The DeFi Conspiracy is Real: But is it Community, or Collusion?
Lessons on community from Vitalik Buterin and Siphonophores.
tl;dr: Community on Ethereum needs to be more than a buzzword. Group Actions can be good or bad for a Community, but first you need to decide: Who is the Community — and what does it care about?
In the first week since announcing ZuniSwap, the outpouring of support has been tremendous. Our Discord server has grown from 0 to over 600 active members. An independent $ZUNI WeChat group has attracted over 300 DeFi enthusiasts. Twitter has been fired up.
Together, we are thoughtfully discussing DeFi, sharing opinions on futurism & technology, and building meaningful cross-cultural connections that will elevate the space for everyone.
While the growth and interest is wonderful, it leaves us asking: how do we prevent our budding Community from turning into a vessel of toxic Collusion?
Learning from the Siphonophore.
Siphonophores are a highly specialized type of jellyfish. Unlike jellyfish, the Siphonophore is a colony of numerous individuals, each with a specific function, such as feeding, attacking, or defense. Sounds a bit like DeFi.
In the crypto ocean of creatures, some are big, some are small, some are bots, or newbs, or whales — and of course, some are humble Degen Farmers 👨🌾. How can we grow a vibrant community with all the lovely Crypto Creatures — one that maximizes positive Coordination and minimizes vulnerabilities to nefarious Colluders?
Vitalik Buterin, in yesterday’s article, Coordination, Good and Bad, provides a few insights into striking the balance.
Sometimes, more coordination is good: it’s better when people can work together to collectively solve their problems. At other times, more coordination is dangerous: a subset of participants could coordinate to disenfranchise everyone else. And at still other times, more coordination is necessary for another reason: to enable the broader community to “strike back” against a collusion attacking the system. (Buterin, 2020)
With that in mind, it’s clear that a strong ecosystem needs to balance between allowing healthy coordination (Community) and taming unhealthy coordination (Collusion). These are two sides of the same coin.
Roles-Based Community Growth.
As the siphonophore grows, it adds specialized individuals with specific roles. Feeders, defenders, movers, swimmers, digesters, sexual reproducers, and more — linking together to grow a chain colony that is more than the sum of its parts.
Roles-Based Community Growth is the design principle most appropriate for launching $ZUNI and organically defining our Community. Flexible roles facilitate an alignment between user growth and user responsibility. It is useful and paradigmatic for DeFi and Crypto in general.
$ZUNI Roles, today:
⚔️ Code Warriors : Core Dev Team, out on the battlefield every day.
🧙 Elders : Wise, Trustworthy members of the Tribe.
🛡️ Guards : Defenders, Double Agents and social media Psy-Ops*.
📜 Messengers : Emissaries to Distant Places, Carrying the Peaceful message of $ZUNI.
🏴 Reserves : Skilled Artisans, ready to help Zuni when the time comes.
If you see a role that Speaks to you, head into Discord and @ somebody.
As our community grows, we will introduce and expand upon these roles. By localizing our founding mission to new parts of the world, these loose structures will organically evolve, incorporating insights and value-judgements that could never have formed in isolation.
*there is no asterisk 🤫.
Broad, Geographically Dispersed Participation.
$ZUNI is launching with a Token model and platform optimized for a broad, everyday community of Ethereum users. We are still in the Community discovery phase, working to bridge basic barriers like language, timezone, and technical skill level.
Too often, “Community” is treated as a marketing buzzword, tacked on to a product or ecosystem for the purpose of generating public interest with the empty promise of ‘something good for everyone’.
This is not the $ZUNI way.
History has shown that a powerful community does not need to be a very large one. $ZUNI will launch with this in mind. For ZuniSwap, participation in our Community is earned, not given away as a cheap perk or incentive.
If you share our mission of safely growing Ethereum and DeFi for the everyday user, hop into our Discord and join the Tribe.
Judging between Coordination or Collusion depends on who is the “Community”.
In the end of the day, code isn’t everything. True community begins with a seed of mutual intention, mutual interest, and mutual respect.
“Evaluate Intentions, Not Actions (!!)”
(V. Buterin, 2020)
With the right seed values, a community can grows and bind together, evolving a set of shared principles and working mechanics. That is what sets a good community, like Ethereum, apart from others.
Community is a not a feature you can deploy with a code update.
Together we build it from the ground up.
Discuss the future of $ZUNI on Discord,
Follow announcements (and Psy-Ops 😉) on Twitter.
If you’ve made it this far, I’d like to say thanks by offering a choice collection of more High-Res photos of Siphonophores. They are awesome. Highly recommended internet k-hole.
Shout out to Vitalik Buterin for the recent post “Coordiantion, Good & Bad.”, and Casey Dunn for his paper on Siphonophores.
