Thoughts on the PoolTogether DAO
PoolTogether Community Interview #10: MkKoll, Community Advocate
Hello,
Welcome to the 10th Edition of the PoolTogether Community Interview.
It seems another week, another language version of the PoolTogether Community Substack is launched! This time, it is the launch of the French Language PoolTogether Community Substack!
We now have English, Spanish, French, Mandarin and Portuguese versions of the PoolTogether Community Substack.
We also have a treat coming up for you next week with the return of The Richard Show. Episode #3 will feature a lot on investing in blockchain and crypto projects including Richard’s investing strategy and how you can find new attractive projects early. You do not want to miss that if you are at all interested in investing within the crypto space.
Onto today. We have a legend within the PoolTogether Community. MkKoll is someone who is involved in so many parts of the protocol - from the Treasury Working Group to other parts of governance and also is taking part in the Marketing Working Group which you have read about in last week’s newsletter.
Tell us a bit about yourself. Describe yourself in a few words / facts:
I’ve always had an interest in technology and ‘computer nerdy’ type stuff. From being an an avid video gamer in my teens (less so these days as there are more interesting things to be involved in online), to dabbling in programming. Learning about computers and technology has always been an interest of mine.
Since 2017 I’ve also delved down the rabbit hole of macro finance and realised ‘how the sausage is made’ when it comes to central banking, money printing and the pit falls of fiat currencies and centralized power in general. It isn’t pretty. Naturally, crypto called out to me as a potential technological solution to some of our ills in the world.
How long have you been into crypto?
I’ve passively followed the development of crypto for at least the last 5 years. I also remember reading at least one Slashdot article way back in the early 2010’s, probably before the 2013 Bitcoin boom. I thought the concept was interesting but niche, and never really took the time to think about it deeper or thought it would birth the industry we see today.
My first crypto buy was in late 2018 because at the time the KYC/AML on-ramping always scared me a little. Since then, I’ve basically been irresponsibly all in.
Do you want to tell us about the main lessons you have learned since then?
Under no circumstances take any significant action with your finances in a state of high emotion or when you are not fully thinking clearly, i.e after a drink! Don't leverage trade if you don’t know what the hell you are doing.
Thinking 'long term' is at a minimum thinking 1 year into the future. ETH is the most important asset in the whole industry.
Why do you think ETH is the most important asset in the whole industry?
When ETH fully transitions to Proof of Stake, its economic security will directly correlate with the price. Higher price = more expensive to attack the network. If we don't have network security, we don't have an industry. Pretty much everything we are building rests on having secure, decentralized blockchain networks.
While other networks chase scale at the expense of decentralization, Ethereum has proved so far it is primarily concerned with being the most secure blockchain in the world. I think the Ethereum network is showing it has the strongest network effect of any other chain by a large margin, excluding bitcoin.
Both users, developers and institutions are adopting Ethereum at lighting speed and its growth is only accelerating. In my opinion, this is all due to the credibility of its development and communities' ethos to maximise decentralization and security first.
What was your best crypto moment?
I don’t think there is any particular one. But hitching my wagon to the Ethereum ecosystem and having belief in the developers and overall mission has served me very well ever since.
What was your biggest fail?
Leverage. I don’t trade any more, but I will admit I had in hindsight, an extremely risky leveraged CDP position with far too much of my ETH stack before the March 2020 covid black swan. I was almost completely wiped out.
That morning, I woke up unusually early and with just a weird feeling. I checked the markets which hadn’t quite nose-dived into the covid dump we know today, and immediately protected my CDP with DefiSaver. An hour later, everything went nuts and a combination of the late Maker oracles and DefiSaver reactively selling off my leveraged stack to protect the majority of the CDP, I JUST made it through with a %50 haircut on my stack.
At least twice my investment was within less than $10 of complete liquidation. Yeah, leverage. Never again. My crypto investing ethos changed to one of extreme conservatism and I learned a lot about crypto investing the hard way that day.
How did you find out about PoolTogether?
The r/ethfinance subreddit. I learned a lot about this space and so many cool projects from having discussions with people back and forward in that message board. To this day it’s a great place to be with a high signal-to-noise ratio.
What made you stick around?
My earliest PoolTogether Deposit was late 2019 I think. But I only really got involved with the community a few months after the POOL token drop. Token incentives are strong! Since then, I’ve found the combination of a motivated tight-nit community with extremely engaged and responsive core developers to motivate me to stick around.
Also, I’m a believer that the mission to make PoolTogether the biggest prize savings game in the world is one that is highly socially positive and aligned with the core values of self-sovereignty of your savings of crypto in general.
How are you involved in the community? Tell us about it.
I’ve almost see myself as a sort of ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ within the community. I’ve dabbled in governance discussions, ran a competition, worked with a dev to create the first 3rd party Pod with Ethfinance.
Mostly I’m still trying to figure out where I can best position myself within the community. Where can I add the most value? Currently I’m involved with the new Treasury Working Group or TWG and plan to use it as on-the-job experience opportunity to learn about how a DAO works and learn from brighter minds than I in terms of safe and effective treasury analysis.
Can you tell us more about your thoughts on DAOs
DAOs will be the new institutions of the future. Why would I be anywhere else but seizing the opportunity, learning everything I can and exploring this new financial and social technology with you all?
Legacy institutions, especially large ones, suffer from the apathy of their employees. Also the individuals on the higher end of the hierarchies tend to be highly extractive of the value the company or institution is bringing. DAOs can mitigate this by being an overall more democratic way to run an organisation and giving token holders a direct stake and say in what happens within the DAO.
This can all come with its own problems for sure, but i think is an overall better organisational structure when done right. Our job in DAOs is to build a culture and incentive structure with the token that mitigates some of the more negative aspects and failures of large human collaborative projects. We have recently seen some of these failures within the SushiDAO, where a leadership vacuum was created and the DAO almost completely lost its direction and momentum over night.
There are definitely problems to solve. How do you reward contributors? How do you prevent 'inner-circle's of contributors having too much power whether they be early contributors or individuals with large voting power from dominating the DAO? How do you resolve disputes? I do believe though that this new organisational technology as a whole has merit and we should do all the experimentation we can to really determine if this is a better way to organize people and work towards a common goal.
From the PoolTogether DAO in particular, I've learned specifically that the product itself can inform the culture of the DAO. We see how everybody wants to use PoolTogether be a force for good, whether it be charity initiatives or just improving the financial health of millions around the world. We all kind of get the mission, even if we havent formalised it anywhere! I think this is due to how the PoolTogether product works at a fundamental level. The product informs the culture
Would you recommend PoolTogether to others? How would you describe it to them?
Absolutely. PoolTogether is probably the best newbie friendly dapp out there. It helped the concept of DeFi click for me. I use it all the time when I’m trying to explain what the power of Defi can do for the every day person.
We hope you have enjoyed this week’s Community Newsletter. Please join us on our PT Community Call every Friday at 2.45pm EST on the PT Discord.
Our next newsletter is out on Sunday as well.