Meet the Core Team
With all of the exciting things going on at Bribe, we would like to give our community a little more information about the team inside the hive. We sat down with Condorcet, Governor C and Cleisthenes to learn more about who they are, their views on governance and the future of Bribe. For those interested in learning about the leadership behind Bribe Protocol, we proudly present this interview with the core team:
So, Condorcet. Tell us a little about yourself. What is your background?
Sure, so my educational background is in politics and from there I started working in traditional finance. When I was working in that industry, I saw a lot of unintuitive processes and extra work stemming from these traditional processes. Banks are pretty opaque and create a lot of automation problems. I was working more on the organizational side, but you know it really became a question of how to move an organization and how to adopt automation in a way that dignifies and takes care of people rather than displacing careers and making things difficult.
While I was face to face with these problems that no one was really talking about, I saw apps for DAOs and blockchain projects everywhere. I had been watching the space closely since 2015 and joined the DeFi industry as soon as I felt equipped with the right experience to understand the application of the technology.
How did the idea for Bribe come about?
While my formative professional experiences were in finance, I was actually a student of political science. My education gave me a unique perspective when I joined DeFi. Governance really stood out to me as a way for DeFi to be democratic, giving power directly to the users. And that’s the beauty of DeFi, right? It’s not controlled by a bank or the government, it’s democratic. But I saw some issues with the way this was functioning, namely low participation and voter apathy, and wanted to develop a solution.
From there, I connected with Governor C and the core team began to form. He is very much a DeFi app and economics expert, which really helped here. Bribe was created to deal with all of these new and esoteric problems so his background gave us the confidence we needed to build something new.
Can you tell us a little bit about the team?
Yes, the founding team and developers met through Composable Labs and Advanced Blockchain AG, who helped fund us during the early stages of the project. Governor C is a software engineer specializing in smart contract development for fintech products. Before Bribe, Cleisthenes worked as a marketing consultant.
Cleisthenes, what is your view on the state of governance today? And how will Bribe help?
To put it frankly, DeFi governance today is not working as it was designed to. The idea was for a system of democratic voting; instead, we see low participation, voter apathy and whale dominance that borders on oligarchy. As I see it, there are three ways to address these problems: education, delegation and incentivization. While sufficient attention has been paid to education and delegation, we are only just beginning to explore incentivization of voting with bribery protocols like Votium and Votemak. Bribe is the first protocol-agnostic solution to low participation and voter apathy, as we can build a Bribe Pool for any existing DAO.
In terms of oligarchy, power players (whales and VCs) control governance not only because they own a lot of DAO tokens, but because they have the capital and networks to effectively buy proposal outcomes. This is where we make our argument that bribery already happens, but most protocol users are left out. Our goal with Bribe is to bring transparency and access to a marketplace that, in truth, exists already, just behind closed doors and for a select group of individuals. Bribe makes influence in governance more attainable and allows retail holders to profit from governance markets they have traditionally lacked entry to.
Finally, Governor C, what is your vision for Bribe? For the future of governance?
Our Voter Extractable Value (VEV) tool is just the beginning. DeFi is quickly moving in the direction of a cross-chain future. There are several examples of projects that are already building tooling for this — for instance, we are closely watching how Aave, the first protocol Bribe integrated with, is deploying different instances of the protocol across different chains. So what we essentially want to do with Bribe is build cross-chain tooling to help governance evolve with DeFi as a whole, and take it cross-chain. We have talked a lot about this vision, but it really is critical to our vision for Bribe. We don’t just want to solve the governance problems of today, we want to shape governance in the future. This means helping DAOs govern regardless of chains or layers in a fair, democratic way using Bribe’s fundamental infrastructure.
About Bribe
Bribe creates DAO infrastructure tooling to incentivize protocol participation. Depositors stake their governance tokens in the Bribe pool to earn income. Bidders borrow the staked votes to support or reject governance proposals. Bribe V1 introduces Voter Extractable Value (VEV) to coordinate and auction powerful coalitions of DAO votes. Bribe is best used as part of a well-balanced and active delegation strategy.
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