The Idea of YFLINK is Born
How 5 Anons Teamed Up to Build YFLINK in Less Than a Week
And how LINK marines can achieve more with the help of a Defi-backed governance token
Mine $YFLINK with $LINK here: https://yflink.io
HOWEVER BEFORE DOING THAT . . . PLEASE ENSURE YOU READ THIS ENTIRE POST
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe
Marine Sergeant Robert “Bobby” Shaftoe is my absolute favourite character from Neal Stephenson’s classic novel Cryptonomicon.
Shaftoe is every bit as tough as you’d expect a marine veteran of Guadalcanal and Corregidor to be.
His life is a total mess. He has a wife in the Philippines, and a child he’s never met. He’s a junkie and can’t function without morphine.
He’s deadly, of course, but he’s also down to earth. He’s funny. He’s curious, fiercely loyal and duty bound.
When someone complains to him about all the hurt that stands between them and something that needs to get done, his inevitable response is to tell them to “display some fucking adaptability.”
And boy does he display adaptability himself.
At one point in the novel, a German U-boat crew discovers him shipwrecked while he’s carrying critical intelligence that can’t fall into enemy hands.
As he sees the U-boat approach, Shaftoe reaches into his pocket for his cyanide pill, only to find that it’s been dissolved into mush by the frigid salt water.
So he friggin adapts.
To the bewilderment of his would-be captors, he dives deep underwater in an attempt to drown himself.
He would have succeeded too had the Germans not plucked him out of the water, unconscious, to resuscitate him.
Talk about hardcore adaptability!
The Idea for YFLINK is Born
Sometimes when I’m paralyzed by fear, doubt and uncertainty, I think of Shaftoe barking at me to display some adaptability.
This Friday I was joking around with a group of friends on Slack (I spend way too much time on Slack) about what seems to me like the beginning of a Cambrian explosion of YFI forks.
Whatever YFI holders might think of the phenomenon, it seems pretty clear to me that Andre Cronje himself, in true open-source spirit, is all for his work being forked, mutated and adapted.
Which got me thinking, what if we took Andre Cronje’s phenomenal work, forked it, and adapted it for marine use.
We’d get the party started by finally bringing some well deserved yield to LINK marines.
Then beyond that, where else might this experiment take us?
What might happen if marines poured some cryptoeconomics into the engine of LINK’s legendary meme machine?
What kind of influence might marines wield if they managed to form a 5%, 10%, heck maybe even 15% LINK block?
In essence, what would happen if we could capture in a token, with a transparent market price, the value of the attention of a highly coordinated group of LINK marines?
What started out as a cool thought experiment between a group of friends suddenly ballooned into a huge idea that we got excited about bringing to life.
I started toying with the idea of taking charge, somehow pulling a team together and bringing this idea to life over the course of the weekend.
And that’s when I felt it. That cold grip of fear and uncertainty and doubt wrapping itself around my gut.
What if I can’t pull a team together?
What if I pull a team together, but we can’t move fast enough?
What if we somehow move fast enough, but then LINK marines hate the idea?
What if marines get really excited about YFLINK, but then governance led by marines turns out to be a terrible idea?
It was almost enough to make me abandon the thought and go back to my routine of staring at yieldfarmer.info and hitting refresh every few minutes to see my YF2 balance tick up.
Thankfully that’s when I thought of Shaftoe barking at me to display some fucking adaptability.
Do you think LINK marines shrank like violets the moment Vitalik tweeted no oracle was worth $32 million?
Do you think LINK marines ran for the hills when Zeus Capital put a 7 cent strong sell recommendation on LINK?
Do you think LINK marines curl up into the fetal position every time Chainlink TG admins say there is no timeline for releases, they occur when they’re ready?
Of course not!
LINK wouldn’t be the $9 billion dollar juggernaut it is today if marines hadn’t pulled their socks up, adapted and soldiered on.
So I thought screw it. Gotta risk it for the biscuit. Let’s do this.
But to have a decent shot at this, I was going to need all the help I could get.
Fire Team
I called my good friend Link_0x (not his real name). He knows everyone in crypto, has incredible ideas which have turned into massive crypto projects.
Two minutes into the call he laughed out loud and said this was going to be huge.
He told me to reach out to MrPineapplePen (also not his real name). This was going to be a hectic weekend.
MrPineapplePen is one of the best smart contract developers I know and pretty soon after we got off the phone we were planning out how best to adapt Andre’s YFI contracts for marine use.
San, another long time friend of mine, you wouldn’t believe the legendary projects he’s led and is leading if I told you. He happened to be free this weekend and jumped at the chance to work on something fun.
And last but not least Ashitaka . . .
Oooh . . . say that again!. . . Ashitaaakaaaaaa
By the time Ashitaka and I jumped on our first Zoom call he had fired up the YFLINK growth engine and recruited marines who started pumping out memes so fast I was having trouble staying focussed on the launch of YFLINK itself!
The Plan
With the team recruited, we came up with a plan.
We’ll start by forking Andre’s revolutionary Yearn contract and switching it to accept LINK instead of yCRV.
There will also be another 4 contracts from which LINK marines can mine YFLINK, details of which are described further down in this post.
Now, if you don’t know what any of this means . . . display some adaptability LINK marine!
Hop onto Discord or Twitter and ask a brother for help in figuring this out.
Once those pools are up and running, we plan on submitting some proposals for marines to vote on. Read on for more details on the proposals we have planned below.
The YFLINK Token
At the end of all this merry go round, you’ll end up holding $YFLINK.
What does this YFLINK token do? Well that’s up to you marines.
It’s a governance token. It allows a group of marines to vote and make decisions.
Decisions about what? Well, you tell us. Anyone can submit a proposal.
Everyone can vote with their YFLINK tokens.
Proposal #1: LINK Meme Competition
We thought it might be cool to take YFLINK’s governance mechanism out for a spin with a meme competition.
We’ll post more details later but it’ll be pretty simple.
If you hold even a tiny amount of YFLINK, you can submit a meme as a proposal for the meme competition.
You can then tweet your meme proposal out to your network to gather votes.
The winner will have their meme hosted on the front page of the YFLINK site until the next meme competition, plus an award that we’ll announce soon, possibly YFLINK.
Personally, I’m quite excited about seeing what happens when we pour a little cryptoeconomic incentives into the engine of the legendary LINK meme machine!
Other Proposals
We thought it might be a good idea to use YFLINK to govern something in addition to memes.
Perhaps you agree, or perhaps you don’t, end of the day, your vote decides!
We have a few ideas ourselves, but have also heard some incredible ideas from a few marines we’ve been speaking to.
If you have any ideas, please do post them on https://gov.yflink.io
A Word on Token Value
We’re taking a page out of Andre’s book here and saying this token should be valued at ZERO.
Token Distribution
Please read this entire post carefully before visiting the liquidity mining page.
Our primary objective is to get YFLINK into the hands of as many LINK marines as we possible can, as fast as we can.
The key obstacle we foresee are yield farmers who are in it just for a flip.
Our secondary objective is to not run out of cash.
We have not raised capital and have no plans for raising capital.
However, we do have big plans for YFLINK and we need to ensure we can compete for resources with VC-funded projects who have raised millions of dollars and have massive budgets.
We can’t bring a knife to a gunfight basically.
So, we came up with the following solution.
Note: I have had to change the following section like 5 friggin times already.
What we’ve discovered is as soon as you put something on the blockchain, all kinds of hell breaks loose, and we have had to display a fair amount of adaptability
What this means for you is that the below will likely change materially and fast, so please take it as indicative of the plans and intentions we are working our arses off to sticking to
Once the insanity of the launch is over, we will post in detail about what actually happened in this crazy period, rather than trying to provide live blow by blow updates that will slow us down
At approximately 17:30 UTC on 2 August 2020, we posted a draft of this paper on our brand new governance site
- At 05:39 UTC on 3 August 2020 we created the first YFLINK contracts — YFLINK token is an ERC20 token with a fixed supply of 85,000
- Shortly after, we began mining the YFLINK token on behalf of the 5 creators, up to 8%, with between ~1% — 1.4% going to each creator, and 3% being held as reserves
- We then also mined on behalf of friends with deep and wide connections in the YFLINK community — a total of ~6%. We believed this was critical to ensuring that we had the best shot at getting as much YFLINK into the hands of marines without having to go through yield farming whales. We may do 1% — 2% more here if we find additional people with reach
- Finally, we incentivised a close group of friends with preferential mining up to 2% of total YFLINK to seed our liquidity pool with the first ~$1.1 million worth of LINK, to start. Regardless of when this is deployed, it will be capped at 2%
- By participating in the early mining program, all of the participants in 3 and 4 above have committed not to mine further until the first week of the liquidity mining program is complete, after which they are free to mine as they see fit
- In total, we expect to use approximately 16 - 18% of YFLINK’s total supply for this early mining program
“But isn’t that effectively a pre-mine!?!!”
Sure, call it a pre-mine if you like.
And you know what, if I had to do this all over again I would just do a pre-mine, same outcome, much faster to implement. Life lessons.
At the end of the day, we are trying to solve for:
a) not having to raise capital . . . we wouldn’t have been able create and launch YFLINK in 7 days if we had gone down that route; and
b) ensuring we have the resources and incentives we need to make YFLINK sustainable.
This is not a pump and dump ponzi scheme — that was never the intention and besides, it looks like that fork ponzi game is dead and buried anyway.
So if that’s what you were looking for, sorry to disappoint.
We are thinking about the long term usefulness of the platform for LINK marines (not yield farmers!) and this is the best we could come up with in the time required to survive in a very competitive space!
Also you should be aware that the 5 creators have agreed not to mine YFLINK further for 6 hours after the launch of the marketing campaign and disclosure of the contract addresses.
During the first week and after the 6 hours are up, we have agreed to only mine Pool 1, which notionally at least is the riskier of the pools.
And finally, after the first week of the liquidity mining program is complete, everyone, including the creators, are free to mine as they see fit.
Key Burn
This was a bit of a tricky decision, because on the one hand, you want to give marines the ability to easily change YFLINK’s emission schedule.
On the other hand though, giving one person or a small group of people the right to change emissions at will is way more risk than we want to take on.
So as soon as all YFLINK contracts are deployed, we are burning the contract keys.
Here is the burn transaction: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1d3b95cba94c864ed116315f5ab196f4e1f6e00de98470f7ba9f7ad08ba1e865
Which means that no one, not even us, can change YFLINK’s emission.
If at some point marines decide they want to change the emission schedule, have a group of marines hold a multi-sig (hey, maybe we send Ser the keys along with 10 Big Macs and a thank you note!) etc., it’s still doable, however it will require everyone to migrate onto another token.
Pools and emission schedule
A total of 85,000 tokens will be emitted in 6 pools.
Emission will last for approximately 15 weeks however the vast majority of the emission will occur in the first 4 weeks.
Details of the pools’ emission schedule can be found here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Jyc2BXAUWxhKY7zfEtgM3qpJ24Qw3wrLq5nQP6nMhLE/edit#gid=2088403485
- LIVE (15,000 tokens) — Pool 0 is what we call the Genesis Pool (live): LINK goes in, YFLINK comes out over time
- LIVE (15,000 tokens)— Pool 1 is a LINK Balancer pool (live): you put LINK and YFLINK goes into a Balancer pool, you take the resulting BPT tokens and put them in the YFLINK pool. You earn YFLINK and BAL over time
- Live from Wed 12 Aug 2020 1400 UTC( 15,000 tokens)— Pool 2 is a yCRV Balancer pool: same as 2 above but using yCRV instead of LINK. You’ll earn YFLINK, BAL, Curve interest and potentially CRV tokens
- Live from Wed 19 Aug 2020 1400 UTC (15,000 tokens)— Pool 3 is a fun one. You take LINK and deposit it into Aave.com. You’ll get aLINK tokens, which you then post in an aLINK Balancer pool along with YFLINK. You then take the resulting BPT tokens and stake them in the YFLINK pool. You earn YFLINK, BAL and AAVE interest
- Live from Wed 26 Aug 2020 1400 UTC (20,000 tokens)— Pool 4 is our little twist on voting. Voting requires staking of YFLINK in the Governance contract for the duration of the vote. But wouldn’t it be cool if your YFLINKs earned more YFLINKs while they’re staked? Of course it would be cool. This pool does that.
- LIVE (5,000 tokens) — The Fuck Up Pool: Pool 5 was never meant to exist. It was an accident that occurred before we burned the admin keys. Timely reminder of the risks! Please do read the risk section below!
“Wait, did you just say Fuck Up Pool?”
Hahah yes, I did. Please don’t ban us Medium. Read below for details on what happened with this pool.
Actually a timely reminder of the risks of defi!
Last but not least, risks . . .there are plenty of them
Where to begin haha. This is super risky.
For starters, for all of Andre’s and our great care, for all of the tens of thousands of dollars that Balancer and Curve have spent on audits, these contracts are liable to explode in a glorious fireball of bits at any moment and without warning.
Handle them like you would a flask of nitroglycerin.
🚨 Case in point! MrPineappleMan just informed me that BEFORE THE KEY BURN, he accidentally deployed an additional rewards pool of 5,000 tokens 🚨
We initially intended to have only 80,000 tokens. Now we have 85,000. Ooops!
Fortunately we know with certainty that after the key burn, there really is nothing, not even a mistake on our end, that could change supply from 85,000.
The Fuck Up Pool means that we will end up mining up to an additional 5,000 tokens than we planned over the coming week.
We are calling this our Fuck Up Pool, and you can find contract details for it here: https://etherscan.io/address/0x01877A9b00AE3c7101525721464F3e5840e07F49
This is the creator team wallet it’s been mining into: https://etherscan.io/token/0x8194efab90a290b987616f687bc380b041a2cc25?a=0x01877a9b00ae3c7101525721464f3e5840e07f49
We will use the $YFL mined from here to fulfill our early mining program obligations faster, and any left over we’ll potentially use for Proposal #1 (meme competition), or maybe propose a burn, we’ll figure this out after launch
We’ve kept the contract code closed source, so as to discourage yield farmers from exploiting it.
But again, timely reminder, when code is immutable, risks go up exponentially!
Second, we the fire team that started this crazy experiment all have day jobs.
All of us have committed to working on YFLINK, 2 of us full time, until at least the first product is launched.
However we also have day jobs, so at any time, one or more of us could decide to pull a Satoshi and “move on to other things”.
Third, I’ll repeat this again, this token really should be valued at ZERO.
Fourth, if it’s not entirely clear already, this whole experiment could collapse into a heap. I mean, we pulled it together over a manic week.
And fifth, it’s actually something I personally worry about, some whale comes in and scoops up a disproportionate amount of the vote.
That would be a bummer. We are doing our damndest to mitigate that.
And if you can help us get to marines faster, please do.
So there you have it marines. Consider yourselves briefed. Excited to see where this leads.
And please do join us on Discord and Twitter to start this experiment!
Let’s roll out!
Shaftoe
(also not my real name)
