Eric: Welcome @DrNickA — I hope you are doing well today!
Eric: Excited to learn a lot about finance.vote
Dr. Nick: Hey @ERCSU I’m good thanks!
Eric: To start. Please tell us: What is Finance.vote?
Dr. Nick: Sure, so finance.vote is a voting platform designed to upgrade decentralized governance in DeFi.
We’re launching quadratic voting at the markets and aiming to build a network of miniDAOs that are designed to get the crowd running decentralized financial systems.
We’re launching the alpha release of our product today, which is our vote markets. These are like a prediction market with voting. Where users can select which coins they think are going to perform and they get rewarded for their research.
Eric: Great. I will ask more about that later. Take us back to the beginning — how did you discover crypto and what made u decide to start Finance.vote?
Dr. Nick: Later on we’re going to integrate something we’re calling second layer governance, which will be like Reddit for crypto and finally a social trading functionality that will allow groups like this to pool ETH and trade via DEXs into a portfolio of coins collaboratively.
Sure, so I’m a physicist by background. I spent around 10 years in experimental physics and ended up teaching mathematics and number theory as a lecturer. A big part of that is cryptography, which is where I discovered bitcoin.
I’ve been obsessed ever since, but it was when the DAO happened that I really saw how blockchain was going to change the world.
So for the last 4 years or so I’ve been researching token economics and how we can use these systems to build governance systems on the internet. I’m starting that work with this network and I’m pretty excited!
Eric: So you mentioned quadratic voting. can you explain what that is?
Dr. Nick: Yeah, so quadratic voting was invented by a Microsoft researcher and economist called Glen Weyl. He and Vitalik have been researching it for a while and I have too.
It’s designed to add more complex decision making to voting.
So instead of only being able to vote on one thing, you can vote on multiple things weighted by your preference.
In our system, you get a budget of vote power tokens $V that you can spend on votes. It’s the square of the votes. So 5 votes is 5x5 = 25 $V.
It implies an economic cost for making your voice louder.
Eric: Interesting
Dr. Nick: I honestly think it will change the world.
Eric: so this attempts to solve, cartels or plutocratic influence, right?
Dr. Nick: Exactly.
That’s the idea anyway turns out that’s really difficult
The idea is that you can vote more than once but it gets exponentially costly. But stopping people from setting up multiple accounts is the hard bit, turns out you can’t really. Not without hard identity verification anyway.
Eric: fascinating. What is the status of the project right now? have you guys ran some test scenarios and found the model, sufficiently working as a cartel resistant voting platform?
Dr. Nick: So we didn’t want to be one of these projects that disappear into a development black hole for years, so we’re shipping our product in phases and tuning it via community voting. We’ve already let our community pick our ticker name and our launch date.
Eric: This is where the token comes in. Please tell us all about it.
Dr. Nick: Yeah I’ve been modeling this stuff for a long time and we think we’re on to something. The key is to make it costly to make multiple accounts.
In order to get an identity to vote, you have to burn some of the token $FVT. In return, you get an NFT that gives you a vote power budget in $V. Everyone starts with 100, but if you get some predictions right you get more in the next round.
The idea is to integrate meritocracy into the equation. That’s the key to breaking the rich run everything phenomena.
So we can’t stop people setting up multiple accounts, in fact, we kind of encourage it. You just have to burn more tokens to do it. Should hopefully stop bots ran by whales swinging the consensus too much.
Eric: make it skill-based. this also increases the value of identity as it can accrue power
Dr. Nick: Yeah well put, that’s exactly what it is.
Eric: what is the total supply of the token? are there multiple tokens?
Dr. Nick: There are 1 Billion tokens that are emitted over the course of 5 years. We start with a small amount of liquid and then they’re emitted to users of the token based on how much they vote, through a process called vote mining.
Eric: please tell us how that works — vote mining?
Dr. Nick: https://link.medium.com/gC0ZOcf46ab our medium article has all the gory details.
Sure. So a big problem in the decentralized governance space is voter apathy. We’re overcoming that by paying people to vote.
It will be a bit like the uniswap airdrop, only it will happen proportionally to the amount of participation in the network. Those who vote in every vote market will get the most coins in the airdrop.
Eric: Do you envision a government utilizing Finance.vote?
Dr. Nick: I think governments will use quadratic voting one day for sure.
I don’t see governments going degen long on $FVT any time soon, but the technology should be very interesting to them
It’s Election Day at the moment and I think the postal vote narrative is going to put blockchain voting right at the top of the interest list soon.
Eric: Ok. we will let the community drop-in their questions. @DrNickA please start replying after 2–3 minutes.
Community AMA
Q: Your project is very similar to Stox, which is a blockchain prediction markets platform. What are your advantages compared to them aside from your miniDAOs and social trading?
A: Ok so Stox doesn’t look permissionless. The advantage there is you can use your credit card etc, but we’re far closer to uniswap in that sense. You just interact with our system with a meta mask. We’re aiming for maximal decentralization. We’re also doing quadratic voting, rather than being an up / down options thing. I think that, and our reputation process should make things more interesting.
Q: Are there any tools to help the users predict the crypto coins that will do well in the coming weeks, or are the users predicting that off their gut feelings?
A: yeah this is a good question. We absolutely intend to provide our users with some tools to help predict the markets based on fundamentals. We might even get some traders who are good at TA involved. We want a long term relationship with our platform to be educational. I’ve done a lot of data science in my time and I think the alpha we will generate will be super interesting. You should vote as you would trade. Only here you don’t have to buy the underlying asset you can guess and with no downside risk other than your gas fees, with a share of the reward pool.
Q: Is KYC needed to obtain @financedotvote identity? Are there any fees required to get the initial starting balance of 100 voting power ($V)?
A: Nope we’re permissionless. The cost of identity starts at 100 $FVT but will jump in price based on demand. We have developed an auction mechanism for carrying out our TGE and we use that to distribute our identities. This is how we’re maintaining that sybil resistance.
Q: I read somewhere that the Finance vote will mint a Decentralized Identity token (DIT), so why do you’ll do this? Can you give us more details?
A: Yeah so we’re very excited about this. Identity is a crucial component of voting systems. Now if you’re doing an election you’d probably want people’s real IDs, but we don’t want anyone’s personal information. For us, your identity is your voting history and that’s it. That’s all stored in our DITs. They’re also going to be cool NFTs, it's just a number for now. They come out in number sequence order. I minted $FVT 1 this morning. I think the low numbered ones could be special ;)
Q: How many times must pass to see if my choice was right or not? Also, I obtain any benefit just to vote? Or my election must win to obtain revenues? #financedotvoteama
A: So our vote markets currently last two weeks, but chain up. You have one set of votes per week, which closes on the weekly market close. Then the markets do what the markets do for a week. Those who get the market moves correctly win more $V and a share of the reward pool that’s currently 100,000 $FVT. After the first week, there will always be one vote live and one is settled in the market and it will just roll forever.
Q: With high transaction costs, slow transaction speed! What do you think if Ethereum starts to suffocate, DeFi will move to a new platform? And what is the strategy of FINANCE.VOTE if that happens?
A: So we’re very bullish on Ethereum. It’s where the action is. The explosion of volume on uniswap and TVL in DeFi contracts is a massive sign of adoption. Sure it’s a bit slow and costly, but that’s the cost of freedom. You’ll find other blockchains with zero fees that are just centralized and full of spam. For us the gas costs stop people spamming us with free votes, they’re actually kind of useful. Makes people put some skin in the game.
It should be noted that once you’ve got an identity you get a free vote for life in our vote markets. We’re giving some of these away for free in our telegram this week!
Q: DeFi is one Topix in the blockchain. Can you share opinions on DeFi with us? Do you think that DeFi will disrupt the existing financial system? What is the approach toward the DeFi sector?
A: Ok what’re my thoughts on DeFi. Honestly, I was very skeptical for a long time. I thought the whole thing was too contingent on MakerDAO and I still think one of those big yield farming contracts will go pop at some point. However, it really is the future. The ability to be able to not just create our own money with Bitcoin, but be able to manage it is potentially hugely transformative.
One of the things we’re trying to catch is the massive influx of scams and lazy forks. Our users will be paid to sort out the good and bad by their votes.
The next phase of the DeFi will be down to how good the governance systems are. Projects that can pivot with the needs and desires of their users will win, but just letting it be open season is where they will fail. Largely, people in crypto have never worked in actual large institutions and have been responsible for making governance decisions. So I think it's rather naive at the moment. There’s lots of work to be done. We’re super early.
Q: Hi, What your plans in place for global expansion, are you focusing on the only market at this time? Or focus on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships?
A: We’re starting with building a strong core community. In politics, they call this building your base. We’re starting small and building big over time. We’ve got insanely big plans, but we want to make sure our game theory is tuned. We want early adopters and that’s who we all are here in crypto. The best thing to do is to dominate a small pool before moving to the bigger ones. Crypto is a pretty small pool at the moment so we’re starting there.
Q: Do you have any Coin Burn / BuyBack systems or any Token Burn plans to increase the value of Token & attract Investors to invest?
A: Every new account burns some tokens. We have a degree of inflation with the reward pool and deflation with new accounts. It will be up to the DAO to set the monetary policy decisions on what these rates are. We’ll actually be a decentralized economy at that point.
Closing Remarks
Dr. Nick: Think I’ve picked up on the nongeneric ones. @ERCSU any you think I’ve missed?
Eric: All good! We can wrap up.
Please invite our community to your official tg, tw, and website pls.
Dr. Nick: Yeah do come and join us in our telegram discussion channel. We’re giving free pre-TGE NFTs away in there this week https://t.me/financedotvote
Eric: Thanks for the time!
Dr. Nick: https://www.finance.vote check out our content on here too
Thanks, Eric.
The final thing to note is that our TGE is next week and we’ve invented a new kind of auction to do it.
This Sunday we’re running an incentivized test auction and there’s $1000 up for grabs. Get accumulating some Ropsten ETH ;)
Eric: How does the auction work?
Dr. Nick: So we’re distributing 20m tokens prior to listing with all the proceeds going to uniswap liquidity.
We didn’t want to decide on our listing price, because a principle of good governance is that you don’t know what the outcome is before you start.
So it works like this. 500k tokens are available at $0.01. When that lot sells out, the next one opens at double the supply and double the price.
So the next is 1m @ $0.02 at so on
We call it an exponential token auction, should be fun!
