[READY] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Byte Mason Product Suite

ARCHIVED & OLD Missions Governance Fund: Phase 1
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Voted : Yes

Thanks to everyone laying out the situation that unfolded around Solidly, but after reading through what happened I can see why the Byte Mason team took the actions that they did when farming Solidly using placeholder tokens. Personal beef happens in crypto, and it looks like the action they took pissed off others in the Solidly camp. So that’s what we’re seeing play out now, as those parties are trying to spoil Byte Mason’s success moving forward.

I’ve had some interactions with the Byte Mason team through our work at Layer2DAO. In accordance with our mission to grow the L2 ecosystem and incentivize more developers to move to L2s, we are partnering with them to help them roll out their product suite on Optimism and help grow the TVL on Optimism. My interactions with the Byte Mason team have been top notch, and they seem extremely capable. I do believe the Optimism ecosystem will be better off for welcoming and supporting the growth the Byte Mason product suite.

It’s clear that personal agendas are playing out here in the Optimism governance forum, so I would encourage everyone without first hand knowledge of what happened on Fantom to abstain from the vote if it’s solely based on the accusations wielded here against Byte Mason’s actions with Solidly (cc// @linda and @MinimalGravitas).

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68

We voted no on this proposal because the amount requested is very high compared to the TVL on Optimism. With the majority of tokens being distributed through Reliquary, we’d like to see the platform deployed on Optimism mainnet first, along with some initial user traction.

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69

That account you reference is a fake account Ser @lefterisjp - also FYI @OPUser @linda as I noticed your comments as well - that was created to troll these forums when I was discussing the Saddle Finance proposal not long ago… It was flagged then and should be flagged again in my opinion but unfortunately has not been.

I’m not going to take the time to read the comments from the account because I already know this; would be better if an admin just removed them as it is not serving any productive discussion from my view.

I also have the clips that I publicly posted across Discord as well as the timestamps to accompany them.

Seems like another team looking to expand… being met with resistance for no reason that is sound. Let’s be optimistic!?

They’re an outfit of 35 ppl that have endured the worst of the bear market and this is not how we should be greeting a talented team from my view.

Weston

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I’m fine changing my vote to abstain then since I don’t have direct knowledge of the situation if others are vouching for the team. @0xWeston even if the account is fake, the comments from @lefterisjp’s friend had me concerned still.

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71

I’ve followed Andre since YFI farming days and was involved in the Fantom community by way of BeethovenX months before Solidly launched. The Byte Masons have always conducted themselves with integrity and transparency throughout my interactions with them and my external observations of how they operate. You can ask any project that was on Fantom at the time and is still on Fantom today - I doubt you’ll hear anything different. I can completely understand how the events may be misconstrued by outsiders or those who weren’t involved in the Fantom ecosystem.

It is unfortunate that this has derailed the OP proposal but I know this won’t have any bearing on the Byte Masons continuing to build on Optimism. I hope the OP community can re-consider this proposal or a similar one in the future.

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Thx for feedback @linda yeah I hear you - if trying to make an assessment as a bystander here I can see how that may be the wisest course of action then… just erring on side of being conservative which I can certainly appreciate and respect.

Personally I would love to see this team get some support from Optimism as I have been in contact with some of them for months now and watched their development; haven’t had any negative experiences and really appreciated the DeFi educational materials they published to try and educate new DeFi users… that went a long way in my book to demonstrate their values I think.

I have a hard time finding any net negative by bringing in and providing incentivizes for new talent to Optimism right now…! :red_circle:

Cheers all

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73

I don’t agree that looking at their Optimism TVL is the right metric to use. While this team is relatively new to Optimism, they do have $16mm in TVL on other chains and 17,000 users on their Discord. Particularly with the narrative shifting from Alt-L1 to ETH L2s, I believe there’s an opportunity to pull users to Optimism (especially from Fantom). In my opinion this is a great use of OP token incentives: Byte Mason has an existing audience on Fantom (and other chains) that is likely more than willing to come try Optimism if we provide their team with the OP incentives to lure those users over.

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74

After reading through concerned raised by different users/delegate about credibility of team, I have changed my vote from Yes to Abstain. Will be monitoring this thread closely and willing to change my decision if new information comes to light.

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I don’t understand why you would call an account that is making a particular claim fake. For me the information checks out with what I have already been told about the team by people I trust and I can’t possibly vote in favor here.

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Can you share some evidence for the account being fake? They were critical of your proposal ([READY] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Saddle Finance - #37 by FantomFunhouse) but so were a variety of other people. Accusations were also made in the thread suggesting that you were acting in bad faith ([READY] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Saddle Finance - #41 by jackanorak) so I would hope that you see the necessity for some objective reasoning as to why you think @FantomFunhouse is a bad faith account?

— EDIT —

Snap

In the original post of this thread they made the claim that the discussion is “heavily astroturfed”, which is clearly accurate. In the first 25 comments, more than half are by users who’ve never posted before (kiwikish, mate_phi, Miso, veJoe, Andros, Ikpeamarom, 0xFreshPots, CryptoDandy, b1rdmania, naly, jonsteps, GuiLamas, IlijasDev).

As for the key issue at play here, I think @exosphere makes a very good point about those of us who lack first hand knowledge. I unfortunately have zero experience with the Fantom ecosystem and so it is very difficult to assess the veracity of both sides claims. My friend is not a developer and so although he has an opinion, from the lack of specifics that he can remember (or at least that he’s shared) I’m trying hard not to take it as equivalent to insider knowledge of the situation.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that abstaining is the correct course of action. If the option is to give out tokens or not then personally I think voting to not give them as the default until the matter in question is resolved.

Of the claims here to be addressed, perhaps this one is specific enough that it can be established true or false:

Can anyone prove whether this specific point is accurate or not?

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Hi @MinimalGravitas, @OPUser, and @Linda,

We outlined all of our interactions with $SOLID and our Treasury in the post above, see here:

While we could continue to debate the past, the Byte Masons as a team would like to move the conversations happening in this thread back to the original purpose of this proposal, the products and use cases we bring to Optimism. We believe that we offer a strong product portfolio to the Optimism ecosystem and want to focus on providing secure, low-fee yield opportunities to OP users.

The team listened to both public / private feedback and reduced our original $OP ask + emission timeline to bring our proposal in line with other successful proposals from past voting cycles. We hope this, along with our offer to match incentives $ for $ and our OP educational content from our Lrn.Fi platform demonstrates our strong commitment to building and working to further the Optimism ecosystem.

As always, we’re an open book and I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.

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78

Given the conversation in this thread, I’m unfortunately going to need to vote against. I am very open to reevaluating future proposals, but enough doubt has been raised and I think Optimism should be doing its best to avoid hurting its reputation. I can’t validate any of the claims made in this thread, but it would be worth evaluating further before a proposal of this size passes.

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Updated my vote to abstain - I like the proposal but the issues raised around the project are concerning and I don’t feel I have enough information to make an informed decision.

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Spent the day yesterday dealing with a family emergency, so I’m not going to drill too hard into this thread. Thanks to the Optimism community for the spirited discussion - we are committed to bringing you world class products and will likely be in these forums relatively often to explore possibilities with you. Feel free to message me directly on Twitter for more pointed discussions: https://twitter.com/0xBebis_.

To give you all an idea of why ‘DYOR’ is important and the power of language to influence interpretation, I’d like to point out that the ftmscan link provided in this post could be used to exonerate us. Funds were liquidated AFTER the Solidly team quit for a tiny fraction of what people claimed we exited for.

Out of respect for parties involved, I will abstain from commenting further.

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I work as a developer at Byte Masons. This is my first post here–well, technically second since my first one from yesterday has been hidden for some reason–but you can verify me through:

  • Github (username “tess3rac7”)
  • The Byte Masons discord (search posts from “tess3rac7”)
  • Twitter (username “tess3rac7”)

I didn’t think I’d have to post here, but looking at the lazy and abysmal “governance” that’s going on here I can’t help but say something. Here are some factual statements to put an end to the hearsay and fud.

Yes, the Byte Masons created a dummy pool token to absorb SOLID emissions. Why?

  • Because every other protocol was using their SOLID emissions to incentivize their own token
  • Because the Byte Masons’ token (OATH) wasn’t live yet
  • Because, as it turns out, it’s possible to claim tokens that are time-sensitive and leave them in the multisig for a few weeks, and use them later to incentivize your token holders. Just like it’s possible to buy and store winter tires for a car that you will take delivery of next week.
  • Because incentivizing our token with those emissions is exactly what we did afterwards. And the remainder of those tokens were liquidated only after the Solidly team quit.

Was it public knowledge that this could be done? Yes. Were we the only ones who did it? No. Did anyone care that we did it? No. Well, except for one man: Andre Cronje himself. Here are screenshots of DMs Andre sent to us the day of:

Screenshot from 2022-07-27 12-21-59
Screenshot from 2022-07-27 12-21-591167×753 212 KB

What you see above is someone who cannot take a joke; who is so hurt that a pair of tokens was given a particular name that he:

  • Takes it as a personal attack
  • Threatens to vote us out (he tried to create a grand drama on Twitter that fell flat)
  • Threatens to remove us from all future incentives (what you are seeing happen in this proposal; open your eyes please)

This happened 6 months ago, in February. It was a simple joke gone wrong. Sometimes you think your heroes have a certain temperament that will connect with your temperament. Sometimes you’re wrong–completely wrong. Both Justin and Crypto A S apologized profusely to Andre at that time but it all fell on deaf ears. When it became clear that we couldn’t console the man, we decided to move on and keep building. And in the last 6 months, we’ve built and survived the bear market and grown and leveled up our tech and taken on new projects and so much more. We have become stronger partners with other top teams on Fantom, and as those teams have gone cross-chain, we have supported them and built on top of them.

Andre Cronje has since “left crypto for good.” lefterisjp’s only source is their mysterious friend who wishes to “remain anonymous as they have left crypto for good.” FantomFunhouse, also anonymous, who seems to resonate so much with how Andre feels about us, is calling Justin and the rest of our team “clowns.” Come on guys, let’s not pretend to be stupid. Are we discussing a serious governance proposal here based on merits and pros and cons? Or is this some joke gossip-circle where we are going to entertain name calling and obey one resentful man (with different pseudonyms) who wishes to remain anonymous and is essentially trying to psyop all of you into kicking a talented team of 20+ dedicated engineers to the curb?

I’m just one of the developers at Byte Masons. In the last three days, I have: implemented depth first search on balancer pools so we can build zappers for beethoven; launched 15+ velodrome autocompounding vaults on reaper.farm; made significant improvements to our serverless infrastructure–all whilst collaborating with two dozen other talented and dedicated engineers each of whom are tackling equally complex challenges every day to take DeFi to new heights.

As delegates and individuals with voting power, here is what I implore you all to do to verify our credibility:

  • Browse, and ask us about, our currently deployed projects
  • Go to defillama and look at the top projects on Fantom (Spookyswap, BeethovenX, Tarot etc.). Then go to their discords and search “reaper” and you will see all their users who respect us and love our products. We will put you in touch with their leads and founders as well so you can hear directly from them.
  • Tell us what we can do to successfully bring our full suite of DeFi products–a yield optimizer + a lending market + a liquidity provision solution + an education portal–to Optimism together with our existing Fantom usership.

Please, treat us with some level of respect. Value our collective more than one seemingly powerful individual who couldn’t take a joke, and is simply trying to manifest his promised revenge in the most “below-the-belt” way imaginable. We have done absolutely nothing to deserve this dogpiling treatment from our peers in this industry.

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82

Are other projects willing to match $ for $ with incentives? I don’t understand the pushback on this proposal. This seems like a win-win for Optimism. I just wish I had more OP to vote with. Some of you are voting NO on this but YES on other things? WTF

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I’m not going to engage in this thread further because I’ve said all I have to say and it has turned into a mess. It’s very weird to me that Byte Masons think that screenshot of their conversation with Andre paints them in a good light or redeems their actions in any way. Maybe I just see it differently.

Solidly history notwithstanding, this proposal is asking for too many tokens given their userbase on Optimism, the proposed time frame for distribution, and their TVL.

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Didn’t see this ping, see below:

Solidly gave out 20,000,000 SOLID at launch, Reaper Farm received 591573 (2.9%). (GitHub - solidlyexchange/solidly).

This is Reaper Farm’s multisig, filtered by SOLID transactions. You can see them claiming 2.6% (476,506) of the first week’s emissions (19.6M - Jump Crypto - Solidly Emissions, A Deep Dive | Jump Crypto).

The gap between 2.9% and 2.6% is from other Solidly users downvoting their fake pool. You can also look through the multisig for the transaction where they sent the LP to Solidly if you care to do so.

They’ve also just admitted that they extracted almost a quarter million dollars from the protocol while insulting the person who gifted it to them. Not really my kind of “joke.”

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Hi @FantomFunhouse and @MinimalGravitas ,

We outlined the context of the Solidly situation in one of my posts above that includes our treasury transactions, we did nothing wrong and have nothing to hide. The Team went out of our way to not profit from the situation, only when the Solidly team quit did we liquidate part of our $SOLID position, as described below (includes treasury transactions). Please see the full context here:

I am being as transparent as possible so we can put these accusation to rest and can refocus this thread on the content of our proposal. Let me know if there’s any other questions or concerns I can address.

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You abused his trust, effectively stole the money, caused him to ragequit, then pawned the leftovers after he was gone - and you’re framing this as honorable because you didn’t sell it until you made him quit? Profound.

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