Worthy Goals.
“ Don’t worry about looking good — worry about achieving your goals.”
- Ray Dalio
When we started on the road to open money and finance through hacking out an interface play we never expected to uncover what we did, experience half the things we have, or feel the feelings we’ve felt.
Navigating a startup in such a nascent field like DeFi is like driving a car blindfolded into the ocean and not realizing that you are in fact an octopus…
We’ve quietly been achieving these last six months, heads down, building, testing, and sandboxing. Blatantly ignoring conventional startup wisdom of shipping fast and breaking things, we’ve been cautiously optimistic in the shadows about our vision and focused deeply on being right.
Our main goal is clear, make money and finance accessible to everyone.
We’ve gotten loads closer than some may suspect. Arrogantly I will even state that I think we understand the problem better than a significant amount of the noise in the crypto echo chamber.
With a supreme goal like making money and finance accessible to everyone, we have some huge barriers to success that we are aware of, and I’m sure a stack we are unaware of too.
In this first bit of noise from us in six months, I want to share with you the following:
- Traction, plenty of traction! (We accidentally created other very useful products…)
- The visionary divergence we have undergone. Big talent reshuffles.
- Rethinking open governance, a sneak peek around our governance moves to come.
So let us dive in.
Mosendo Traction ⚡
In our updated wallet architecture, we shift away from the smart wallet design as a means to provide a fully-gasless experience in the Mosendo wallet. Instead, we use MCD Dai’s new built-in permit() function in order to gain the same UX benefits of smart wallets but with lower architectural complexity and better scaling (fewer costs).
Additionally, using MCD’s permit() function, we designed a recovery architecture that integrates with Connext’s state channels disputes in order to allow for both on-chain and in-channel funds recovery.
In non-technical words… It’s silky smooth onboarding!
The relayer is in action!
As you are likely aware, needing ETH for GAS right when you don’t have it can be a frustration that leads to inaction or dissatisfied action. Also for new users, it just seems clunkyAF.
For now, the best solution we have to solve this is meta-transactions. Swallowing the need to have ETH for GAS in order to get started with the experience, or in those inevitable moments where you have a few stranded tokens.
The Mosendo Relayer Service is an HTTP API endpoint that relays signed meta-transactions to the Ethereum blockchain on behalf of Mosendo wallet users.
Coupled with a singleton smart contract, the relayer service takes advantage of the new MCD Dai permit() function in order to relay transfers directly from the user’s external account as opposed to using smart wallets. This saves on contract deployment gas costs and reduces complexity.
This relayer is inspired by the Gasless wallet’s architecture, detailed here.
On-Chain Deposits
All on-chain deposits, including by the end-user and third-party depositors (e.g. fiat gateways), are sent to the user’s signer address (as opposed to Connext multisig contract address).
Each time the user returns to the app, the current Dai balance of the signer address is fetched. If positive, the wallet client runs the following:
- Displays a pending deposit amount to the user
- Requests Connext deposit rights from the hub
- Requests the Mosendo relayer service to forward the full balance to the user’s Connext multisig address
- Waits for the relayed tx to be included on-chain
- Rescinds Connext deposit rights
- Marks the deposit as complete to the user
Recovery Agent
The Recovery Agent is a smart contract operated by the Mosendo team via an oracle service. The purpose of the recovery agent is to provide an opt-out trustless recovery option to all Mosendo users who lose their keys. As long as the user is able to prove their wallet ownership to the Mosendo Recovery Agent operator (e,g. via email or sms), the operator can trigger a time-locked funds recovery from the lost wallet and forward funds to the user’s alternative wallet.
Following the initial signer private key generation for each user, the private key is used to sign an unlimited Dai allowance to the recovery agent contract. This signed message is sent to the Mosendo oracle service which only submits to the blockchain if it initiates a wallet recovery transaction in the future. This means that the recovery agent set up only costs transaction fees if the user does in fact lose his key and make use of the recovery agent’s service.
A special thank you to Nour Haridy for his work on this incredible Mosendo architecture. You are a whole other level of genius!
Unexpected Product, Ready To Launch!
Introducing GR🔴WUSD
Whilst trying to figure out the critical go-to-market path for Mosendo we stumbled across a grand idea.
The ramps, gateways, and exchanges in the crypto sphere are the number one touchpoint for brand new crypto users.
Currently, the lifetime value of a customer for these ramps is short-lived, in and out, missing out on capturing the full potential earnings of the customer lifecycle.
GrowUSD helps them to capture that value using the high interest-earning power of rkDAI.
rkDAI
rkDAI is a fork of the rdai and it points to kDAI which in turn is a fork of Compound. That’s a lot of forking forks!
Why this architecture?
Firstly, right now we can achieve some of the highest rates on DAI returns and that will attract the returns focused DeFi natives.
Secondly, simultaneously this allows these same DeFi natives to accelerate their earning potential by sharing their affiliate link with other DeFi folks. That’s right they can earn DAI returns without even holding any…
In my opinion, this solves a whole bunch of coordination failure problems that all derive from users' and stakeholders' inherent self-interest.
This affiliate architecture is the bridge to increased immediate adoption. We really feel this is the work that matters when it comes to expanding the number of users who have access to DeFi returns.
What is and how does kDAI work and generate its returns? kDAI is basically cDAI. It’s built on a fork of Compound. OTL — Open Token Lending is a censorship-resistant money market protocol where lenders can get a consistent rate of return with real-world collateral in a permissionless, trust minimized manner. Returns are presently coming from a tokenized 1st mortgage on a piece of real estate in Melbourne Australia.
We are grateful for the partnership with the Moresh Kokane and Sean Qian from the Konkrete and Open Token Lending team.
We look forward to some of our proposals we are already dreaming up for your imminent launch.
Influencers, Affiliate Marketers & Ramps Meet DeFi Returns!
We are looking to partner with strong influencers, affiliate marketers, and ramps of all kinds to help you increase your lifetime value of your customer base.
It’s pretty simple you get your own landing page and 10% of your referee's interest earnings will go to you.
Hit me up on twitter let’s chat!
Visionary Divergence
Tom Howard has diagonally stepped into an advisory role in the organization.
He brings to the team killer vision and thoughtful intelligent ideation on directives. We look forward to continuing to work with him in this new dynamic relationship. Tom will also be working on submitting some proposals to the upcoming open governance we are working on (more details on that in a moment)
When Tom joined the team we were already hurtling towards our goals, he amplified and accelerated this. We are grateful for having him at a full-time capacity for the time we did and look forward to his advice and work proposals moving forward.
Rethinking Open Governance
The leap to open finance and money is too grandiose for any one individual, startup, globalized corporation, or even nation-states.
It requires an incentive system that has reimagined capitalism, one that reduces the barriers to risk, making it easy to sandbox new ideas and still meet broad collectives of self-interest organizing sub-communities.
The entrepreneurial risk to solve open money is too high, money legos is the answer, however, incentives need to be designed in a way that they are limbic, that they inherently include motivation, intention, learning, and memory.
We are exploring a governance model that would allow for bottom-up and top-down decisions to be made. Inspired by a system that can be found in nature, the octopus, their distributed minds give us inspiration and insights into how a system that doesn't fully agree with itself can still make decisions objectively.
The singular aim of moving to a governance model for us is to incentivize the entire open money and finance stack. My thinking around this to date has been inspired a lot by Chris Burniske’s article a Blank Slate of State and his recent podcast interview on Ryan Sean Adams podcast Bankless. If you haven't yet check out these pieces of content, they are life-altering.
We will leave it there for the moment as a tease-only, but you will be hearing a lot more on this in the weeks and months ahead.
