Protocol name: Velodrome
Name of protocol representative(s) that will serve as delegate(s): alexcutler.eth, tao, nickbtts
Link to delegate commitment 16: (if your protocol doesn’t currently have one, you will need to create one) https://gov.optimism.io/t/delegate-commitments/235/165
Is your protocol OP Native?: Yes
Was your protocol active in Optimism governance prior to 12/5/22?: alexcutler.was
- If so, please link to voting history (ie. Snapshot profile, delegate communication thread, twitter threads, etc.):
Why do you want to participate in this program?:
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.
Why do you believe your protocol would be a good steward of the Optimism ecosystem?:
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.
- Do you agree to abide by the delegate code of conduct: Yes
- Please list any anticipated conflicts of interest: Being a decentralized exchange, we interact closely with virtually all protocols on Optimism. Projects looking to draw liquidity or activity for various reasons may want subsidization of their activities on Velodrome. Recusing from all votes that may involve us or other dexes would see us participating in almost no votes. However, the added short-term gains we may realize from any single proposal is heavily outweighed by the importance of ensuring Optimism’s success, and so we are committed to voting in ways that benefit Optimism rather than benefit our protocol, if the two aren’t in alignment.