Name: Velodrome Team
Address or ENS: velodrome.eth
Discord username: alexcutler.eth#0399, tao#4297, nickbtts#0447
Verification (Tally profile or tweet): https://www.tally.xyz/profile/alexcutler.eth
I have read and understood the Delegate Commitment Process: Yes
I understand that becoming a delegate is a significant commitment: Yes
My reasons for wanting to be a delegate: We are Optimism’s preeminent native decentralized exchange and have been working since day one to use every lever available to us to help guide Optimism to success. The nature of our work gives us a perspective on building on Optimism that few teams or individuals can match, and being delegates will enable us to channel this insight toward policies that we believe will enable Optimism to meet its objectives.
My view on the Optimistic Vision : The core principles underlying the Vision are foundational to our protocol.
Velodrome is a public good: we raised no money, gave virtually all of our votepower away to ecosystem protocols, OP Labs, prospective users, and Optimism airdroppees, and are laying out initiative after initiative intended to broaden stakeholdership of our protocol and of Optimism more generally. We structured Velodrome to allow anyone seeking to build to bootstrap funding without appealing directly to private capital and for veVELO lockers to benefit from economic activity in the ecosystem.
Why did we do this? We believe that the promise of decentralized finance is not to enrich the few but to freely provide accessible technology facilitating economic activity: a financial Internet, in effect. Optimism is in our view the first true broad-based attempt to make this a reality, and we believe it’s our job to help shepherd this project in its early but critical days.
My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:
- The fact that we as a protocol are now being offered votepower is testament to Optimism’s commitment to experimentation, continuous improvement, and broadening notions of representation. And now that we’re joining the efforts, we recognize we won’t get everything right at the start — but ensuring that every major player shares these core values and commits to putting in the effort will get us to the right place.
- We’ve observed a lot of difficulty and confusion that result from imperfect delegation practices and the ‘one token, one vote’ construction. Our view here follows from the first point, which is that finding new ways to enfranchise committed players will help us as a community move beyond the first generation of governance structures in organizations. We look forward to seeing the first public implementation of Citizen House.
- From the start, we have worked closely with the Optimism Foundation and love having them as partners. We’re also deeply cognizant of their desire to decentralize as much as possible and the challenge they’ve faced walking the tightrope between being active stewards and allowing governance to do its thing. The Protocol Delegation Program is an example of the kind of care they’re showing in helping the organization mature, and we’re thrilled to be expanding our partnership to this domain.
**My Web3 interests:**Choose ≤ five from the following set. List them as comma-separated values as your answer, like: “A, B, C”.DeFi, Privacy, Zero knowledge, Accessibility, Economics.
Accessibility, Bridges, Cryptography, DAOs, Data and analytics, DeFi, Developer tools, Economics, Events, Environment, Gaming, Governance, Identity, Infrastructure, Legal, Messaging, Music, NFTs, Oracles, Privacy, Security, Social impact, Visual art, Wallets, Writing, Zero knowledge
DeFi, Economics, Infrastructure, Social Impact
Languages I speak and write: en, sp, fr
My skills and areas of expertise: Our core team has work backgrounds spanning diverse areas of investment management, professional services, academia, and software engineering.
My favorite Web3 projects: Curve, Gitcoin