The Muon Vision — DAO Maker Interviews Co-Founder Lafayette
Lafayette sits down with DAO Maker to talk about everything in the Muonverse — from his humble beginnings to his vision for the future of Web3
Personal Background — What Led Lafa to Muon
For Muon Co-Founder Lafayette Tabor, an early passion for maths and logic evolved into a deep fascination for computers and the internet. His personal journey to Muon has been a progression of many years of research, development and most crucially, the realization that a decentralized future would not become a reality unless people actively got involved.
“I started working in crypto helping set up a Bitcoin mining farm, that was my first step into full-time… But I was very interested in Ethereum, so I was researching it and how it worked. Then I started developing my first contracts on it, which was very rudimentary back then. Not like today with all the development tools and libraries of open-source material.” — Lafayette
The research and building culminated in the construction of DEUS Finance, from which Muon was ultimately born as Lafa explains:
“I had the idea to make a derivatives exchange (DEUS), something like Synthetix but for stocks. So we were focusing on making a decentralized oracle that is now Muon. That is how Muon came into existence, we basically realized that what we have currently in crypto is not sufficient for our goal to trade assets on oracle prices, since the only oracles we had all lagged behind.”
Muon: Global Data Connection & A Unique Consensus Mechanism
A common misjudgment might be to assume that Muon is another blockchain, but this is not the case. Described by Lafa as a “global data layer”, it acts as more of a connective layer. At its core, Muon is like a decentralized oracle network, carrying out data requests from off-chain sources.
“The beauty of a chain like Ethereum, but also its pain point, is that every data point can interact with every smart contract (which leads to congestion). People like Vitalik Buterin have already foreseen this as an issue, back in 2016 he was asked what the most important aspect of blockchain was, he said ‘interoperability’… So we have these blockchains that only have data availability within their own chain, and there is no other project like Muon trying to be a global inter-blockchain data availability layer.” — Lafayette
Another unique point discussed is that Muon’s consensus is subsequential, meaning that a transaction doesn’t have to be slowed by verifying nodes. Instead the verification process is insured by nodes having collateral staked, and afterwards nodes can challenge each other (similar to optimistic rollups). In this system you only need one trustworthy node that can challenge and prove that other nodes are acting maliciously (and ensure they are punished), for the system to function. There is also a clear economic incentive for all nodes to behave honestly, both in respect to rewards and punishment.
Muon Team
Muon is home to a now 50+ strong team of engineers, as well as 10 members in Ops and Marketing. Developers are split up into teams focusing on specific areas of development, including Muon core, Muon apps and partner apps. Importantly for our community, Muon engineering is almost entirely backend, frontends are largely designed by our partners through their apps. This is an area where we’ll expand in in the future.
Currently our engineers work directly with partners to help them implement their custom Muon solutions, which we also hope will set a platform to pave the way for future builders on Muon once integrations become publicly available.
Building Apps with Muon
Muon came about from the need of DEUS Finance to trade on-chain derivatives. To this day Muon continues to work with DEUS on a range of solutions, including price feed oracles, cross-chain communications and leveraged yield farming. This is just one example of Muon’s work with partners on bringing their applications to life, as we’re working with a number of projects across the DeFi, NFT, GameFi and Metaverse sectors on a wide variety of solutions, such as NFT bridging, RNG’s, securing P2E game rewards and more.
On top of this the Muon team also has members dedicated to in-house built apps, with the current flagship project being MuonSwap, the first true cross-chain DEX. By utilizing Muon’s ability to read price data from across multiple chains, MuonSwap will be able to combine liquidity from all supported chains for optimal price aggregation. This means a user will get the most accurate price, based on the liquidity across all chains, and at the same time negates the effect of cross-chain arbitrage bots.
“The cool thing is it [Muon] opens completely new possibilities for the type of blockchain applications that can be built. Before, you were always limited within the technical boundaries of the chain you were building on, with Muon the horizon becomes much bigger and you can think of new systems and apps that were not possible before.” — Lafayette
MRC standard & Layering Apps
Just as the ERC token standard has set the foundation for dApp tokens and utility, Muon has its own MRC standard for the foundation of cross-chain functionality. MRC tokens effectively have cross-chain transfers in-built for users transacting, and there are even long-term plans for a Muon wallet, which would mean users would no longer need to switch between networks.
The broader vision is to layer complex applications (such as OpenSea), to have certain functions taking place across several chains. For example using the network security of Ethereum, but the execution speed of Polygon, with the data all tied together by Muon.
“Transactions on Ethereum are very expensive. I think at some point there will be no direct user interaction with Ethereum anymore, and it could be that all the transactions are done through Muon. Then you have apps or contracts that are controlled by Muon with user interaction, and the Muon app is sending the transaction to the different chains.” — Lafayette
View the full interview here.
