Builder update #1
Welcome to the inaugural “Builder’s Update,” which is a newsletter covering the BUILD Finance ecosystem.
For those who are just discovering us for the first time, BUILD Finance is a decentralized and autonomous venture builder, wholly-owned and controlled by its community. The work we do revolves around five core activities: identifying business ideas, building teams, finding capital, helping govern or manage different ventures, and providing shared services.
The organizing principle for our work together is a “beehive” model where everyone is an equal contributor. If that sounds interesting to you and you want to find out more or offer your help please join our Discord and come say hello.
As with most projects in crypto, we have a native token: $BUILD. The token gives holders voting rights and a claim over the treasury.
$BUILD is currently held by over 500 unique wallets, as seen in the graphic sourced from Nansen below. We want to be clear that any value it currently has is purely speculative, however, as we are still building our first set of products. More information about its tokenomics can be found in our Gitbook.
(source: Nansen) -
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Over the course of October, BUILD has moved at a quick pace. We have made every effort to keep the wider crypto community up-to-date over Twitter, Medium, and our Discord, but we realize this can be a challenge to follow in the information overload of our industry. Accordingly, this newsletter is intended to offer subscribers a one-stop-shop review of the recent events, both in terms of our governance and our different products.
Governance:
Throughout October our community held several votes on Snapshot that are important to be aware of.
At the beginning of the month, we had a vote that resulted in the BUILD Treasury selling 5,000 $BUILD for 205,000 DAI as a way to establish an operational budget to finance product development. A later vote decided that this DAI should be deposited into Aave and held as aDAI so the funds accrue monthly interest. Noteworthy, this vote marked the first instance where BUILD/ETH UNI-LP tokens were able to participate. 3 users took advantage of that, accounting for 11% of the total votes. The job around enabling this feature has been led by @vfat and required some hard work figuring out through the plumbing of Snapshot, but we got there eventually!
To increase our collective output as a community, the second governance vote introduced an incentivization mechanism for community contribution, tipping, and other small projects using our unique bCRED token. bCRED is a token that allows us to reward members for their work. While it is currently not backed by anything, when we start generating revenue, we’ll deposit part of that revenue into a smart contract which will accept bCRED and give back DAI 1:1.
The aforementioned governance vote permitted 6,000 bCRED to be minted as an initial allocation. These tokens are stewarded by 6 active community members — “guardians’’ — who are free to allocate these funds to tip people for proactive work. The list of guardians is: @vfat @nickbtts @Son of Ishtar @Benjamin Mooney @!! HODLhands !! @0xdev0. All accounting for bCRED can be found in this google spreadsheet.
Metric:
Metric is BUILD’s first product. It is a 100% community-owned DEX aggregator that gives the best possible rates for every swap by routing orders via multiple decentralized exchanges. The $METRIC token was available for farming over the first week of October with a hard-capped supply of 1,000,000 $METRIC, and the token contract can be seen here.
Some notes on the product to be mindful of. First, 100% of all swap fees will be distributed to holders of $METRIC. Second, $METRIC represents a trading fee waiver when using the product. What this means is anyone who holds 100 $METRIC or more in their wallet will not be charged any swapping fees.
On the development side, October has seen Metric make various improvements on UI/UX front. Several include the implementation of light mode, additional token balance information i.e. values are now available in terms of USD, as well as a mobile layout. There have been 14 commits on our GitHub, and various issues remain under active development as seen below:
The next big feature people can expect to see is in November users will be able to make limit orders for any pair of tokens.
$METRIC is currently held by over 400 unique wallets, as seen in the graphic sourced from Nansen below.
(source: Nansen)
OTC Market:
otc.market is a permissionless swap platform made specifically for the over-the-counter market. This product is necessary because most swap platforms that are used for OTC in DeFi today don’t focus on it as a service. Instead, OTC trading on these platforms is largely a byproduct use case rather than the product itself.
Seeing the need for a stronger OTC platform built from first principles, otc.market is crafting a product to make decentralized, over-the-counter trading both easier and more profitable for everyone. Our goal is to marry a simple and elegant design to high-powered functionality as a way to make the platform attractive for a wide range of people.
While the platform will be usable by anybody, our target demographic is the long tail of users who trade large volumes and/or illiquid markets. The aim is to democratize access to OTC desks, which in traditional finance are walled gardens, and in doing so enable better price discovery. The timeline for launch is early December, but a teaser of the front-end can be found below:
Hype:
Hype is a liquidity-locking protocol that Build has launched with the hope of solving a central issue in decentralized finance: token liquidity. New projects on Ethereum often struggle to attract enough liquidity for their project token, which makes it unattractive for investors to take positions in that token due to the potential for market manipulation. As a consequence, projects are forced to resort to aggressive liquidity mining schemes or token inflation just to incentivize pools with credible liquidity.
Hype solves this problem by creating liquidity on Uniswap in a variety of token pairs that include HYPE along with a project token. LPs in these pools are incentivized to keep their liquidity locked over the long term through a taxation-based form of permanent farming that does not increase HYPE supply from its set 100,000 tokens. More information about the specific mechanics and how pools are selected can be found in the Gitbook.
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We would like to end here with two final thoughts.
First, BUILD is a rapidly evolving project. As such, anything we post here, both now and in the future, is subject to change. Our intention with the newsletter is simply to give a snapshot of what we are actively working on.
Second, we want to say a quick thank you to our early BUILDers. The BUILD Discord has been overflowing with enthusiasm, reaching nearly 1,500 users, and we couldn’t accomplish what we do without our community. You’re the best.
In closing, if you’re interested in building DeFi, working on our various products, or pitching a new idea, please reach out to us in our Discord. We look forward to hearing from you.
