The Phonon Brief #5: Jan 21-Jan 27

Published in

Phonon DAO

5 min readJan 27, 2022

Welcome to the 5th edition of The Phonon Brief. Our aim with this newsletter is to keep the Phonon and the wider crypto community informed of the latest news, including product launches, governance changes, and ecosystem updates. If you’re interested in learning more about Phonon, follow our official Twitter and Medium accounts.

Summary

The Phonon App
PDBG Recap
Chain Analysis
Resouces

The Phonon Alpha App

On Jan 26, a blog post announced that the alpha code for the Phonon App was made open source. This means that you will now be able to load up the Phonon wallet and try it out.

In order to try it, you will need to have some experience with programming. At a high level, you will need to clone the phonon-client repository and start up the webUI. Then you’ll want to clone the phonon-app repository, install dependencies, and start that up as well. The app talks to the phonon-client to create, update, and redeem phonons.

There are more detailed instruction for getting started on the GitHub under the Readme document.

PDBG Meeting Recap

The Phonon DAO Bootstrapping Group meets every Wednesday at 12:30 EST. If you are ever interested in listening, feel free to join in the Discord.

Liquidity

This week started out with discussion around the first full week of liquidity on SushiSwap. As mentioned in the last few briefs we launched a partnership pool with Frax Finance, where they provide their FRAX stablecoin and the DAO provides PHONON tokens.

The first impressions the group has had is that SushiSwap routing is not allowing for multihops. The only PHONON pool on SushiSwap is the PHONON-FRAX pool. When a user wants to exchange ETH for PHONON, SushiSwap should first convert ETH to FRAX then FRAX to PHONON. However, if you attempt to make this trade the SushiSwap router will not calculate your estimated PHONON and not allow a trade to be made. The extend of the issue is not currently known but it is assumed to be affecting the DEX Aggregators as will. Currently the majority of SushiSwap trades are from Arbitrage bots and not actual users. SushiSwap has not commented on the situations despite multiple attempts to contact them.

This liquidity option is not a long term solution and the DAO will be considering changes in the future that include removing liquidity from SushiSwap.

Questions about Trust

A common questions from new people in the Phonon Community is about trust. How can I trust the certificates that say the card is acting the way it should?

This questions was was answered by first explaining that each Phonon compatible device has a unique “certificate” that consists of signature from the producer hashed with the physically unique and unclonable chip on that device which is required for compatibility, the certificates show provenance so you can be sure where it was created. How this works is that GridPlus (the sole current producer) has a keypair that signs the ID saying this card has two properties. The first, that the card is running the Phonon code and the second that it has a PUF, or physically unclonable function.

When a two parties are engaging in a transaction the cards use the cert to check each other and verify they are on the approved list of certificate manufacturers for the Phonon Network. This list is comparable to how https works and the cards are manufactured the same way a bank manufacture a credit card to not allow for manipulation.

What is stopping a manufacturer from acting maliciously and if they did could I be rugged?

To become an approved manufacturer of cards on the Phonon Network the DAO will require a certain amount of PHONON to be staked by the manufacturers to help prevent malicious attacks. However, even if a card was created in bad faith the limit of loss is restricted only to users who interact with the malicious party. Meaning, if a malicious act was conducted the Phonon DAO would be able to remove that card cert from the approved list of certificates. Thus limiting the loss and having the manufacturer of that card forfeit their stake. Buying a malisious card will not allow your fund to be stolen unless you are transacting with the bad actor. Once the bad actor is discovered anyone using those cards will be able to settle back on a blockchain.

Contributor Compensation

Early in the week a forum post was published outlining some potential compensation to be paid to early DAO contributors. The post was well received and some adjustment were suggested before this goes to a formal proposal. The post outlines payment for a few categories of people, community management, Media, Development, the PDBG, and the DAO stewards.

Valid comments were made about adjusting the community management and media categories to include ongoing payments rather than a one time amount. The goal is to encourage future participation as well as reward past contributions.

Working Groups

Four subgroups were created to facilitate more efficient use of time going forward. These four subgroup will meet and work on their specific duties each week then report back to the general PDBG meeting with updates.

The four groups are:

The Economics working group will focus on a variety of token related issues and opportunities, this includes, liquidity, protocol fees, native phonon structure, and much more.
The Product working group will focus on defining the roadmap for the DAO to pursue(e.g. what projects the DAO should focus on funding, timelines, etc.)
The Operations & Governance working group will define areas of the governance structure such as quorum and proposal structure.
The Communications working group will be facilitating all things marketing and optics. They will be creating content and marketing marketing materials, helping to run the discord and social accounts, and deciding how to frame the uses cases of the Phonon network and token.

If you have any interest in participating in these groups head to the #join-a-group channel in the discord.

Chain Analysis

The Chain Analysis has moved to a google sheet and you can access it here. This sheet is a work in progress and will regularly be updated with new information. If you have suggestions on what should be on here, leave a comment below on tweet me @PhononUpdates.