Sina Habibian
Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of into the bytecode. Today I sat down with Trey Chiappa tricks. trake is a uniquely thoughtful and interesting person as you realize through this conversation. He's one of the key leaders in the Yearn finance community after its legendary Genesis event. And he was also responsible for designing and driving the adoption of the governance system. And here in this conversation, we talked about Yearn evolution and key moment in its history with an eye towards takeaways that might be useful for other projects. We talked about the introduction of the multisig, then the mint, a very complex governance proposal where the community eventually chose to dilute themselves in order to reward core contributors. And then we also talked about Constrained Delegation, the governance model that trach helped designed and which is operating in Yearn today, which I think could be used by many, many more teams in this space. The other big area that we got into was coordinate. Coordinate is a protocol for decentralizing compensation. It was designed that incubated inside of Yearn and is now being built as an independent project. And towards the end of the conversation, we got into something I was really curious to talk about, which is pseudonymity. You hear the story behind Drake's name. And he also shares a perspective that has really stayed with me since this was a really, really fun conversation. And I hope you enjoy it.
Can you think of a particular moment in time where you had to really touch into why it is that you're doing what you're doing? We're getting real here?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, love, just jump dive right in just right in get to the good shit. There's so much money at stake. Right. And, and I think for so many of us, money is one of those things that triggers our base survival fear. And that's challenging stuff for all you can be in that you see this in like Enlightened Masters and gurus and whatever, and they can still get fucked up by this. This happens all the time, dramas, controversies, whatever, some teachers, say, with a student or stealing money or something like that. Because it's really hard and deep stuff. So yeah, very recently, just thinking about how do I really want to show up in the world? How do I really want to be using my efforts and my gifts? Right, and I've been making a lot of money. And that money I noticed was a force on me, you know, and money is great. I have no problem with money. But I realized I had to let go of a lot of that. This type of decision where I had to step back and think like, okay, like, what is actually really an integrity for me? And what does that mean, regardless of anything else, throwing away all outcomes, everything like what is? What is that most resonant with the core of who I am? And that changed it. Yeah, that just happened to me. Just last week. I was just listening to this talk by Bruce Lyon. Actually, I sent you one of his talks, while I talk to you is giving on money. And he said, It's so beautifully. It's like, Are you acting from fear? You're acting from love? You know? And is, is the economy one of fear? Or is it an economy of love? And money can be used for both of those things? Yeah,
Sina Habibian
I, I also, like one model that comes to mind that I really liked was how bank lists approached their DAO right, where they were like, this all belongs to the community. And as the first proposal, we're going to say that, you know, bank lists the company, I don't know what the right terminology is, gets X percent of the tokens, and then the community volunteers into giving them that gift, right? And yes, I thought that was just a really beautiful way to approach it.
Tracheopteryx
It's so interesting how in defi, we have the opportunity to do these really beautiful uses of money. And like, the minty Yearn was kind of like that, you know, like, Yeah, we had this 30,000 token hard cap, like hard money idea meme out there. You know, and there was this fair launch, but who was it fair for it actually wasn't fair for the contributors that didn't, I came around after the farming was done. You know, and so I didn't get to earn any Wi Fi but I was working all the time. But the community came together and they meant it a bunch more or Wi Fi to give to the contributors. And that was a really it was a gift. It was a beauty. It was another gift, you know, in the series of gifts that you're
Sina Habibian
this other document that I really, really enjoyed going through Yearns blue pill. Yeah, one of one of the pages in there. You're like this is it's dangerous. What we're doing here we're putting Yearns vision into words. And that could limits what it can become. And that's what it made. It made me think of, but then the vision that you were ultimately putting on paper was that it's to evolve. How did that document come together? I mean, to me, it's like, it's just a work of art. It's so beautiful. flicking through it.
Tracheopteryx
Thanks. Thanks a lot. I was really grateful to be part of that process. There's a lot of people that helped make that come to life. I guess it started, I think I put together a small group of people to think about vision at Yearn and which is really tricky thing to do in a pure Tao like Yearn, because generally, we're not tricky. I guess it's more like, uncertain. How do you do it? In a doubt? Like, generally vision comes from the leader? You know, it comes from the CEO or something or the executive team. And we don't have anything like that here. And so how do you make a vision? And so we did it. And I was thinking about this while like last year, and started doing some interviews with some people to think about what what's your vision for your maybe our vision should be like a collage of all these different independent visions and red phone, did some interviews, and he's a red phone. Krypto is a contributor, Yearn and Weaver Alex Weaver another contributor. Yeah, and did some interviews he interviewed like, 14 people or something. And then we were just kind of talking and it kind of just started emerging from that. And I think I think red phone. Yeah. So we hired red phone, I kind of on a contract to do some tweet storms for us and some longer form content. And he, you know, I don't want to say too much about exactly who did what, because I love the mystery of it being a totally, that's definitely a part of it. Yeah, that's a part of it. So these were some of the players, right, and then there was a lot of other people a year, and that helped a lot of other people. But through that kind of mix, we started working on this long form piece. And different people wrote long pieces of it. And then we edited it, and other people rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and like a lot. And the idea was to have illustrated, and we basically share the text out within Yearn and with other with some people and got feedback or like, does this represent us? You know, so from all of those interviews that we did, we kind of had like a starting point, with which we, you know, just took our own shot at it basically, like, this is what we think the vision is. And then like, Does this sound right, guys? So instead of being like, here's the vision, you know, go March, it was reflecting back to the organism? What do we think? What do we think we're seeing here, getting feedback, going through lots of iterations, very slow, until we got to text that we really loved. And then we had that illustrated by this amazing agency, including some of our own contributors to the exam. Did some illustration illustrations
Sina Habibian
are amazing. That's almost the first thing that is like, Whoa, this is different.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, it was great. And then we rewrote it. Like after we had a lot of the illustrations done, we're like, wait, no, some of this isn't hitting? Who went back and rewrote some of it? Yeah. And then,
Sina Habibian
wow, labor of love. I mean, that that does sound like one of the most challenging tasks to go through with a DAO as as large and diverse, as yearn to define a vision for it and do it in a way that involving the community in that process.
Tracheopteryx
It was, it was I think, the main thing is, it's slow. And that's okay. Like one of the things that Zack Anderson my co founder coordinate often says is go slow to go fast. And it's there's so much wisdom in that. And it's true, it's like, in order like this document has provided so much value for yearn. And it needed to happen it had to be authentic had to be sincere is not something you could rush out the door, you know, it took its own slow meandering time.
Sina Habibian
Well, maybe let's let's transition to coordinate. And I there are some of these questions about like DAOs just as a form of coordination as a as a new life form, as he likes to say on the blockchain that I want to get into, but maybe as helpful context, if you could just talk about what coordinate is.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, so coordinate is a tool to decentralize compensation. So, you know, with DAOs is most people think about DAOs, you think about coin voting, that's kind of the the first thing that started a lot of DAOs and on blockchain, allowing for that type of decision making it happen. But there's so many other types of decisions that need to happen within any organization. They don't really happen through that one structure. And in most hours today, compensation decisions happen in the old style, where there's some people they do a negotiation, they hire somebody, and then maybe they put that plan together and they get that voted on through the forum. But actually, the decisions and the work actually happened in it all top down way. So coordinate does is it really it's defined native way to do compensation. It's down there Live, where all you need is a budget, an amount of money that you're spending every month, a group of people that are going to receive that money and a reason to give them the money, you know, like for creating value for a yarn, and then the allocations all happen through a decentralized process.
Sina Habibian
And how does the process work.
Tracheopteryx
So the process works using these tokens called give tokens which are kind of like poker chips. It's called a gift circle. So the coordinate is kind of the the brand and the product is the gift circle. And so the way it works at Yearn, which is where it was designed within Yearn for Yearn, and it's spun off as its own entity, but the way it works, and we've run it for eight months, a Yearn we give away now, like $75,000 a month through it. And so every month, at the end of the month, the last week of the month, there's a there's an epoch and everybody gets 100 gift tokens, which are like poker chips, they're non transferable outside of the system. And the ask is you say, who did you see creating direct value for Yearn this month, give them a gift, that's it, you know, you can give them a bigger or a smaller gift in terms of how many gift tokens you can give. So maybe maybe, like last month, there was only four or five people in the circle that, that I saw create direct value, because actually, there was a lot more, but those people are opted out. So some people, people that are paid through a normal system, which we also have a Yearn opt out of getting gifts to the community grant. So the committee grants only go to people that they should. And so from that group, there's only four or five people that I that I directly saw last month provide value. And so I gave one of them 30 Give I gave one of them 20, give, you know, one of them, five, give etc. Everybody does this, at the end of the epoch, you count up all the received gives. And you just take the budget and you divide that by the amount of the knob total number of gifts, and then each person gets that percentage of the of the budget for that month.
Sina Habibian
What does this look like in practice, like what has emerged from the last eight months of running this ad year and at other doubts?
Tracheopteryx
Oh, I mean, so much. I mean, one of the things is just how much more work there is to do. Like, there's so much more to make in this space feels like we opened a whole kind of Pandora's box of opportunity, because it really shifts compensation, from fear to love, really, you know, it's bringing it into the gift rather than based in scarcity and having to scratch out some amount of money. Because with coordinate, you get paid retroactively. But the amazing thing is, and like, you know, the future that I see is one where every protocol has a coordinate gift circle attached to it. And ideally, it actually, you know, in the next version of coordinate, you should go to use it for all types of compensation, you can use this version for that, too, it's just a little harder. But if every every community has one of these circles, then as a person that wants to contribute to the space, all you need to do is just join a discord, join a telegram group and start making shit. And you will be invited into a coordinate circle, and you will start receiving money just based on whatever value you've created. You don't have to negotiate with anybody don't have to sign a contract, you don't have to sign an NDA, you just do you have something to offer, make what you are drawn to make, and then money will flow to you. And that's like a much better economy than for me to live in.
Sina Habibian
Yeah, you're like increasing the surface area for each group and empowering each person on the edges to basically bring in other people.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, you know, in coordinate v2, which we've been we're in the design phase for right now, I think has made it really clear. It's like one of the Big Insights is that we did a lot of reading and research on compensation incentive structure. I mean, there's so much to go into here. Like it's common knowledge that, you know, if you want to have people provide good work, then you need to, you know, incentivize them ahead of time with a good financial package, right? But the science actually said that that's not true. The science going back to the 60s shows that that's not true. There's a book by Daniel Pink called Dr. Which has a lot of great studies around compensation, where you can look at like Charles Eisenstein and sacred economics are reinventing words, a lot of different looks at this topic, but direct financial rewards if then rewards work for algorithmic work, work that was like, you know, can be reduced to practice like, you know, sweeping a floor or doing you know, some type of chore, but it's actually counterproductive for open ended heuristic work that requires creative thinking. Like, if you give people a riddle, and you say, if you saw the dribble faster than other people, then you'll get a you know, 100 bucks. It will increase the time it takes for them to solve the riddle. And if you just don't say anything, because money tends to fuck up our inherent motivation system. And we've all felt this right, the soul sucking nature of works Sometimes it's like, you get stuck in my belief on this, what happens is that money just really narrows your vision, it brings it down to that old, old fear center, you know, in your sacrum, like, it makes it about survival, like I have to get this money to survive, when the work that we're doing is so far from that, you know, we're creating a new world here, you know, and it's creative and open and new, and we need to have all those energies available. And we don't want money to limit it. So really, like, yeah, coordinate is emerging from that. And so in coordinate V to realize that trust, contribution, effort, and compensation are actually three separate things. And they always get lumped together, right? It's like, I'm gonna hire you. And now all of a sudden, you're trusted. And now all of a sudden, we expect you to give all of your effort to this group, and you're gonna get this much money for it. But like the value created for a network isn't directly tied to labor hours, or sweat. Like we've known that for a long time, but we don't really have a good way to deal with that with compensation. And also, that doesn't mean that you're trustworthy. If you're getting paid by a group, like trust is earned in relationships with other people. That's how you define trust, in compensation should be in direct proportion to value provided to or protocol, right, it doesn't have anything to do with time, time should be free, we should spend our time however we want, it shouldn't be metered.
Sina Habibian
Got it. So you're decoupling it from there is no talk of how much this person worked, how many hours they put in, it's like, how much value did they create in your eyes?
Tracheopteryx
That's how I would see it. And I think of it as a very protocol centric view. Like right now we think about compensation, that's actually a hierarchical centered view. Most compensation systems are developed, you know, in out of, you know, the fires of these rigid, hierarchical bodies that go back to you know, nations and militaries or whatever else, you know, the compensations are tiered, you know, and there's rigid hierarchies. Nothing wrong with hierarchies, just rigid ones aren't great. You want to make that more flexible, you know, you want to you want to like the protocol, Yearn doesn't care, you know, if you've been working there for a year, or if you're like, got a degree or, or even if you're a software object who doesn't care, the value to Yearn should be rewarded, you know?
Sina Habibian
Right. Yeah. It also, I mean, it's also a potential solution to the new way of working that DAO are the DAO's represent, which is, you're not necessarily going to go and join the DAO for three years and work full time. Like, if you try to force it into the model of compensation, which is equity, vesting with a cliff with clawbacks or whatever, you're forcing an old world model onto DAOs, when instead, they should allow more permeable, you know, come in help, like on a project where you can then phase out go do something else, and it should be able to work in those types of situations.
Tracheopteryx
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's what we all want, right? Like we work from home, we work from multiple DAOs, like, the whole nature of work needs to change. It's not about this kind of a servant master relationship anymore, or contracts or golden handcuffs or any of that, I can create value for curve, I can create value for badger, I can create value for sushi for Yearn for gitcoin, for ohm, whatever, like, maybe I want to, I want to just be a free person, you're creating value in this space, and why not. It's also this open source kind of idea too. Like, if I do one thing that's good for one group, it could be good for another, why not get compensated by both of them for the same piece of work. There's nothing wrong with that. We haven't had decision making systems pre prior to coin voting, right to to enable this new type of basically kind of organizational entity that we now call it a Dao. That small change created such an incredible explosion and the ability to do coin voting on the blockchain and other types of consensus, the limit amount of consensus mechanism we have has created this entire new kind of Cambrian explosion. But compensation is x actually an even bigger decision space Majan. If we blow when we blow that one open, like the types of possibility, the freedom, the creative energy, that release is going to be wild. That's what coordinate is doing.
Sina Habibian
There really is something huge here. Yeah, like one thing that came to mind while you were talking was conflicts of interest, right? And like that, in the old world model, if I'm working at this organization and getting compensated in a traditional way, and then I go and like get someone else to come and partner here and then they pay me for making that partnership happen. That's a conflict of interest, right? Like I've done something wrong there. But maybe like the core problem, there is a lack of transparency, the lack of giving Full disclosure to everyone that I'm involved in both of these organizations, and I believe this is a win win collaboration. And like, if I helped make it happen, then I should get compensated on both sides. Like maybe the problem comes from the fact that these things are done not out in the open.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I think that's that's right. But does that mean that there'll be no people, no bad actors in this future transparent space? Like, no, there will be they'll probably just take a different shape. And we'll need to develop, you know, the, you know, the systems and tools to address that as there are in the old models, too. But I think, you know, every a lot of people worry about collusion when they start thinking about these types of systems. And I think, yeah, the more transparent the better tools there are for seeing this stuff. Really, the the incentives for colluding really reduced drastically, just from a game theory perspective, because, you know, with slashing and other types of things that we can add in, it just won't make any sense. You know, it'll be a much higher value much higher, Evie to be a good actor. And to be a company value.
Sina Habibian
You put it you put people into like iterated games rather than one off games.
Tracheopteryx
Exactly. Yeah. And because it's all transparent, and you know, with opportunities for reputation building, you know,
Sina Habibian
totally. How So when thinking about compensation, one other thing that comes to mind is, especially if you're anchoring compensation to value created, there's just going to be a big range there between what value people are creating, right, like, I sometimes think it follows a power law, like many other things. And if you're running an open process, where people are allocating this to each other, will this system allow for, you know, one engineer making 10 times more than someone else? And do you want that to happen? Like, is that a property of a good functional system that someone can make 10x more than someone else? Who, on paper, like has the same qualifications? And how do you think about that?
Tracheopteryx
That's super interesting territory. And whenever we think start thinking about this stuff, it's very easy to start extrapolating into the whole world and be like, Okay, well, we should need to, we need to create a system that can solve this problem globally, you know, in like, you don't want to, like reinforce power dynamics and wealth, inequality, all that, like, yes, and like, let's take a breath of product, it's like, starting with, like, let's solve the problems right in front of us and not worry too much about that. Not saying that that's what you were suggesting at all, but I know people, you know, can often get
Sina Habibian
there. I mean, when you're when you're going after something so complex, there's almost an art about being like we're gonna solve these problems first. And we know there's, there's more levels to this that we need to figure out over time.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, so I think we can talk about in both ways, right? So like, as a global civilization, like, what should be the ratio between least paid to most paid? I have no idea. But um, I don't have a problem with there being asymmetry. I think that people also worry about scarcity. And like, I was in some discussions recently about like, Oh, should we have scarcity in the metaverse? Like, I thought we were like, over scarcity. Because like, no, like, like, I don't know what you but I like that there's, you know, what is like 20% nitrogen in the atmosphere. And you know, that's 7% Oxygen, I've probably got these numbers totally wrong. Like that's useful. It's good that there's a scarcity of oxygen.
Sina Habibian
And it is like a fundamental property of the universe.
Tracheopteryx
It is, and it's going to be in the metaverse, too. And it's like, one way to think about it in a nice way to think about is it's actually about stories like you in the metaverse, it's like, these little properties, these nuances, these scarcities in our each other like that I really like science fiction, comic books. And so to you, not everybody loves those, like that's a nice story that binds us together. Like, we need methods to hold that type of relationship in the digital world to scarcity is important however you want. Access is different people confuse scarcity and access, no, like, people should have access to all these different things equal opportunity. Absolutely. But scarcity is okay. What we want is a system where, you know, if we're talking globally big picture stuff, a system where the people at the bottom of the spectrum can still have wonderful lives and have equal opportunity and access to move along that spectrum. So in the small, the small scale, like with creating a compensation system right now, I think the things I think about more than, like popularity contests, you know, and like, one of the concerns with coordinate is it devolves into a popularity contest, right? It's not about actually rewarding the direct value, but you know, who's the coolest kid in the room? We haven't seen a lot of that so far. And, you know, with like the 30 to 40 different protocols that are running over the past six months and, you know, dozens of epochs, I'm sure it will emerge in some ways or another. So first idea is that well, is there something wrong with that? I'm not sure that there is something wrong with that. But I do know that I was wrong to me is that the person that's maybe not so popular, that is a brilliant genius, I call that kind of silent genius project problem, that they're getting compensated properly. So one of the things we're going to add in to coordinate in the future is the ability to create, actually, you could even do this now with coordinate a group or some people that have more power in making compensation decisions. So a kind of expert group to balance the wisdom of the crowd. And their job instead of saying just rewarding direct competence, direct value, their job is to talk to people see who's being under compensated and fill in the gaps.
Sina Habibian
Yeah, well, there are certain roles that by their nature are, they're not going to have a lot of touch points with the community, or they're going that the nature of their work is that they need to do it kind of under wraps a bit, you know, if you're the person building out the regulatory or legal strategy, you can't just be talking about what you're doing. So I think it makes sense to have other systems complement this. Another another question that comes to mind is, if this process is happening in the open, you may want to do what's what's defensible. What helps you build relationships with people, rather than doing what you absolutely think, is the correct way. And I wonder, I mean, this is another one of these future problems of like that there's good stuff here. Let's start with this. But I wonder if there could be versions of coordinate that, like, say, user and knowledge proofs to make sure that all of the math checked up properly, that everyone allocated their 100 gift tokens, but you can't see who they allocated towards?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I'm interested in this, you know, we like a commit reveal scheme or something. So we've heard I've heard people advocate for this. And we tested it over one epoch at yearn. There was a small sample size, you know, just one test, but people liked the transparent version more. And so we've kind of held off on on trying to put that but other a lot of people do want it. And I'm, I haven't thought through it deeply enough to know if it's going to be a important feature not. What do you think? Do you think that all that help?
Sina Habibian
Well, maybe there is something about just where we are today, where because this system is new, and there's this cool social component to it. And you're helping, you know, I guess one thing you talked about is helping the doubt, discover new people on the edges, right. But a zero knowledge version of that definitely also makes sense, maybe at a later point. And I think zero knowledge difference is different than commit reveal, like there, there just wouldn't ever be a reveal of how each person voted. Right, there would just be the total Italys that come out, knowing that the math was done correctly.
Tracheopteryx
Right. Okay, that's interesting, too. I mean, I think the way I see it happening is being options, like the kind of design theory for a coordinate is that there's a lot of modules, it's very customizable, and people can do whatever they want. So we're adding in, like quadratic voting as a strategy option for vote counting. And we'll add options in like this, too. I think like, my feeling is, it'll be really useful to have this data publicly, though, to be able to see like, oh, wow, this person got got a bunch of gifts from Stanny. And from Kane and from Andre and from, and from all these different Vitalik gave his person give and like, wow, this that's, that's really interesting kind of chain of reputation that you want to preserve the system.
Sina Habibian
Totally. It also makes me think, like, just changing the nature of who the gift is coming from somehow being taken into account in the system. Yeah, like maybe maybe there's some sort of PageRank that comes in over time.
Tracheopteryx
Well, that's one of the things we're most excited about, really, in the future is we need a better example, but it becomes a kind of decentralized LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn sucks, but but I think you know, what I what I'm pointing at, but yeah, to have all that reputation and all those trust all those relationships all available.
Sina Habibian
Okay, so another topic I'm really curious to talk about is so Yearn started off in a very unique way, right, with Andre giving away all of the Wi Fi and this totally decentralized, DAO emerging. And then you being one of the people who was there to help bring out structure out of this crucible of chaos and and potential potential energy. And now that you're working on something new with coordinate, how are you thinking about the strategy with which you're bootstrapping the community around the project? The DAO like the governance like how, how are you thinking about that?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I mean, it's great because we get to learn like you framed this beautifully. I mean, it's all the stuff that we learned through the 16 months or whatever on yearn. We don't have to reinvent that all from scratch. So you know, one of the things that from One of the most valuable things that we made from Yearn was the new governance model that we have, which we call Constrained Delegation or governance to. And I mean, it took us a long time of like banging our heads against the wall, and like making a lot of mistakes to get to that model. And so we don't have to do that, again, is that the plan for coordinate is that it will be, you know, governance to from the start. And, you know, there have been a lot of DAOs that have, you know, fought the same path and done this progressive decentralized. So Yearn was like instantaneously decentralized, whereas right protocols like synthetics, and went on this really kind of progressive decentralization path, and to the point where they have no entity now, and they, you know, and they have a really cool their own kind of Constrained Delegation model. And so coordinate will be able to progressively decentralized because I think also like, well, there's different ways to do, and I'm really not sure if there is a best way. But I know for a coordinate, like me, is me and Zach, you know, we have this very strong vision together. And we, you know, we don't want to give the vision away. Right? Right. So that's okay, you know, you don't have you don't have to do everything decentralized, where the vision holders, you know, so we have most of the power right now. But we don't want to have the power forever. That's not in any of our interests. But we want to start the thing, get it on, get it out there, you know, get the first product fully out, get the team the culture established. And as we do that, then we will use the mechanics of governance to, to start delegating, or, you know, powers from us to the community. And in giving them away. And you know, most people don't ever give away power. Right, but, but we did that at yearn. And we do like, I've seen that done, I'm not worried about that happening with us, we don't want to hold the power better, because we've learned directly, it's better for a centralized group, not terrible power.
Sina Habibian
Right, we'll get into guff too. But I really like this, that you've developed this governance model in a project that's much much further along, and you know, that you can design things in a way that they just fit into that. And without having to make any foundational fundamental changes, you can just kind of change the power dynamics in the future.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah. And then not just from your own truth we get to learn from. So we've been Collaborative Law with synthetics, and they've developed their own kind of parallel version of our government as well. They've developed their own governance, but it has so many similarities, structural similarities to ours. And a lot of the same concept of they developed other really cool tools, like the election modules that they're building. And so we'll probably want to add those coordinate by Hope y'all will add them a year in the future, too. But yeah, just there's so much work that's been done not just at Yearn over the past years to couple of years that we get to benefit from.
Sina Habibian
Yeah. And that process of, you know, decentralizing gradually. How are you thinking about that? Like, is it grants to folks who do work on the protocol? Is it is it I guess, using coordinate? Probably right to you want to bring people in through the edges? Like, how are you thinking about that process?
Tracheopteryx
Well, we want to use coordinate and a lot of different ways everywhere from like, as a way to allocate advisor token shares to core team salary, and also for incentivizing the community. And gov to so I think about, you know, thinking about an organization is like a circle. And like, what that circle contains is all the different types of decisions. I think decision making is really the most interesting lens to look at these organizations through. And there's all different types of decisions that need to be made from like, one contributors decision to send a gift and one telegram group, all the way to like, am I going to mint another, you know, chunk of this governance token, there's so many decisions, what logo to use, blah, who to hire bla, bla bla, only some of those are really well suited for on chain coin voting or whatever type of coin voting. We don't have consensus mechanisms that work well, for a lot of the other ones. There's a lot of decisions like around, alright, who gets X merge control for a GitHub repo, you know, who gets to decide what logo we use? How do you make those decisions? We need governance to saying
Sina Habibian
like, doing a governance vote around the color of a button on a website seems like, like the Dilbert comic for crypto that we don't have yet.
Tracheopteryx
Exactly. Democracy man, like every voice must be for
Sina Habibian
like centralization. Who does this designers think they are?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, it that's Central. You gotta be decentralized. We're all gonna vote on the color palette of this. Yeah, it's a great way to make shitty artwork, and to just suck the life out of everything. So people have been gradually decentralizing for a long time. We've learned a lot about that. So now there's another agency, well, why don't you just be fully decentralized from the start? You can. And I think that that makes sense in a lot of cases. But it also you don't need to, and I think in the in our case with coordinate where we actually have a strong leadership and strong vision, let's not pretend that it's all the community. It's like no, for right now. It actually is Few people. That's okay. You know, and we don't want to do it forever. But like we're trying not to gaslight anybody like, look, it is central.
Sina Habibian
Let's all be adults about that. Yeah, you know, we're going to make this thing work. Yeah,
Tracheopteryx
I don't want to give them my power right now. And that's okay. But I definitely will give it up because I know I don't want it for that
Sina Habibian
long. I think giving away tokens by using coordinate is also just a, it's potentially an alternative that many more people will move to because it's, it seems better than retroactive airdrops that can be gamed. And, you know, it's literally like, you know, you will get tokens if you do useful work. So, go and do that useful work.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I've been calling I've been calling this contribution mining. And I think it's like the most interesting way of new former tokenomics that we've been thinking about it a yearn to do and further and coordinate, certainly, but um, yeah, how do you distribute your tokens? Like, what are tokens? They're like, I think of governance tokens, like, yeah, people get caught up by the financial component. And there's a lot of tricks around, you know, financial versus the governance power. But really, in a protocol, they represent the voice of that protocol. And to me that you really want them to go to the people that are leading within that protocol, who are like setting the standard for how the community is going to work, how the culture is going to work, what is being made, where it's growing, what it's becoming, give those people governance tokens. And these should not be armchair people that are I mean, there's a place for that, too. But I personally don't think it's nearly as valuable as the people that are in the trenches doing the work, give those people tokens and coordinates the perfect way to do that. Right. So you do a distribution through contributor mining?
Sina Habibian
Yeah. I mean, I think the shadow side of a lot of this DAO stuff is that it is armchair critics who aren't involved just commenting on these public forums. And are there really is no way to, to weigh people's opinions to kind of choose whose voice are you going to take seriously versus less seriously. And just having things in these forums, just comments, one after another puts you into this mindset of seeking consensus, doing something that everyone is behind. And that is just not the best way to make decisions? I don't think
Tracheopteryx
it's really not. And so I have a lot of experience with the CEO, and and having authored many governance proposals and spent a lot of time in the forum there. And we've had a lot of really strong critics, like, look, criticisms, great. And also, you know, sharing your opinion on a forum is great, the way that it goes wrong. And I've seen this happen many times, when people expect you to do what they say, right? They expect either they're like, look like, I have raised this point many times, why aren't you doing it? And it's like, well, you know, it might even be a good point. But that's just not how we work. You know, we're not a top down group where like, you know, you're going to scare the shit out of some middle manager who thinks that, like, our marketing is gonna go down the tubes, he doesn't like for some engineers to like, go and build this for you. Like, that's not how we work. Everybody at Yearn that works at Yearn gets to decide what they do. And so nobody has decided to do what you've suggested, it might even be a good idea, but that's just not we're not gonna do it. Or nobody's done it yet. Maybe we'll in the future, or the other. The other thing is the other way it goes wrong, is where it's like, look, everybody is everybody agrees this, why are you doing it? It's like, well, it's same thing. Like, if you want to do it, do it.
Sina Habibian
Okay, so maybe let's talk about governance to what is that? How did it come about? And what is it
Tracheopteryx
so governance to is a new kind of Decentralized Governance, theory and, you know, implementation that Gabriel Shapiro and I wrote for Yearn, it was Yep, 61, which got approved down maybe six months ago or something for four months ago. And it really goes back to the beginning of Yearn. So when you're in started, it was like, how did you make decisions? Right, Andre gave away all the Wi Fi tokens, and he said, You guys are in charge. Right. And that was mostly it, you know, so people came on to the forum, and they were making proposals from everything to like, what podcast and Andre go on to, you know, what should the token emission be and everything else and there was no, I call this the kind of what's the surface area that the governance token actually controls, there was no definition of that. There was no scoping of the governance powers. It was every everything was up for grabs, as great as beautiful chaotic madness, right. And as time went on, what we ended up seeing was a lot of these just organic groups of people started forming to do things, you know, like, there were developers that were working on the code base, and, and there are people that were, you know, moderating the forum and there are people who think about governance and whatever else and and they were making a lot of decisions. You know, there was a question as to What is that allowed? Can you make decisions and instead of trying to go the route of like trying to push everything through this one, coin voting, so it's like coin voting is like the thinnest possible straw to suck all of human expression through, right? That's a That's a quote from I think Joy Malford was an HCI researcher years ago, might have mis attributed that. But it's a great quote. And instead of trying to do that, or trying to pretend that that's how we're going to do it. We did substrate and I and a few others, Franklin and few other people, Vance Spencer, did a proposal yet 41, which was to temporarily empower the multisig to make operational decisions. And we said is like look like what's happening is people are forming these autonomous teams, and they're doing the work, like let's empower them to do it. We don't need to be Democrat, overly democratic, but everything in that past. And what it did is it gave the multisig, six months to do some limited things like hire people, and make certain set of decisions. And this was the kind of beginning of Constrained Delegation.
Sina Habibian
And what I'd add is like, all of the discussion is fully public on the forum. And it's really interesting to go back and read through these conversations. So the transfer of power to the multisig was Yep, what 40? Some
Tracheopteryx
4141? Yeah, yep. 41. Well, what were some of your like? Yeah, what were some of the insights like from Did you read the 41? Discussion? Like,
Sina Habibian
what do you recall? I did. I just think it's so beautiful, how and and unique and elegant, how this project started, right? It's with full decentralization, and then watching how people organically take leadership of certain things, and then come and propose this model, you know, from the soup, where there was no structure, and then the larger community being wise enough to pass this decision. And I thought that was interesting. And then I thought, you know, what comes after, like the mint, which was the big one. And it was also interesting, you know, I think in the multisig, though, too, is like, we're gonna do this for six months temporarily. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And then the men's post is six months after that. So it's like, what it was right?
Tracheopteryx
I think you're right. Yeah, it was. So you have 41 was like, August. And the mint was like February. And it actually we got an extension on Yep. 41 Because we didn't figure it out governance to in time. So we needed we needed a few more months. And we then we did it in a couple of months after that. So it was like the mint in that I think governance too, was like right after that, like March or something.
Sina Habibian
Yeah. And the mint is just a sure again, to in complex thing to traverse, like that you can you can talk about. But I mean, my other just observing this whole process and reading the forum posts, like these are really freaking competent, like smart people. You know, the mint is probably up there with the most complex strategic things that you'd have to navigate when running a company. You know, you're getting buy in from this public community to dilutes them, because it's for the long term benefit of this project. And you all managed to do that.
Tracheopteryx
Who was crazy? Yeah, that was so wild. Yeah, let's talk about that. We can come back to governance too, but because it's all governance, and it's all crazy. The Mint happened so strangely. So we've been the interesting thing is that like, from the beginning, like talking to Andre about this, and forgive me, if I've misrepresent this, and all, it's all my mistakes. But as I recall talking to Andrew about this, you know, he always assumed that there would be a Wi Fi emission and ongoing Wi Fi mission from beginning it wasn't meant to be 30,000 And done. And there were like 10 attempts in the governance to MIT more Wi Fi in the first month or something, and they all failed.
Sina Habibian
It's like how bitcoins a block size, like there was this comment that this should be changed? It's
Tracheopteryx
yeah, right, basically, right. Then all of a sudden, people started conflating their memes. They started thinking about Bitcoin and hard money and stuff and the like, yeah, that's what Wi Fi is like, No, that is not what Wi Fi is like. It's not meant to be hard money. It's a governance token. The purpose of it is to coordinate the community. And so it needs to be flexible, really. It does have a financial component, we want to honor that. But so everyone got stuck in this mindset. And I really realized how powerful memes are. This 30 came meme, like everybody I was subscribed to all of us thought that it was like this amazing thing. Never meant any more. We're gonna do it the hard way. But then, like,
Sina Habibian
just to just to draw the point. I think memes are so powerful, and it's one of the things that many of us realized by spending time in the space, but it's almost its own craft alongside engineering design, like how to craft basically, idea packets that people can get behind is so so powerful. before,
Tracheopteryx
it's super powerful, and it's just as important as everything else, you know, and it has such a huge impact. I think a lot of people can sometimes have this naive view that like, they think that like technology is like this really pure meritocratic, like linearly improving system, but it's really not. I, one of my favorite philosophers of technology, Andrew, Andrew Finberg, really talks about this. Well, he says, like technology is part of the social matrix. Like, if you look back to the evolution of the bicycle, for instance, like you, they used to have that big one wheel bicycle, and that was the most high tech bicycle. And so then that should just keep going, right. But then somebody invented the safety bicycle, which had two little wheels. And that wasn't a considered a better technological bicycle. But because of people's concerns around safety, or whatever, they started to use that more. Technology always develops in this way, as part of the social media is embedded, and we decide, you know, as a community, memes are a huge part of that, and how these decisions get made. There isn't one, you know, technology doesn't exist outside of human consciousness, you know? Right. So
Sina Habibian
humans are a big part of it. And it's very path dependent. It also makes me think of without going too much down this tangent, but it may, I think, it's called, like, Planck's rule, or the idea that science progresses with generations of science, new scientists that come to the fore. And that basically, people, you know, even Einstein struggled with the ideas around quantum mechanics, and it requires someone who's, you know, really young and hasn't fully deepened those grooves in their minds to really buy into the old way of doing things to come in and do something new. So, like, if you look back in time, that's how these ideas progress.
Tracheopteryx
Oh, yeah. So the myth, so it was like the most incredible Overton Window shift. Like, what happened was, basically all these incredible people like Bantay egg, milky Clem, and Daniel Lemberg, and dark ghosty and Falco and all these incredible contributors, you know, and Doug, Luciano, we're all getting paid like peanuts, we were getting paid. So little, was like, well, we'll there was no Wi Fi to like pay us with or like what we're going to just didn't make sense, Yearn was so poor, that we're making so much money in our fundamentals were so much better than every other everybody else. So it was like, well, we should really reward the contributors to write and that's and that was kind of what happened was, it just we just been poor for a long time, basically. And
Sina Habibian
so it was like 500k, or how much was actually available to pay the contributors at this point.
Tracheopteryx
500k was our was our budget, but it could get topped up. So per year, it wasn't actually super clear. Like, it wasn't 500k per year, it was that multisig would have an operational budget of 500k. So if you can get theoretically, you could continuously refill it, and it's an infinite budget. But um, I don't know if we actually specified I think it was, maybe
Sina Habibian
I had an easier way out of this situation.
Tracheopteryx
We probably did. But that didn't feel right to just drain all the money. I think. I think it was more monthly. Actually, I think it was 500. No, no, sorry, it was 500 km month. No, that was classified. And we rarely used all of it, actually. But even if we did tap it all out, like it still wasn't enough to contributors. So that's what kind of sparked the men and then it was this incredible Overton shift where like, I had to do, I went on a campaign basis, because when it clicked for me, I forget what it was because I had been anti MIT previously. And then it was like, somebody did a bunch of research of other projects, like treasuries and stuff, and what they're compensated was like, this is just not fair. Like, this team is so good. And I see them contribute, and they're so fucking talented, they need to be properly compensated. And so I wanted to campaign to basically break this mean, 30k mean thing. And it changed a lot of minds changed a lot of hearts and minds. And then the MIT went through. But we also put a team together of like super heavy hitter, big brands to put that proposal together. It's one of like, the best written proposals I've ever been a part of.
Sina Habibian
And then it has the complexity of this as the group of people potentially setting their own compensation. And like all of these things that are incredibly complicated to navigate, even in a traditional company, and you're doing it out in the open. What did that campaigning process look like? Like, what did you win about winning the hearts and minds of a large community?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, it was just like a lot of discussions, a lot of talking to people a lot of like, sharing perspective. And like, because what had happened for me basically was like the solution gotten broken in my mind. And then but I saw that same illusion, a bunch of my friends minds. And it was like, it wasn't about me, like enforcing my view on them. It was about questioning it with them together, you know, and I just like took it upon myself to go and have all those conversations. And to like, get this thing it was it was like politics, right? But it was, it did take a tremendous amount of my energy. And I don't think I would do it again in that same way. But I can't say I don't regret it. And I don't think it was a bad thing it was. It was intense. It was intense period. And there's a lot of discussions, a lot of debate. And a lot of campaigning really, you know, for this, this idea. One of the weirdest things is like I was with some people on the team, I was like, campaigning to make them rich, you know, like, they were like, no, don't do that. That's not who we are, you know, I'm like, no, like, you know, we need to do this, you need to be rewarded that that's so that's interesting. And, yeah, going back to that multiple, like, I don't know what the multiple is, but having some people in society or in a protocol, make 10 times or 20 times the amount of somebody else, as long as that other person that, you know, that's making it, that low end of it, you know, has the opportunity for advancement, you know, is making a salary that allows them to be healthy and safe and to take care of themselves, then I have no problem with that. You know, I think that that's actually good. Because value is asymmetric. And there are natural hierarchies. And some people do know things better than other peoples, and that should be rewarded and celebrated. It doesn't happen. But we're all so used to the really unhealthy power dynamics of exploitation and enslavement and taking advantage of others, that we're we react to that. And that's why you see a lot of people fight against any form of hierarchy. But it's like, look, no hierarchy is a natural part of the universe. And, you know, we can't pretend that the sun's up here in the moon. So it's more about how you hold it, you know, that can all that stuff can be done in a beautiful, true way, too.
Sina Habibian
Okay, and then moving on to golf to you. Yeah,
Tracheopteryx
yeah, golf too. Right. So we talked about, yep. 41, where we gave the multisig power. And the multisig is a sixth of nine, Gnosis safe multisig. But really, what Yep, 41 gave them the power to make decisions. But actually, the people that are making decisions, were these organically forming groups of contributors, that would form around a shared interest, they'd start doing work. And they would say, you know, actually, you know, we should farm we should put some of the Treasury into this farm, because it's going to earn us a lot of yield. And then they would pass that decision to the multi SIG, the multi SIG would review it, and then they would execute it, or they would veto it, if they thought it was, it was not a good idea. Or they'd ask questions. And that was just the natural way that it developed. The multi SIG actually wasn't making many decisions at all, otherwise, other than Is this a legitimate action or not. And the purpose of the multiset with these are nine high reputation public figures that provided a trusted machine for for making long chain decisions, the treasures are not going to just get wasted. And so gov two came out of that, when we did your 41 is for six months. And we put a line in there, saying that this is a temporary, and we will move into a multi DAO future which, you know, we saw places like synthetics during this multi DAO system, we thought actually that makes more sense. So we want to move to that. But it actually ended up changing because we didn't do a multi DAO we kept one DAO but instead, we created these autonomous teams we call y teams. And that's the foundation of governance too. So what governance governance TOS specific perspective on on DAOs is comes from this lens of decision making. And we started with just on chain decisions. So we enumerated 19 decision making powers that Yearn was doing in each of these became discrete powers that can be traded and moved around within the system. And then we gave, we created this concept of why teams is or small teams that can form and be ratified through a process in order to hold these powers on behalf of Wi Fi holders. And Wi Fi holders have the ultimate power of delegating or re delegating these powers. So if Wi Fi holders believe that a white team is not functioning well, they can take the power back. So it always says go back to them. But then there's also checks and balances. There's also the main multisig, which is an a type of white team and they have veto power, they could veto even a wifey holders motion. So there is it is not pretending to be some perfect logical system that can all be put on chain and all work flawlessly it actually admits that there is space for human discretion, you know, in these systems, and that there is space for some forms of trust. Because I believe that the you know, whatever you're doing, if it's at the edge of what's been done before, it can't be reduced to practice, there always has to be scientists have it that is left for human beings to decide on.
Sina Habibian
It feels like taking corporate governance and learnings that have been there and bringing it on chain with a much higher level of configuration and reconfiguration right. Importantly, like all of this can change, and that's baked into the system.
Tracheopteryx
Exactly. There's a few really key differences and this is something that's super interesting. So people often say like, well, what's the difference between like a DAO and an L? I'll see, right? Yeah. And in because they can kind of look the same like token votes, shareholder votes, like multi cigs boards, executive teams, blah, blah, blah, I think to really understand the difference, you have to look at the substrate on which they emerge. And the corporate model, you know, which goes back 300 years, is built on top of a platform of, of government, nation state governance, democracies with legal apparatus and rule of law and militaries and monopolies. Physical violence, right? That's what these systems come from. Those systems have always been super vulnerable to entrenched power and to collusion into, you know, the Bilderberg conferences of the world and all these like, you know, conspiracies and whatever. When you change that substrate to the blockchain, which is this kind of new physics in the, you know, interpersonal space, where everything can be transparent, and everything can be changed, but it's trustless. And, you know, the same people can trust, it's the same for you as the same for me, it is fundamentally different. And that doesn't mean that every structure within it needs to be different, like people make decisions in small groups that's not going to change. People work together and they intimacy grows in small groups, that's not going to change. Right? So we're not going to get away from that hierarchy exists, that's not gonna change Harkey is useful. The differences are these subtle differences like that it goes from opaque by nature, you know, in Baroque by nature hidden by these big corporate veils and legal jargon, veils, and expertise veils, but a lot of it is mostly just obfuscation on purpose in order to control power, moving from that to transparently on purpose like that changes a lot moving from rigid, hierarchical systems to fluid, natural leadership, natural hierarchical patterns. So with governance to it, it looks structurally similar. But it's fundamentally different.
Sina Habibian
When you think about this space for potential models for coordination and governance that is made possible by blockchain as a substrate. And you've designed this model for gov two, which is basically at the cutting edge of what we have in this space at this point. Do you have open questions and in your mind of pieces of the design space that you haven't explored enough? Or a trade offs that are inherent in the decisions that you've made with this model?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, good question. And so this is been thinking about a lot lately with Gabe Shapiro and some other people more stuff. So I thought metallics reason article on coin voting was really great. And so, you know, we have this problem of the ability to separate governance power from the financial power of tokens. And there's a lot of ways you can imagine that happening. And a lot of the stuff that we're doing, it's based in coin voting. And, you know, at Yearn, we've taken this delegated model and other places to where we use snapshot for signaling, and then we trust a group to take that output and put it on chain. I would like to see that stuff on chain. But then if we do put all that on chain, right, then you really do open yourself up to governance attacks through the type that Vitalik explained it. And I thought that paper was really on point, a lot of the reason that things worked as well is because it's early, there's a lot of goodwill. A lot of these systems haven't been figured out how to exploit them yet. A lot of bigger money, corporate interests haven't gotten into the space yet. They will absolutely exploit all of these systems, we put them in,
Sina Habibian
we have this grace period before we're really on the math.
Tracheopteryx
Right? So like, yeah, I want it to be on chain, but I'm not willing to open like, look what happened at compound just recently, like, or look, there's been other governance attack or like steam, right? So like, you know, sure, you can fork you can fully fork the community, but I don't want to have to get it that far. You know, like, maybe we can avoid going that far. You know, so one thing that governance two does is it creates these kind of two bodies, in a way, there's like the wifey holders, and then there's these white teams, which you can think of as being kind of legislative group and then an executive group from a governance perspective, and that maybe there does need to be some type of a judicial branch. And, you know, people have looked at this, like Aragon court or clear claros corridor escalation games. But I think there's another form for that, too, which is a inter dowel body that an elected delegated body of ambassadors that have a very, very limited scope of what they can decide on. But the one thing that I'm thinking is that the self sovereign tree of protocols, so the problem with governance attacks, if you even think it is a problem, but what I think it is, is that it's taking the sovereignty of the community away to another community. And I think that we might like that's one thing that we could create a kind of UN of DAOs to protect against.
Sina Habibian
Interesting so pull up, pull out a group of people who have reputation Who are you though, who have the confidence of the larger community that they're aligned with what we're truly trying to do here. And they kind of stand as a last check in case the systems get co opted?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, like I was thinking of it like six of nine multisig with from nine different protocols, right. So you take some of those trusted protocols, and each one of them elects an ambassador. And it serves on this multi statements, multi SIG has one key role across all different on chain protocols that want to be part of the system, which protect them against governance attack.
Sina Habibian
That does seem like using humans and a limited way to protect against what could go wrong. And we really need humans, like I think approaches of moving off of coin voting in fundamental ways are too early. Like it's just it's, you know, you can't build a web of trust that is going to work and as civil resistance, like these problems are really difficult to solve. And so this seems like a good solution that could work today.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, hopefully one of them like, because the alternative is that you have like a multisig. That's within one community. And that kind of we're doing that and it's working, but it's not ideal. You really want to have as much transparent and on chain as you can. And so how do we keep pushing that further? This is one way to do that.
Sina Habibian
Going back to Constrained Delegation, is if you're talking with you know, a team that's going down this process of progressive decentralization, would you advise them to use this system? Like what are what are the options in front of them? And how do you think about making that decision?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, this is also a really great area. So we went to M con in we I'm using the royal we, I went to EmCon. For tracks Patrick's, you did the tricky objects clan, in Denver, and there's all these incredible Yeah, we were no, we actually you and I went together. That's what it is. And there's all these great people in the DAO community talking and like, well, actually, this summer's for me when I was helping the loot. community trying to think about governance is like, there isn't really clear, like template for people to do governance when you're just starting up. Like, the options are like, okay, snapshot multisig, discourse discord, right? That's one option. Or it's like compound gov Bravo. If you're more software minded, or you want to be more unchained delegation, and then you know, website, and then discord and discord. And what else is there or it's roll your own, and a lot of people are rolling your own. But what a lot of these systems totally miss is like, why you're doing what you're governing, and what's the point,
Sina Habibian
right, like first principles, thinking about the problem they're trying to solve?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, exactly. That's totally left out. So like, talking to people give coin like the get going public library about like writing some of this stuff, or some of these dowel groups like, like, let's write up a bunch of this. What we really need is a more legitimacy as a community and like to read it together. So does it seem like one person pushing their agenda? Like, can we come together and put together this toolkit for new protocols to do governance and understand it better, and create better options at Gnosis? Zodiac is a super interesting one that's coming online, too.
Sina Habibian
Yeah, and that that legitimacy is a key piece of it. It's why a lot of people are using compound Bravo, right? It's because you can say that we're using the same governance model that everyone else is doing, rather than rolling our own. So governance to the model is really think about what key decisions you have to make as a project and how you want the decision making around those to work. And really, the framework is a flexible one, where the token holders delegates this decision making to particular multisig that are that are empowered to make these decisions. And then, you know, have the power to change that around. Or, you know, you could have this other group that has veto power. It's more a, a framework for what governance uniquely means for your project.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, absolutely. And so if there's anybody out there that wants to work on this, like, reach out to me, because we have governance too, but we haven't implemented all the features. So So governance, two is running in telegram groups right now. Like there are some of the why teams are multisig this but some of them don't need to be like the why budget team, right? That's just a telegram group and they do polls you know, for for three or five voting of the signers within the group and that works okay. But that's not so easy to like, spin up, right. So what I'd like to do is take zodiac and build, you know, Telegram bots and discord bots that allow direct integration with the Gnosis multisig or with another module so that you can have so you can like roll out a governance to implementation really quickly. We're work with orca Protocol, or like there's a lot of people building their colony, but like, we need the integration and we need
Sina Habibian
the stuff these 20 Explain what Zodiac is quickly.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, so Zodiac is a kind of a library for doing modular governance. It was partially inspired by governance to what I've been told. And it you know, allows you to interact with Gnosis safes are a Moloch, DAO or colony and students or whatever you want. And you can have modules you can have modifiers and you can have guards are the kind of governance Legos to do things like a modifier can be a time lock, and a guard can be like, you know, it's only certain types of transactions can be scoped to this group and not others. It actually would work perfectly for
Sina Habibian
up to audit. So governance to or another name for it is Constrained Delegation is maybe more the framework for how to think about governance. Yeah, and Zodiac is more like the programmable primitives that you use to put together your concrete instantiation of this.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, that's like, I think Zodiac is an implementation option, you know, so is orca protocol. So is colony, so is Aragon, or whatever. Zodiac is the closest one that governance to that I've seen, and I think it's wonderful one, we need better implementation so that you can spin these things up quickly, and make them configurable and customizable, and you can choose what you want, you know.
Sina Habibian
So I have one last topic, and then we can call it granted. It's around pseudonymity and being called trachea Alpha tricks, which is my favorite season by far IQ.
Tracheopteryx
Thank you. Yeah. So I, I had been following crypto for 10 years, but I only really started working in IT defi summer. And during that period, I was like, Well, do I do this as my real name? Or do I do it as a as an add on anime character? And it really wasn't actually, I was really not sure. I was like, because I don't have I'm not like, super, like, nerd in that way. Like, like, it seemed like a lot of friction for me. And like, actually, under my real name, I have a pretty good reputation. And I was like, Well, I'm not gonna be using any of that. And like good credentials, and stuff like that. But what I decided was actually really wanted to become part of the culture in that way. And I also was unsure about security and worried about, you know, what about people finding me out and who knows, like, like, it's a little scary. And there's this new space. So it felt like a nice layer of security, but also just the cultural part of being anonymous and getting to be tricky objects getting to be a dinosaur, like was really cool to me. And it's been really rewarding actually, like, coming into this space with nobody knowing who I am. Nobody know my age, where I'm from what I've done in my life, you know, and be able to create this entire career in a year from scratch, when I'm actually kind of old, and I've had multiple careers before, was pretty cool.
Sina Habibian
That is really cool. So how, how does it work in practice for you, because you know, if a real pseudonym, like Satoshi, let's say, where I imagine that person would have had that group of people. I mean, Satoshi is maybe a bad example. Because there's just it's, there's a lot of lore around it. But if you're a person who's truly pseudonymous, that means that you're probably not sharing this big part of your life with the people that you're surrounded with in your day to day life. And that seems like a pretty big life decision to make that could potentially create, you know, just a division and who you are like, can you be authentic with your family, with your partner with your close friends? And I haven't heard people talk about these questions. So I'm curious how you think about them.
Tracheopteryx
I'm really glad you're bringing this up, actually, because it's, I haven't heard people talking about it either. And it's really big. It's really big one. And it turned out that that friction was too much for me. So early on, I was tricky optics, and I still am. But I was like, No, I didn't share a video with anybody. I didn't tell anybody personal things about my life. And I really didn't like it. I really didn't like it. And I just decided that that wasn't worth it to me. And that I wanted to see people's faces and, and then it was like, well, oh, go to EmCon I'm gonna go What am I like, want to, like put makeup on or something? It's like, No, I like I really like being in my body and around other people. And so I just decided, I started thinking of it as like a bike lock, you know, it's like, if somebody really wants to steal your bike, they're gonna do it. No, but I'm not gonna like bring it to ton chain, you know, or like a complete, like, you know, vault with me, whenever I ride my bike, like, I'm gonna bring a lock, you know, and I'm gonna build, bring a good lock, and I'm gonna be really smart about security. But I'm not going to stop myself from going where I want to go. And so, you know, I ended up peering on video at EmCon. And at the time, I didn't expect that I was going to be on video, but then I was like, Screw it. You know? Like, it's important to me. I want people to see my face. So Oh,
Sina Habibian
yeah, and I feel like even though one degree of separation helps a lot, right, like, even if people have to, like slate star Codex had his name out there on the internet, but like 99% of people didn't know who he was. So I think that can still be pretty effective. So the biggest kind of trade offs or positives or negatives of this path has been, while one that is just freaking cool, you get to be like at the forefront of weirdness in this community. That's awesome. You get you get more security, you still get to kind of open up to people that you build more of a relationship with. And if you're talking with someone who's thinking about seriously taking on a pseudonym, how would you give them a heads up of what's in store?
Tracheopteryx
Well, figuring out what you're, you know, like, are you an anime person? Are you like comic books? Or like, where's that pseudonym? How are you sourcing it? And having that be like, really authentic for you, I think is really important. What your name is, tricky. Optics resonates with me in a lot of ways. I really love it as a name. So it's been really fun to have it. It suits me.
Sina Habibian
You know, what, what is the story behind tracheal Patrick's,
Tracheopteryx
it's a combination of a trachea, which is like the human organ of speech and song and the Archaeopteryx, which is the first feathered dinosaur. So that's a really creative and powerful combination to me, because the transition between dinosaur and bird is just, you know, profound evolutionary moment. And also, just song artistry, speech, creativity. So like, that speaks to me, and I get to I get to wear that every day, which is like a talisman, you know, it's got magical powers. So like, find out where your magic is gonna come from and give it a name. This is, you know, becoming an on is a kind of shape shifting, spiritual quest, you know, like, look at it that way. Why not? That's more fun. Even if you don't believe in the spiritual stuff. It's more fun to think of it that way. I think so do that, you know, really, really find something that's going to bring you power and bring you what your goals are, right? And embody that, and then learn OpSec you know, like, you don't have to be like the super dev, super shadowy C coder, but like, I mean, we should all we should all know OpSec you know, everybody in this space, but when you're when you're in a non you need it in a different way to just like around what your what types of communications and engagements are gonna cause different types of risks to your security and decide how important it is to you how secure you want to keep it What kind of bike lock Do you want to ride around with?
Sina Habibian
Right? Alright, man, I think we can call it here. Thanks, man. This is really fun.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, thanks for having me on. I could talk to you about this all day. So appreciate it.
