ORCA GOVERNANCE
Highlights from Orca Governance Chat #3
Meet the potential future members of the Orca Council!
Welcome to the highlights of Orca’s third Governance Chat!
To continue the conversation regarding Orca Governance v0, team member KZ was joined once again by Reverie’s co-founders on the Orca Discord. Additionally, KZ was also joined by the candidates vying to join the 7-member Orca Council (+ the council’s secretary):
- Michael “tmoc” Hwang, Orca Engineer
- Hart Lambur, UMA
- Chris “Tags” Montagano, Orca General Counsel
- Lakshman Sankar, 0xParc & Personae Labs
- Larry Sukernik, Reverie
- Min Teo, Ethereal Partners
- Dom Tsang, Solana Foundation
- Cortina, Community Member
- Ko-Wei, Community Member + PhD (National University of Singapore)
- Wes, Community Member + Room40
As a reminder, the first call was more of a generalized governance chat and the second chat dove deeper into moving towards Orca’s Governance Council model.
In this discussion, the ten candidates introduce themselves and then dive into questions specifically about their experience and understanding of Solana protocols, how they’ll handle any current or future conflicts of interests, how they envision council meetings being held, and what their vision is for the future of Orca!
Check out the answers below, and then click here to cast your vote on the slate of candidates to become Orca Council’s seven members and one secretary!
(NOTE: Answers have been edited for length and clarity. To listen to the full Orca Governance chat, click here, or read the full transcript here.)
Meeting the candidates
KZ: We have a roster of great talent, people that the Orca community has seen in our Discord and around the cryptosphere. Today, we’re getting to know them in the context of them as candidate council members for Orca.
So without further ado, I will open up to our potential council members, so they can do a quick introduction, and then we can go into questions.
Lakshman: I’m Lakshman, the founder of Personae Labs, which is an R&D Lab, which is trying to apply solutions of cryptography, like CKPs and witness encryption, to identity problems across all chains. Previously, and I think most relevantly, I spent a lot of time with the Ethereum Foundation where I worked on the ecosystem strategy and R&D around Eth 2.0, staking and the merge.
I spent a lot of time there thinking about building the hobbyist staking ecosystem. I think one of the things that excites me a lot about Orca is that it’s a very individual driven, user focused, take on DeFi and I think there’s something very analogous with my experiences building the initial copy of staking on Ethereum.
Wes: I’m Wes, co-founder of Room40. We’re a crossover investment firm that’s fully focused on crypto. We invest through two separate strategies: a liquid crypto hedge fund, where we’re doing everything from training on exchange, spots, perps; but also we are active on DeFi products on chain. Products such as swap protocols like Orca, and everything else.
We’ve been tracking the broader Solana ecosystem since early last year, 2021, and have been following Orca’s rise through that time. So we, and I personally, started using Orca in every manner. That was for trading, as well as the initial pools, as well as Whirlpools as an LP.
Cortina: For me, I learned about crypto and Bitcoin very early on and was just kind of ideologically exposed. It’s funny to think about, you know, why was this so interesting to me? I’ve been thinking about concepts like DAOs for quite a few years and for me, this is just an opportunity to participate.
I was first a user of the product and noticed some discrepancies with how APYs were being advertised between Orca and Raydium and reached out to the Raydium team to explain what I was seeing and was kind of dismissed. I came to Orca to talk to them about it and was welcomed with open arms. It was just amazing how quickly I was talking to team members, and they were really interested in what I was seeing. And I was like, Okay, this is a community that I want to be a part of.
Larry: I’m the co-founder of Reverie, we’re still working on our tagline! At a really high level at Reverie, what we try to do is just to help DAOs grow. To better understand our MO it helps to understand what we did prior to this. I was previously leading investments at a company called Digital Currency Group — I did that between 2018 to early 2021. The thing that became clear to me as I was writing between 25 to 100 checks a year, separate investments a year, was that most funds were just not in a position to actively contribute to the investments that they were making, particularly in DAOs. Once they made the investment they became passive holders of the project. I didn’t really like that very much.
We at Reverie been working with Orca, for a little under a year, trying to come up with a decentralized organizational model to help Orca scale and Carl sort of touched on the intuition and the motivation behind it earlier. At a really high level we’re just trying to make sure Orca can ship really quickly and make sure the product is best in class and competitive.
Hart: I am the co-founder of a project called Uma, which has been around since before DeFi existed. We’ve evolved into what we call an optimistic Oracle: A trustless permissionless method to get any bit of noble data onto a blockchain. We’ve been very involved in the DeFi space for its whole evolution. I’ve been very impressed with the ethos and vibe of the Orca community. So a small investor now, just publicly. I have been, like Lakshman said, not the biggest Solana user, I won’t hide my Ethereum roots. But Orca is my go-to app when I am playing in the Solana ecosystem.
In terms of my value in terms of what I’d want to bring to this council, it’s just being able to provide some perspective on how DeFi evolved, my experience of founding a couple of protocols and how that’s gone. Then generally just trying to be a good steward of the Orca ecosystem.
Min: I’m the managing partner and co-founder of Ethereal Ventures, we’re a global early-stage crypto investment firm that has a multi chain approach. What attracted me to Orca: Firstly, as we were exploring the Solana ecosystem where we’ve made a few investments, Orca had such a sterling reputation amongst all users, founders, and developers alike. I also think the mission to create the best DEX trading platform for real traders, by leveraging many of the technical benefits of the Solana architecture is something that’s unique.
One of the reasons that I came to crypto five years ago is to democratize financial access to everyone globally. Orca’s bang on that mission, and it feels like a truly vibrant community. I hope to be able to leverage some of my experience working with our portfolio companies, helping Orca scale the organization as they decentralize, and also continuously integrate feedback from the community.
Dom: I currently lead business development in Solana, the Solana Foundation specifically. I’ve been with Solana for a few years now and Yutaro and Grace were amongst the earliest builders I met, as I was looking to grow out the Solana ecosystem, about three years ago. This is an opportunity to continue and extend what I’ve already been doing with Orca more formally.
One thing I will caveat, though, is that given my current position within Solana, it does mean there may be certain edge cases where I may have to exclude myself from certain decisions to ensure that I don’t actually make a decision that’s selfish, and is potentially a conflict of interest.
KoWei: My background is that I’ve finished my PhD in physics and now I want to be involved in crypto since the 2017 cycle. I started to deep dive into Solana in probably December of 2020 and then helped to build up the Solana Taiwan Community, which is now the official Solana Mandarin speaking community. My personal connection to Orca is that I started using Orca probably last April and I feel like Orca really nailed the details of the UI/UX like the Fair Price Indicator or using the Magic Bar by typing the tokens to swap.
I have used Solana everyday for the last year and I really feel like the DEX experience for Orca is amazing and Orca is not just good at UI or UX but also will try to pivot itself into the liquidity infrastructure after the whirlpools v3 launch. My background is more like a researcher for myself, but I love to be part of the community and to share what I know with the community and also the general public.
Tags: I am Chris Montagano, Orca’s general counsel. Prior to joining Orca, I was deputy general counsel of a $6 billion company that went public on NASDAQ last summer. I had the privilege of leading that transaction and prior to that I spent nearly a decade at one of the largest law firms in America practicing capital markets and mergers and acquisitions.
Over the last six months with Orca, I’ve been continually impressed with the maturity and confidence of Orca’s core contributors and the manner in which they have shepherded capital to date, particularly through what as all of you know, has been a challenging few months.
tmoc: My name is Michael Hwang. I go by tmoc as my online moniker. I’m a software engineer with over 10 years of experience, and I studied computer science at the University of Michigan. After college, I worked at numerous tech companies, both large and small. I was at BlackRock, which is an asset management company, then I also worked at Google and some other big tech companies. I was actually the first engineer and core contributor after Yutaro and Ori at Orca and I’ve worked across the full stack at Orca from the front end to web2 back end and also helped to design and implement the Whirlpools concentrated liquidity smart contract.
I think the value and perspective that I bring is, from a technical knowledge, my technical knowledge of Solana specifically as a builder, and more specifically, being familiar with Orca and our stack.
Question 1: How do candidates plan to use their experience to benefit the Orca Council?
KZ: So a lot of these questions are touched on by some of the potential council members before and I just want to expand a little bit. Many of you come from or have experiences in blockchains that are not Solana, either Ethereum or other blockchains.
So as a representative of the community, what is your level of understanding of Solana and of the status of governance for Solana protocols? How do you plan to transfer your experiences from other blockchains onto Solana and to the council for Orca?
Lakshman: I actually spent a lot of time while at the Ethereum Foundation studying Consensus, doing Consensus R&D on Ethereum. But today, I’m personally pretty chain agnostic, the stuff we’re working on, we’re trying to see: we’re just more interested in cryptography, I would say, than any specific chain. So I’m by no means necessarily an Ethereum loyalist. One principle, I think, the Ethereum Foundation taught me, which I think is quite relevant to Orca today is this philosophy of subtraction. This notion that as something grows from company to DAO to ecosystem, something becomes more community owned less like a central institution.
There are certain philosophies that are useful for thinking about being less accumulative as the central decision making organization more attractive, trying to think about how to make things happen in the ecosystem, rather than necessarily being the ones making them. I think this mindset actually is quite relevant to a lot of projects who are reaching this level of maturity.
Wes: I would add to what Lakshman had said. I think for us being active in various capacities, both on the investment side, as well as the user side across different chains, then seeing how governance is evolving. I think there’s a real opportunity for us, within the Solana ecosystem writ large, but I think specifically here at Orca to really get it right.
I think there’s this underlying ethos, which we are very much believers in, as relates to decentralized governance and ensuring that the community and token holders are at the core of how we decide the path of Orca. The reality is there’s a balance between how we ensure that we empower the folks that have the deepest domain knowledge who are breathing, everything that the protocol is building across various time horizons, is well equipped to be able to move decisively and act in the best interest of the community at large
I think there’s a real opportunity to combine some of the knowledge and expertise that a number of folks on the council have across these various other chains into a package of experiences, both within crypto, as well as web2 or the legacy world where there’s certainly positives and then a lot of failures that we can learn from, then decide the best path forward for the community at Orca.
Question 2: How do you all plan to work together, for the benefit of Orca as a whole?
KZ: There is a huge diversity of experiences in this room, we have builders of various capacities. We have ex founders, now founders, we have venture capital members or community builders, and many of you guys are meeting each other for the very first time in this chat.
How do you guys plan to come together? What are some approaches that you would take or you have taken in the past, DAO experiences that will allow you guys to come together quickly, and make decisions effectively for Orca going forward?
Larry: The hardest part with any council or any group of individuals sitting at a table is coordinating and building consensus. The coordination costs for a group of busy folks is always high. It’s the simple things that work well. It’s basically having some sort of recurring calls, having a chat room where everyone is actually present and responsive. People need to care. Because that’s the main thing that really creates an effective group.
My hope and intention is to have recurring calls to make sure we are in constant communication and answering questions from the community, from the team, from other individuals and from investors. I think being there is the most important thing — just showing up.
Hart: I’m on a similar kind of council role for open Zeppelin’s Forta Project, which is a security auditing and a web3 monitoring system. In my experience here, the vast majority of issues are non-controversial. Where I think this council is supposed to dig in, is on the controversial stuff, and that’s entirely the point.
We are efficient in decision making and we are following the community, or the project team’s opinion, on the vast majority of non-controversial simple stuff and then we dig in on the big issues and I think that actually works pretty well.
Tags: I think that some of it will fall on myself, as well as some other core contributors of Orca, to help facilitate an organized schedule of meetings throughout the year. Out of the gate, it would make sense for the council to establish guidelines, where there’s a commitment that members will show up to a certain number of meetings and to be actively engaged.
I think we should also facilitate some early meetings to get to know each other. I think that the breadth of experience and background here is really a plus. The diversity that people bring to the table will inevitably lead to more effective and informed decision making, which should bear fruit as the ecosystem matures.
Cortina: I do think that it’s important as we develop this council, can we build this in a way where we don’t need people to stake their reputations in order to contribute? That is a big question for DAOs is eventually we want this council to be full of community members and contributors. Obviously having people from the Solana Foundation or from other projects is extremely valuable, to get their perspectives and the same way you would have something like that with a board of directors.
I think it is crucial for our industry as a whole to make sure that we’re always a vacuum sucking talent from the rest of the world into crypto. That means creating as many opportunities as possible. So that’s one thing that I would really lean on is figuring out ways to design this where we can have other community members say, “Hey, I’m gonna contribute for several months in whatever capacity and build up a reputation and build up trust within the community just behind my screen name” or whatever it is, with hopes of of joining the council and the next cycle are however, that works out.
Question 3: What potential conflicts of interest might there be for Council members, now or in the future?
KZ: Do you guys foresee any other potential conflict of interest, either between your future role on the Orca Council and your other participation with Orca? Or between this role and your participation in protocols or businesses outside of Orca? How do you plan to address those potential conflicts of interest?
Hart: I’m also an adviser to the newly created UniSwap Foundation. So I’ll put that out there. UniSwap is, in some sense, a competitor, but I look at them as a different thing. So I’ll be very transparent about that.
Tags: I’m the General Counsel of Orca. I don’t view that as a conflict, per se, but want to be open about that, as well as that I am an ORCA token holder.
Min: I am an investor and my job is to do as many things as possible. In addition I also participate on a compound grants committee with Larry, and potentially will be participating in more with other portfolio companies. We also have investments in Cowswap and Osmosis, where we’re active participants in governance there.
What I will say, having done this for a while, we’re very good at keeping information confidential, otherwise we wouldn’t still be in business. Everything is securely trimmed, a chain is walled.
KoWei: I’m also involved in the Mango Markets’ governance. But Mango is an orderbook, I think that the market for order books and AMMs should be quite different. So I don’t see there’s a real conflict of interest.
Dom: Being part of Solana Foundation, if there is anything that is Solana specific or internally related then I’m probably going to be one of the earlier people informed about what sort of direction, or I may make a decision internally about what sort of direction, Solana takes, or what our go to market strategy might look like.
Having a finger in both pies, Orca and Solana Foundation: my obligation is really to be as transparent as possible, to not just opportunities that are available to Orca but for all of DeFi projects in general.
tmoc: I am a core contributor to Orca, and I just want to be open that I do have a token grant from Orca for being a contributor. I don’t view this as a conflict of interest as it incentivizes me to work, and to want the best for the protocol and long term, but I just wanted to call that out.
Wes: We are an institutional investment firm. We have both a liquid and venture arm and we have processes that ensure that we treat confidential and privileged information with the utmost care. I think, being guided by the goal of being transparent and having the right sort of ethics and ethical compass: integrity in terms of how we push forward. Perhaps that becomes codified over time.
Larry: So just to be super transparent, I personally hold some ORCA and Reverie, received a grant as well. So we hold some ORCA through Reverie. We work with a project called Osmosis which has been AMM on Cosmos, which you can sort of view as a competitor, but I think they operate in such a different space that they’re not direct competitors.
I’m also on the committee of the DeFi Education Fund, which is a UniSwap funded organization for DeFi policy initiatives in the United States. So those are some of the potential conflicts that I would like to disclose. I’m personally very motivated to help Orca succeed: that doesn’t mean helping competitors. It means really just focusing on Orca.
Question 4: How will council meetings remain transparent to the community? And what will be brought up at the first meeting?
KZ: This question comes from Milkman in the audience, and he has asked whether the council meetings will be transparent. So I’m gonna take that a little bit further and ask the council members here. How do you envision the council meetings to go and what is the first item that you want to bring up in the council meeting, should you become a finalized council member?
Tags: I would envision the meetings themselves to be closed sessions to facilitate openness of opinions and discussions as well as we may be entertaining potential projects and other matters that may be confidential. Maybe there will be material nonpublic information that would not be appropriate to be recorded and shared with the public, without some form of review.
I think that to solve the closed session dynamic, the community has proposed the concept of a secretary role, where the responsibility would be to take down notes and minutes if you will, then share those with the community, engage with the community who have questions, or want status updates, or to know what the council has been thinking about or what the council is up to. This would be both compliant legally, as well as in the best interest of the protocol.
KoWei: I think for transparency that the council meetings should be recorded, but not published. Then the secretary role can go through the recording and take notes, then publish an update on the weekly council meeting. Maybe we can have a bi-weekly report or something to the community. Maybe, about all the council votes, it should be transparent because if all the council members get a council token then the vote will be on chain. So, the vote itself should be transparent, but the discussion can be recorded and if something in the future needs to be accountable, then we can recheck the recording.
Question 5: What’s your vision for the future of Orca?
KZ: If you guys have a vision for the future of Orca, or you know what you’re contributing to the council to build, what would that be?
Wes: We’re in such an early innings of what that actually could be used for, especially on a performant network like Solana. Right now, the clearest use case is just going directly into the protocol and the DAO to be able to trade and provide liquidity, and v1.0, of what that looks like, when you abstract it away. But the reality is if you fast forward three, four or five years out, I think there’s just an immense opportunity for us to be so good and provide such deep liquidity that it just doesn’t make sense to go anywhere else. Whether you’re a user that’s seeking low slippage, or all sorts of use cases within other environments, whether it’s like gaming, or social enabled by web 3, anywhere where you have this sort of exchange of value between one unit of value versus another, if it’s powered by, by Orca, almost like Intel inside.
I think the focus is really around how we think about capital allocation and the frameworks to build that machine, so that we have a way to incentivize and facilitate growth amongst those different vectors: whether they’re users coming directly to us; or builders, using our SDK and building on top of Orca as using our infrastructure and then ultimately deepening our liquidity by finding a lot more folks that can come on and be LPs and be market makers for us.
KoWei: So now we see the likes of Kamino built by Hubble, I think it is called Super fluorescence, it’s just like now you can put it into your phone, LP on a DEX but you can also use this collateral to borrow stable coins, so DeFi is all about composability and now the composability to go from the spot market, just like borrower, lending, to more like derivative, or cover call, or order derivative and so on.
So I just feel like if Orca builds the liquidity infrastructure you should definitely in the long run empower so many things that have not been built yet or even been thought about before. That’s what I think is really possible in the long run. For now people will still think Orca Whirlpool is something like a Uni v3 equivalent on Solana, but if Solana can in the long run can do much more than Uni v3 can do. Also it’s all about the builder program and the community. So that’s why I think Orca can have infinite possibilities, if we just get optimistic.
Closing thoughts…
KZ: If any of the potential council members have anything that they would like to share, but haven’t had the opportunity to, please use these few minutes to share.
Cortina: I think what’s interesting is Solana is probably going to be the first place (we’ve already seen it a little bit with some primitives, like StepN, something where there’s just a massive application that we can all point to and say there tens, or hundreds of millions of people using this and it all makes sense) but then there’s also in the last few months, it’s becoming apparent to a lot of people that, that ZK-rollups, and some of Etherium’s scaling solutions are moving along a little bit faster than than we would have expected.
So we might be entering this era where there’s way more quality block space than there is demand for. So tying back to the council and governance is, there’s always this tension between ‘do you want to create a governance structure that provides assurances to other builders that nothing’s going to change here, and you can build on top of this sturdy foundation, that is Orca, and that is liquidity across Solana and that’s our promise’.
But also we have no idea what applications are going to develop, what forms of assets are going to come on the chain that want liquidity, what any of that is going to look like, we can kind of guess, and we have hints at it, but I think that’s kind of the first thing that I would bring up in council, like, getting kind of all the knowledge in the room and saying, where do we want to bet on this in terms of those two tensions, and do we want to remain nimble and flexible and be able to adapt to this total unknown that’s coming?
Min: I think DeFi in general is changing. In addition to a lot of the various forms of DEXs that are appearing on different L1s, I think the shape of market participation is also changing. How do we adapt to ensure that Orca is staying ahead of the curve?
Be it addressing institutional liquidity demands and the needs of builders who wish to build on top of Orca, will be top of mind. At the same time triaging any challenges that are posed by increased regulatory scrutiny, while also scaling Orca in a decentralized manner.
I think this group of council members has a very broad and complimentary experience and hopefully a lot of these high level strategic conversations will help steer the growth map of Orca in the right direction.
tmoc: I’ve been a part of a few DAOs, but they’re more social DAOs, not really DeFi, there’s one called Friends with Benefits on Ethereum. I’m also a founding member of a DAO called Bu Zhi DAO, which is a nonprofit DAO focused on advancing Taiwan’s web3 ecosystem and culture.
Larry: I think there’s just a lot of structural reasons for why I’m excited about Orca in particular: I think it’s really well positioned. One of which, and probably the most important in my mind, is the brand, with an exchange, as a marketplace, you need buyers and sellers, with something like Orca or even something like UniSwap, I think the key thing is to have a really strong brand.
When you have a really strong brand and a really nice user experience, you attract the retail users, and of course, liquidity providers and market makers, they want to trade against retail users, they don’t want to trade against other sophisticated market makers, because they’re not going to make any money.
Something that we think about a lot at Reverie is what are the things we can be doing today on the council at Orca to make sure that in the end state Orca is one of the top dogs on Solana.
Disclaimer: The content of this communication is not financial advice and should not be relied on by any persons as financial advice. This communication has not been provided in consideration of any recipient’s financial needs. We have not conducted any financial assessment based on the personal circumstances of any recipients. Before using the protocol, carefully review all relevant documentation and consider risks including total loss of funds.
