Jordan Kruger Becomes Vesper’s CEO, Vesper + Gauntlet, Ambassador Selection Progresses
Also: Jordan’s first AMA, Matthew’s RealVision interview, and more.
Jordan Kruger Becomes CEO of Vesper
On Thursday of this week, Vesper co-founder Jeff Garzik proudly announced to the Vesper community that fellow co-founder Jordan Kruger has been appointed CEO for Vesper Brewing Co.
Jeff Garzik, Vesper’s chief designer and CTO, posted:
Jordan has been my partner in Vesper since the very beginning and has been a thoughtful and effective steward of the Vesper vision in the months following. She also happens to be one of Bloq’s earliest employees.
Now, while a title like “CEO” might appear unusual in the DeFi context, the team sees this differently for two principal reasons:
* In the early stages of our governance, such a role is vital for the very same reasons we didn’t go 100% DAO on Day One. Steady, early-stage stewardship is required such that a DAO-based project doesn’t fly apart in its nascent stages.
* While we strive to have as much as possible be decided within the DAO, Vesper can — and must! — interact with the so-called “real world.” To that end, this role is focused on ensuring that what starts in the world of ones and zeros among the community takes tangible shape in the world of concrete and steel. Jordan has led Vesper’s business development efforts and is thus ideal to serve in this capacity.
To that last point: The “E” in CEO is “executive” or “that which makes things happen.” That’s the role, for which Jordan has proven herself ready.”
Jordan will hold her first AMA as Vesper CEO at 1:00 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on May 18 in the Discord #ama channel.
From the rest of us at Vesper, we are extremely excited as well to welcome Jordan into this new role.
Vesper & Gauntlet
Gauntlet, a simulation platform that helps secure blockchain-based financial markets, has signed on to help optimize certain Vesper strategies by creating a dynamic approach to collateral management.
Gauntlet accomplishes this by examining on-chain statistics like network congestion, market liquidity, and more into a collateral management module. Through this module, any Vesper strategy that uses lending (right now, through Maker DAO) can minimize over-collateralization without jeopardizing security of funds.
Put another way, instead of using static, arbitrary benchmarks for collateral ratios on loans, Gauntlet will build out the tools for strategies to instead leverage a dynamic, automated approach to collateralization. This means more efficient allocation of pool deposits, which aims to achieve higher APY and TVL.
Stay tuned for more news on this front.
Ambassador Program Progress
Second-round interviews for the Global Ambassador Program took place this week, with a focus on candidates from China, Russia, Vietnam, Philippines, Turkey, and Korea. Watch this space as we will be introducing our ambassadors in the coming weeks.
If you have a passion for community, DeFi and want to become an ambassador for Vesper submit an application, we’d love to hear from you.
What’s This?
Stay tuned.
Matthew Roszak on RealVision Finance
Closing out the week, Vesper Co-founder Matthew Roszak held a wide-ranging interview with Ash Bennington on RealVision Finance. (Free registration required to see the video.) The DeFi-related content starts about 25 minutes into the show.)
Vesper Insight of the Week — vToken Burns
Ethereum gas prices have been on the rise this week. Thus, the the team researched whether there is a notable impact on the vToken transaction volumes and specifically, whether or not users are withdrawing fewer vTokens out of the pools as a result.
When looking at the number of transactions involving vTokens, a decline can be noticed, especially transactions involving vETH and vUSDC. Note that a similar effect took place around March 16–18 and April 20, when gas prices were almost as high as this week.
Now, do high prices also cause a lower USD outflow from the Vesper pools? If we look at the weekly USD value of vToken burns, the answer seems to be “yes,” as this week and the one of April 19 seem to have lower values compared to other weeks. However, last week the gas prices were relatively low, but so was vToken burn USD volume. This indicates that more money is “sticking” in the Vesper pools the last two weeks but is only partly explainable by the high gas fees.
Odds and Ends
Have you checked out the excerpts from Jeff Garzik’s interview with Virtual Bacon? Here are two select clips:
As per habit and custom, art from 0xHolland rounds out the week:
As always, keep up with Vesper on:
#VesperFi
Vespernauts Michael, Mikey, Simon C., Holland, and Green Jeff contributed to this report. Edited by Phil Gomes.
