The Phonon Brief #9: Feb 25-Mar 2

Published in

Phonon DAO

6 min readMar 3, 2022

Welcome to the 9th 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

Community AMA
Native vs Backed Phonons
PDBG Recap 3/2
Chain Analysis

Phonon DAO Community Call 3/3

Thursday, the 3rd of March, will be our first community AMA. We want this to be an open forum where members of our community and the greater crypto community can present their questions, comments, and concerns to the PDBG and Core Devs. Our aim is to provide transparency around the phonon product as a whole, what the PDBG has been working on and achieved over the last 2 months, and any other questions you may have about the DAO or Phonon Network.

If you have questions you would like answered tweet us @PhononDAO or join our discord server.

If you are already familiar with certain topics of the DAO but have questions that would help others, feel free to ask them as well.

The AMA will be hosted in our discord main stage at 1pm EST on 3/3. There will also be a chat channel to ask questions if you would not like to talk.

What are Native and Backed Phonons?

This week we released a breakdown of what native and backed phonons are and how they are used in the Phonon Ecosystem. The above chart gives you a glance of their similarities and differences.

This post explains:

What native phonons are,
How nPhonons derive value,
Native Phonon use cases,
and what backed phonons are.

PBDG Meeting Recap

DAO Wide Overview

Some topics were briefly touched as more of statements rather than discussion. The first point made was that the DAO is here to service the network, not the other way around.

Conversion updates were given. Currently the circulating supply of $PHONON is about 6b. However that is not the converted amount and conversion depends on how you define it. If we look at conversion as the total that was in the redeemer contract and has now been dispersed, we are at ~54%. If we consider conversion percentage as the amount of GRID community holders have redeemed we are at ~45%.

Right now there is about $4.4m in liquidity for the PHONON token which is far greater than the GRID token. The lack of community conversion is something that will need to be addressed in the coming months. The DAO plans to cut off conversion at some point in 2023 so if you know people who have not converted yet, give them a heads up.

We are also looking to expand the DAO multisig, right now it is 3/5 and would like to expand to 5/9. The structure for voting on new signers was notbeen decided due to concerns about a potential attack vector. This would be allowing anyone to become a signer and a group being able to apply for multiple positions. Within the next week there should be a formal PHiP to lock in the handling of new signers.

Governance Process

A proposal for how the governance process should work was discussed in the meeting, I recommend reading the proposal but a brief overview is that there will be four ‘agents’ in each of the four working groups (Economics, Product, Operations and Governance, and Communications) and those agents will serve for 6 months. They will start by creating a budget request for the and will be the ones leading the charge on fulfilling the goals of each group.

Flat vs Hierarchical designs were discussed, the members that spoke up were ore in favor of having a hierarchical approach in the beginning to help move the large undertaking forward in a timely manner. Compensation was mentioned and two approaches were suggested. One approach was for the agents to include salary in their budget request. Another was having the DAO create KPIs that they would need to meet to receive certain payouts.

A follow up discussion about fulltime employees and paying them began. One side was worried about paying out too much PHONON at relatively low prices. The other side brought up network effect and being too judicial with payouts can hurt us by failing to capture a broader audience in a timely manner.

Website Update

Communication for developing the scope of the engagement will happen over the next few days. In the initial meeting the team that will be building out the website have agreed to be paid in both stablecoins and PHONON. The team had ideas of creating a visual language that makes the website unique to Phonon. Three phases of the website are developing the baseline, creating the visual language, and developing the documentation section of the website. The goal is to have the new baseline website completed by the launch of the testnet.

Testnet Launch

Karl announced that the technological pieces for the launch of the testnet are ready. This means that there is a basic wallet that can interact with ethereum to create, transfer, and destroy phonons. There still needs to be a structure to log how people are using the testnet and report issues before it launches.

The launch is estimated for 3–4 weeks. This will give the DAO time to structure the onboarding of users. Action steps are recruiting people to join the testnet. We need 200 people to be involved. Creating a signup sheet should be a priority.

Marketing

Lack of marketing was brought up as a concern, specifically engagement on twitter. It was suggested that hiring a fulltime person to run the socials and build engagement would pay dividends down the road. Since this is the first concrete announcement of when the testnet will be so it makes sense to start a marketing push now.

We need effort around getting podcast appearances, creating discussion on twitter, and marketing to crypto adjacent groups that would find this interesting.