I’m a Happy Fish, don’t make me into Sushi!
How Zuni’s Synthetic Minnowing can prevent the next #sushiflop.
This article draws from EJ Spode’s Synthetic Minnows & Polycameral Governance.
tl;dr: When a Token is launched, Whales can easily accumulate huge stacks, then act in a way that wrecks many smaller holders. Synthetic minnowing is a method of coaxing whales to behave like minnows, ensuring the whole crypto ocean can be healthy together.
Since the inception of the ZuniSwap community, there has been an outpouring of support for the project. The goal of ZuniSwap is to implement meaningful community governance over a common ecosystem utility, the DeFi Swap. After all, Users should decide the direction of the tools they use every day.
This begs the immediate question: How can a new protocol attract users of all sizes (e.g. Whales, Sharks, Dolphins, Turtles, Minnows) without exposing any one group to catastrophic manipulations by others?
As part of the answer, ZuniSwap will implement a version of EJ Spode’s “Synthetic Minnowing”.
The Problem
The problem with the goal of diversity in DeFi governance is that in practice, governance typically gravitates towards the interest of whales — select stakeholders with massive positions in the protocol. This is not really surprising. If control is proportional to shares/coins held, then those with massive positions will ipso facto have massive control over the direction of the protocol.
(Spode, 2020)
How Synthetic Minnowing Helps
Synthetic Minnowing is the process of modeling classes of user, then creating specific rules and parameters to govern how each class of user can interact with a Protocol. For example, we might want Whales to have a long term vesting schedule, while at the same time allowing Minnows to freely enter and exit a system.
The solution to the problem of representing minnows is to enable the creation of synthetic minnows — accounts that may not be held by real life minnows, but which mirror the composition and hence interests of real life minnows.
A whale can always spin up 1000 addresses, and pretend to be a school of minnows, but a protocol can coax that school of minnows into swimming with the whole community of fishes.
Properly parameterized synthetic minnows will take on the interests of natural minnows. Thus, governance protocols that wish to represent the interests of natural minnows may be indifferent to whether the minnows joining governance are synthetic or natural. Apart from the preserving the interests of minnows, such governance strategies can help to broaden the ecosystem and develop governance mechanisms that are more robust and less myopic.
The Benefits of Fair Launch & Synthetic Minnowing
If we can model classes of address, and properly incentivize the Whales, the Turtles, the Dolphins, and the Minnows, we can launch a Token in a way that benefits the overall ecosystem, and creates attractive, ecosystem-safe incentives for each class of user.
Healthy fish should swim in the ocean, not be served up for dinner.
How to get $ZUNI during our fair launch.
We are collecting a list of interested ETH addresses, running statistics, and modeling our Whales, Turtles, Dolphins, Sharks, and Minnows before launching the $ZUNI token.
If you are interested in $ZUNI, please visit https://www.zuni.fi/join-zuni or share your Public Address on our channels. If you don’t like clicking links, here is a screenshot of that page:
Once the token is live, and our ocean is full of happy, swimming fish, we can all sleep at night, earn some money, and spend more time with our loved ones. Crypto has the potential to automate trust, not just exploit it.
With good research and simple, effective deployment, the $ZUNI community will own a sustainable DeFi Protocol that benefits our whales, minnows, dolphins and more…
but not one group fish at the expense of others.
Swimming Fish is Happy: 🐳🐋🐬🐟🐠🐡🦈🐙🐚
Dead Fish is Sad: 🍣
Special thanks to telegram Leo for prompting and exploring this dialogue.
For more information:
Visit: www.zuni.fi, or read our Team Statement.
For further discussion on $ZUNI, join the Community on Discord, or follow announcements on Twitter.
