I’ll be abstaining from this proposal. It certainly seems like a strong one, but having looked at it over the last couple of days I don’t have the bandwidth to dive deep into your suite to assess exactly how it’ll drive usage on Optimism. As a small cap, I’m also concerned by your ability to match incentives that are a significant fraction of your market cap over a relatively long term in a very volatile market, that too partially with a token which does not yet exist. I wish you the best of luck, and hope it works out, but I neither have the confidence right now to vote For; but at the same time I definitely don’t think this proposal has anything problematic to warrant an Against.
Hey Polynya!
Fan of your work, a very measured response as I’d expect.
Our firm has been around for over a year and we have millions of dollars in market liquidity even at these low valuations, along with plenty of cash & assets to cover the incentives promised in the proposal many times over. We have a team of 35 with 20 supremely talented engineers & a couple years of runway.
We waited until after the bull market to launch our token unfortunately but our fundamentals are very strong. Reached 300m TVL with no VCs or token in 2021 which I believe is some kind of record. Fair launched with some cool sybil-resistant tech you can read here. We have the UX still up for posterity’s sake over on https://oath.sale.
Long story short, we’ve been around the block and can back up this proposal 1000%. We’re very mature as a company (by crypto standards) and quite large.
Hey @Crypto_A_S thank you for the proposal.
I have the same question as @rasmuky. I tried to dive a bit deeper into what you guys do and can’t find good statistics that would help me see the adoption of your protocol and what is live in optimism yet and what not.
Good to see you adjusted the proposal amount down.
But why did you reduce the token distribution from 18 to 9 months? I liked the long term distibution idea more.
I agree, we will work on a dashboard to show TVL across products more clearly, I really liked @rasmuky’s idea.
Here is a quick rundown of the status of the Product Suite:
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The Reliquary is in production testing on Optimism. Everything looks good and our Security team is comparing performance against expectations + reviewing our new deployment process. I’m really excited to show everyone it’s gamified front end once it’s approved to release to the public. It’s really cool, shouldn’t be much longer before it’s ready to go.
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Right now Reaper.Farm is live on Optimism, if you hover over our TVL metric in the top left hand corner it shows ~$400k Optimism TVL. We just released a batch of 15 Velodrome crypts yesterday, still working on incorporating all their yield offerings and gaining market share. Also excited to see the power of the multistrategies continue to grow as we incorporate more Optimism projects. There’s a lot to be said about having no deposit or withdrawal fees on those.
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Granary.Finance is also live on Optimism with about $800k TVL, the majority being the $OP token. We take pride in being the first place you can lend / borrow the $OP token. We’ve been networking with other teams in the Optimism ecosystem, should hopefully have some more integrations soon.
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Lrn.fi has all kinds of in-depth Optimism content on the docket to get released about the $OP ecosystem. Looking forward to spreading the word about Optimism and helping onboarding new users.
The Byte Mason team decided to reduce the token emission timeline due to feedback we received stating that emitting over 18 months was too long and that other delegates would rather see us reduce our $OP ask + emit over a shorter timeframe + potentially come back with a second proposal once we can show product adoption by Optimism users.
I hope that answers your questions. The team is very excited to continue to build and grow on Optimism! Looking forward to seeing where we will be in the next 9 months
Hey @Crypto_A_S thank you for taking the time to answer my questions and generally for all the work you guys put in the proposal.
I spent some time doing due dilligence on your project and its history in Fantom.
What I came up with shocked me. I have a few builder friends whom I trust a lot and who used to be in the Fantom ecosystem and what they told me aligns very much with the comment by @FantomFunhouse above which is for some reason hidden? Why hide a contrarian view?
Link here: [READY] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Byte Mason Product Suite - #33 by FantomFunhouse
Posting a screenshot also to make it easier to see what I reference:
My friends basically told me that the way your team behaved in fantom was that of a value extractor who tried to exploit everything for financial gain. could not be trusted and in the end contributed to the fall of that ecosystem.
I don’t want the same to happen to Optimism and I don’t condone this kind of behaviour so I will be voting against.
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Hi Lefteris,
I know only one person who was involved in the Fantom ecosystem but he made similar points about JB (which is one reason why I voted no to this proposal), however he wasn’t sure about the specifics and in particular hadn’t heard of PITAT. I’ve tried to fact check myself by basically only have familiarity with the Ethereum ecosystem so don’t really know which sources are more or less reliable. Please could you share which of the claims you’ve linked to you’ve been able to confirm?
Thanks for doing the deep dive though, with lots of delegates voting ‘for’ the proposal I was starting to have second thoughts about taking guidance from my friend on this one! Any more info you can share would be really valuable.
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Hi @lefterisjp just echoing @MinimalGravitas comment, I have voted in favor but if you could provide some info/link on what you have able to confirm would help us all.
Hey @MinimalGravitas and @OPUser.
What @FantomFunhouse posted is what I also got told by my friend. Unfortunately that friend strongly asked to remain anonymous as they have left crypto for good. Said most of the stuff that happened is in chat groups and on-chain … but yeah I also have not dealt with the fantom ecosystem to be able to dig them up myself. But I greatly trust that friend so I simply can’t vote yes here.
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Bebis explains exactly what he did with Solidly in this podcast.
Hear his own words and judge for yourself what you think of it:
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The proposal looks well-prepared and interesting at first sight.
As we have not heard of Byte Masons or any of your products yet (hardly used Fantom), we did a brief check with conflicting results. It seems you’re tapping into various ecosystems at the same time right now? Projects are not yet / just launched? (-> would justify smaller Ask; or more info on co-incentives?)
Would love to see additional info on the Fantom story too as we’d like to welcome genuine, long-minded ecosystem partners to grow the Op ecosystem together.
Looking forward to hearing back soon and clarification to make a fair assessment!
I’m pinging anyone who has voted yes, as well as anyone who has shown interest in questioning this proposal, because this post is going to be flagged by astroturfing bots. Hopefully you all get an email notification/see this post.
@MinimalGravitas @OPUser @lefterisjp @katie
Here is Reaper Farm’s multisig/treasury: 0x111731A388743a75CF60CCA7b140C58e41D83635
Here is their multisig/treasury listed on the airdrop recipient list of protocols who would be the launch partners of Solidly: GitHub - solidlyexchange/solidly
Here is the multisig/treasury address testing dummy tokens to LP with: Pain In The (PIT) Token Tracker | FtmScan
Here’s the pool they made on Solidly (still LP’ing it lmao, notice the few negative votes):
Here’s them dumping the first week’s emissions: Fantom Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | FtmScan
I’m happy to answer any questions anyone has. I think it should be abundantly clear what kind of character Justin Bebis is. Giving him an OP grant, after he went out of his way to fuck over a protocol that was meant to be a public utility using GIFTED FUNDS is just beyond reason. These actions were the direct cause of the death of the protocol. I cannot implore you enough to change your votes to “no” if you have voted already, and if you haven’t voted yet, to vote against the proposal.
Give his proposal’s spot in the roundup to Tarot instead - they’re a high quality Fantom protocol.
I encourage those with influence to share this information with those who may find it useful.
Thanks for reading.
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Thank you for trying to explain. I tried to watch the video but the guys were laughing too much and using too specific fantom lingo to understand. They just seemed to hint they did something nasty, but not super bad and laughed about it.
What would be useful is if you could specify exactly what happened and what it is that in your opinion their team did wrong and explain it in simple ethereum terms? Assume zero knowledge about how fantom works or what solidly is.
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Im not sure why Solidly is being spoke of as if Andre was a saint trying to create any sort of Value in the Fantom Ecosystem? Andre was a rugger who exit scammed billion dollars worth of funds on every holder who held FTM/Kp3r/Yearn, Man was basically a serial rugger and escaped to live in Dubai to avoid any laws. He still holds almost 400m FTM and will probably wait for some narrative to be spun up to dump on all of his holders. It’s crazy he’s upset at the byte masons after dumping every Ecosystem token in opera
Here’s his wallet address : 0x431e81e5dfb5a24541b5ff8762bdef3f32f96354 U can see that he farm dumped Solid by himself, and also dumped every single eco system token and basically killed the eco system
Man was working with Daniele who was the rugger behind Time And ICE which were directly affiliated with The Italian Mob.
Personally I think Solidly was one of the worst "Experiments (which is what Andre called any project he half assed that made people lose money) To ever touch Defi
He is also responsible for Cream which was exploited for almost 500m, Pickle finance and Geist finance which exit scammed on all of their users.
Personally I am happy Andre is gone from DeFI, maybe now people will be losing less funds to his terrible work ethics.
Edit: Here’s also another fact people didnt know about Andre during the whole Solidly thing, He used his Curve/Anyswap and various other tokens that were allocated to him as a developer to Farm Solid, he pretended that he didnt get an allocation and the protocol had no “Dev allocation” But he used all of his free tokens to farm Dump it using Retail as exit liquidity.
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Hey guys,
Thank you for your feedback.
We’re aware of the original comment from FantomFunhouse, but chose not to respond as it seems that it was posted by an account created for the sole purpose of leaving a disparaging comment about us. We did not make the decision to hide the comment – this is not within the powers of a thread author on here.
I urge you to hear our side of the story as well, and give us the chance to tell you about who we are and what we do and whom all we do it for – and our vision for the future of DeFi.
We addressed this situation back when it happened: https://twitter.com/ByteMasons/status/1498071841986031629
Some further context on the Solidly situation:
Point 1: Prior to its launch, our team reviewed the Solidly codebase, where we found multiple critical issues/bugs. We sought to notify Andre about our findings, however our feedback was not well-received. Andre eventually resolved to disable issues on the Solidly GitHub after several other Fantom teams notified him of the same issues in the codebase. These unaddressed bugs resulted in major losses of user funds & ended up being the downfall of the Solidly protocol. Some excerpts from page 1:
Point 2: Regarding PIT/AT: while we were in the middle of the $OATH token launch, Solidly was launched with no forewarning. Since the Byte Masons were the only veNFT recipient without a token to farm emissions with, we spun up a liquidity pool with two placeholder tokens (PIT/AT), with the intention of using the $SOLID emissions to reward our token holders & community.
Unfortunately, this has led to several baseless rumors being spread about the Byte Masons and our intentions behind our usage of Solidly – primarily that we were farming the $SOLID solely for our own treasury.
We received 476506 Solid tokens on March 4th (price: $2.68) that we could have claimed at the peak. We gave out 26000 tokens 5 days later as a bribe for Beethoven voting for Oath. After we became aware of Andre’s feelings towards us, we immediately ceased all farming of $SOLID & didn’t touch any tokens until roughly 3 weeks later on March 23rd, when we sold 212959 SOLID at a price of roughly ~$1.10. After this sale, we decided not to touch anything related to Solidly again, leaving us with 237000 Solidly tokens as well as our veNFT (which most other recipients sold).
ALL of our Solid transactions can be seen here:
Every protocol was incentivizing their own token, and as the only veNFT holder without a token on the market, we had to do something to benefit our soon-to-be holders. We could have waited and forgone all Solid emissions during the critical first week, we could have voted for another protocol’s token, but we decided to farm the weeks worth of emissions and then figure out an optimal way to distribute them to Oath holders in the future. If the voting period was not one week we would have switched to incentivizing Oath liquidity even sooner than we did, but we were forced to make a difficult decision that no other veNFT holder had to make.
Point 3: With regard to Andre – as soon as we found out about his frustration, we reached out to try to resolve the situation. Andre was not interested in working with us, nor did he respond to our many attempts to reach out. We even offered to return our veNFT (valued at 7 figures at the time) to him, but our efforts were clearly in vain, as his attacks on us have persisted to this day.
Point 4: We find the characterization of us being “value extractors” to be flagrantly untrue. As far as the Solidly situation goes, we ended up voluntarily leaving millions of dollars worth of assets (hundreds of thousands of $SOLID and a veNFT) on the table as a sign of goodwill – even though we were simply utilizing the protocol as designed with the intention of creating value for both Solidly users and Oath holders.
Beyond that (and back to the actual content of our proposal), our protocols are designed specifically to provide users as much benefit as possible. A simple fee structure comparison should be enough to prove this. Furthermore, we’ve spent an outsized amount of time performing free work in order to ensure the security & proper functionality of numerous protocols on the Fantom network and beyond. We’ve also established a community-focused educational platform in order to freely increase access to knowledge.
We’ve tirelessly dedicated ourselves to the Fantom community, and it hurts to be so baselessly accused of being the reason for its supposed downfall.
We will continue our efforts to set safety, security, and service standards in the DeFi industry and seek excellence in everything we do for the betterment of our community and ecosystem.
I’m happy to answer any further questions or concerns you might have. We have an open door policy in our Discord, and are looking to set a new DeFi transparency standard.
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Andre Cronje built a protocol called Solidly that was intended to be a ultra-low fee liquidity platform for Fantom protocols to use. He launched it by distributing 100% of Solidly ownership to the top 25 protocols (measured by total value locked) on Fantom. He gave the protocol away as a public good for Fantom.
Reaper Farm (Bebis) received approximately 4% of the protocol’s ownership. This allowed them to direct 4% of the protocol’s weekly emissions to a liquidity pool(s) of their choosing. They can vote for whatever they want. You can think of Solidly as similar to Curve.
Every protocol chose to direct emissions toward productive pools for the ecosystem like FTM/WETH, WFTM/USDC, BOO/WFTM, etc. Reaper Farm chose to mint two worthless tokens into their treasury (named Pain in The and Ass Tax) and create a pool on Solidly with these tokens.On Solidly, emissions go to the liquidity providers.
Reaper Farm then voted with their 4% ownership to direct 4% of Solidly’s weekly emissions into a liquidity pool that only they could enter. This liquidity pool had no purpose other than funneling protocol emissions directly into their treasury.
They effectively used a gift meant to kickstart a public good to funnel as much money into their treasury as possible before forcing other protocols to use their own Solidly ownership to downvote their malicious pool
Andre was a rugger what are you talking about? guy made millions on the back of retail and then exit scammed leaving everyone bag holding
It’s interesting that you talk about “having to incentivize your soon to be holders” when Bebis publicly stated that very same week that Byte Masons didn’t have a token because it was pointless to do so.
Nice revisionist history though.
As expected the astroturfers have arrived.
Respond to any of the claims I made?
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Andre the guy that got his partner to make a tweet, telling the whole community that he was going to close down his software and caused a crash that lost people millions?
This is a difficult decision for me but as of right now I’m voting no based on what I read about the Fantom situation. It makes me uncomfortable in supporting for the Optimism ecosystem. I read both sides but it also seems the concerns are not only coming from one source as @FantomFunhouse has shared input, @lefterisjp’s friend (who I do not know) also said the same thing, and @MinimalGravitas’ contact made some similar points (although I am not weighting this one much since the contact wasn’t sure about the specifics). I’ll continue to monitor this forum and adjust my vote should anything change my opinion on this.
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