uses a large amount of gas in issuing a nest.
But the plans for our hard synth projects which are currently in testing is for it to be on Ethereum and perhaps some L2s as well.
lightnode
can anyone create a nest right now on Polly?
BaoMan
No, creating a nest is easy but the code for allowing users to automate/redeem a nest is pretty complicated and the level of control a nest has over asset strategies is also complex. We’re working on methods to make these controlled by factories and frontend interfaces but it will take a fair bit of time to get the security right before it is comfortable to do that.
lightnode
yeah that’s what I figured, there seems to be a lot of edge cases you’d have to do with permissionless nests
BaoMan
Yeah so this is something that will grow over time and I think the first stretch will be prioritizing what we need for the larger synth vision
lightnode
what frustrates you the most about the current market and culture of the space?
BaoMan
hehe, everything.
I think too many people say to others that crypto is all about investing to make a profit as if it’s a stock market. Many people then don’t take time to research or involve in a project. They don’t understand what we want to build and they often don’t read documentation or warnings. It can create a lot of headaches.
Bao has always been designed to be a product/protocol-focused community and the incentives were designed around that. We even have a page that warns users of why they shouldn’t buy Bao and should only farm and take part in the DAO.
That never seems to stop some users from yelling at you that the price is low.
It makes it very exhausting to be a builder.
lightnode
what inspires you to keep building? what projects do you admire the most?
BaoMan
I think our world is broken. It is something that many westerners are only starting to see, but a lot of the world has known for a long time. There are people who own ideas, information and decisions. That is a dangerous power that makes it hard to live a happy and free life.
This is because systems for making money and ownership run by few people are very advanced and easy to coordinate so the world centralizes and becomes much smaller.
But now we have the technologies to let us coordinate fairly with hundreds of thousands of users across this globe and do so in a way that does not require trust. That is powerful.
For me, the goal with Bao has always been to build platform tools that let users and other protocols easily manage synthetic assets and asset interactions.
I think a lot of people think of that as things like synthetic stocks, which I am not really interested in. I think of synthetic assets as accurate consumable data.
If you want to evolve the web3 space it is done with automation and accuracy that traditional markets cannot do. You see all of our legacy systems run on more data than people understand. Actuaries, economists, and analysts all rely on data like job reports, consumer indexes, or even the amount of rainfall a region received.
The problem is all that data is currently something that comes in regular reports. Weekly, monthly, yearly. It always surprises markets.
Currently, the plan to get this data onchain is with oracles, which means we still need to wait for those reports, race to upload them, and still trust the oracles.
Bao’s goal is to make this replaced by a synthetic. The idea here is that we can likely crowdsource this knowledge.
For example, maybe you have a synthetic for housing prices in Hong Kong. Different users have different information that leads them to have insights on what they think that average price is, and so they can make a prediction on that and stake collateral to back their prediction, which is met with a buy or sell of that asset.
The onchain price of that synthetic essentially slashes or rewards the users collateral against their prediction by creating a market for that asset. Meaning that we should be able to get constantly evolving, high-accuracy data on this insight.
If you can liberate this knowledge data and make it useable to anyone who wants it by bringing together the ideas of many people, then our world becomes a little freer.
I like that.
That is what keeps me building at tough moments.
I admire projects that just want to build better things and are not here for the shilling.
It’s part of why I really like the mission from Reflexer. There are easier ways to make a stablecoin. But sometimes doing something that is hard makes the world better so it is the right way to decide.
lightnode
I don’t know if you listened to our conversation with @nikolai, but he’s doing some work around oracles that you’d be interested in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfXC2fakLjc&t=2s
what resources do you wish Bao had more of at the moment?
BaoMan
I always say we just need builders and dreamers.
We are certainly short on Solidity developers and even just people with deep engineering or finance backgrounds for our goal. As an anon team, it has been hard to acquire good talent.
But more we are always short on dreamers. A community that understands the long-term vision and is passionate about that journey. It is easy to be distracted by things in the crypto market that move fast and make money. I would love to find more people who each morning when they wake up are just excited about making this world better.
The passion of dreamers even taking the time to make the comments in discord, make proposals in governance, or think about these many challenges helps improve protocols but it also gives the rest of the community a fire to know this is a good path.
So if anyone reading is a dreamer who wants to leave a footprint on history, please make sure to drop into our community
lightnode
if a dreamer jumped into the Bao community, what’s the quickest path to discover where and how they can contribute?
BaoMan
That is actually a big gap we have that our community galaxy is going to be focusing on. It is really hard to get up to speed on Bao and discover the process. We have docs.bao.finance which is out of date and gov.bao.finance which is our forum but is lightly used. The best place is in Discord but it certainly takes some time.
The best possible way to make a big impact right now is actually thinking through how we can better have a process for users who want to join in and make an impact
lightnode
lol nice
what are you working on in the next couple of weeks?
BaoMan
Right now is testing and governance for me.
We have the first version of hard synths running in test environments and are trying to get it to an operational state.
We also have some pretty big governance votes to plan, in setting out a yearly roadmap as we are coming up to one year of existence.
That yearly plan includes some votes around our inflation and vesting models which are pretty controversial and will be a challenge to pass in governance.
lightnode
what does your ideal governance lifecycle look like?
BaoMan
We have a layout for people to post a concept for discussion, give that one week, and then move it to a formal proposal, which is live for one week before a vote which has a time of one week.
It is kind of like a political process of first discussing the bill and then finalizing the language of it before it goes to vote.
Right now it is a lot of trying to figure how much should be in one proposal or not. Because everyone voting on every small detail is a lot of overhead.
We are also trying to figure out how to have governance over the franchise model as it evolves.
For example, soon we’ll be shifting to the partnership franchise model where other projects will be able to launch a version of the synths or nests for their own projects. We have some plans here of doing a sample one that uses RAI and FLX to power its elements, but in the future normally communities would run their own.
Deciding how much say Bao should have in that governance (if any) is something that needs much more thinking time.
lightnode
on that note, I’ll wrap up with a final question: how do you see Reflexer and the RAI community helping out with the goals of the Bao community to nurture a productive partnership going forward?
BaoMan
I think we have the same goal of making good products that act as foundation blocks for defi and do not depend on old-world technologies.
I do not think many projects actually think this way, and so when we do I think it is good to get involved in each other’s lives. That probably changes day to day. But for us, as we make a sample project, we’re prioritizing RAI. When we discussed what nests are right for stable assets, we chose RAI, and eventually, as we mature our treasury operations we plan to add some RAI to it.
We can make little everyday decisions like that to help, but as we continue to find more projects and communities that really share those visions, we can make introductions and maybe eventually share some resources.
I know I will personally spend some time watching and thinking on governance discussions for RAI to try and support because this is worth it.
There isn’t a specific ask other than be involved with things you believe are good and worth it and let those opportunities discover along the way
lightnode
Awesome, thank you for taking the time. Here’s to a better future
BaoMan
Thank you for having me!
It was great to chat about these things and I hope there are enough fun nuggets of knowledge in there for people who will take the time to read. Having prewritten some answers they got a bit long haha
Best of luck to our friends in the RAI community and we hope we see some of you in Bao world from time to time!
