BlockTalks x Finance.vote AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Finance.vote, on October 9th, at 3.30 PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Dr Nick Almond, CEO at Finance.vote. So here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION
Dr Nick Almond — My name is Nick I’m the CEO of finance.vote. I’m a physicist by background, which I did a PhD in over ten years ago. Since then I’ve been a senior leader in some large universities in the UK and now full time crypto!
I used to teach cryptography years ago and discovered Bitcoin and fell down the rabbit hole. I really got serious in it when I saw the potential of Ethereum and DAOs and for the last 4 years have been researching the cryptospace and the potential of crypto governance systems.
Introduction Questions Asked By BlockTalks
Q1. Could you please introduce Finance.vote to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — Sure, our goal is to bring new voting technologies to the DeFi space. We think that’s the way that we take us into the next era of crypto. The network is going to do three main things. Vote markets, which is a prediction market system where people can make market predictions and earn money if they are correct.
A second layer governance system which will be like reddit but for crypto. Where people can talk about projects and build influence through voting.
And thirdly a social trading system where people can be in chats like this, reach conensus on their favourite tokens, pool money and trade via dex’s.
Q2. What are the advantages of Finance.vote to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — We’re going to be giving more power to our token holders than any other network. So FIN holders will be able to influence the features and other things without having to be a token whale.
Our prediction market system doesn’t need an order book so there’s always liquidity and we think we’ll upgrade DAOs significantly.
Q3. What are the major milestones Finance.vote achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — We’ve just completed all our smart contracts and integrating them into our user interfaces at the moment. So we’re going to go live very soon. So you’ll get to see for yourselves.
We have some potentially big partnerships coming up with networks who want to use our miniDAO system and we will be shipping lots of product quite quickly.
Questions Asked on Twitter For Dr Nick Almond!
Q1. How does layer two governance empower minority token holders in the network, and how does it offer freedom to participate in governance and direct the direction of networks through miniDAOs?
Ans — It’s great that you’ve picked up that layer two governance is all about minority token holders. We’ve been analysing the governance of the space for a while and realised that mostly it is impossible for minority token holders to influence the direction of crypto networks.
In our system users will be able to set up votes, share opinions and sources related to their chosen network and build influence on them. Imagine if the Telegram rooms related to your favourite networks had a DAO attached to them that you could earn tokens for voting in. That’s what it will be like.
We also have a consensus mechanism that limits the amount of voting power in the system so that owning a lot of tokens doesn’t override everyone’s opinion that we think is quite revolutionary.
Q2. Can you tell us more about identity minting and why we must have 100 $FIN before we can vote? Is not this makes using the platform more cumbersome and potentially keep out most of your customer base from using the platform?
Ans — This is a really important question. We know that spending some $FIN to enter the system will act as a barrier, that’s what it’s meant to do. If it’s completely free to set up an identity then it’s going to be easy to set up lots of identities.
Our identity minting system is designed for sybil resistance, so if someone wants to heavily influence our votes it’s going to cost them a lot of money and reduce the token supply in the process.
Once you’re in however you get a free vote in every vote market. If you make good picks you’ll more than make back the FIN you spent on entering the system by a long way. It’s a good deal and those people that didn’t come in because of it, will change their minds when they realise it makes financial sense to do so.
Q3. Can you explain more about your Semantic Ballot Voting which seems to be the first of it kind, the technology behind it and why it’s necessary/important?
Ans — Yes, thanks for picking this out. It’s an extension of the quadratic voting system that Vitalik and others have done a lot of research on.
It means we give you a list of tokens or comments and you distribution your vote power tokens based on what your preferences are. We think this is really important because it opens up decision making from just yes or no decisions to generating a list of priorities. We think it’s going to be a really powerful tool in blockchain governance.
The important thing is that it will allow you to vote on more than one thing. So you don’t have to pick just one token you think will succeed.
Q4. What do the users whose prediction is fulfilled get? Do they get any benefit? Do I need to pay anything to make the predictions? Is it similar to binary options?
Ans — It’s a bit like the bitcoin block reward. In bitcoin the miners win the new tokens, in finance.vote the users who make accurate predictions do. To start with this is a share of 100,000 $FIN.
The size of the share you get is proportional to the amount of votes you put in. We also give you more voting power ($V) in the next round, so the voice of the correct people gets louder over time. It means the network pays people in FIN for being correct.
Once you have an identity, it’s free apart from the cost of gas for a transaction, but we think you’ll make that money back and some by making good bets. It’s similar to binary options, but you can only guess up or down there, here you can hedge your bet across lots of tokens. Quadratic options!
Q5. As for the market predictions in the tournament series focused on baskets of assets from all over the crypt, can any user do it or is there any special requirement to be fulfilled? Which one?
Ans — This is also a really good question. To start with we’ll use the coin market cap DeFi Top 10, but soon after we’ll start introducing new token lists for people to vote on. We want our users to decide what the token lists are.
We think it will end up to be very desirable to end up in one of our token lists, because it will generate attention on that token. We have to make sure we do that fairly and we thing the fairest thing to do is let the votes decide.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to Dr Nick Almond!!
Q1. Your Bicameral governance structure is indeed a new paradigm of governance in the cryptospace, can you tell us more about it? Of what benefits is the utilization of both a layer one DAO, the Decentralized Monetary Fund (DMF) and the Layer two $FIN MiniDAO, do you think more projects will adopt it?
Ans — This is a nice question. So we think there should be more that one layer to governance. The place where decisions are made final and where they are discussed before hand. We’re doing this discussion bit. We want dialogue to happen in the miniDAOs and big serious decisions to be made in the DMF (our main DAO). There’s a reason why big governments have two systems (bicameral) parlament and the house of lords in the UK for example.
Q2. Token burn” is beneficial for any project, in being able to control the number of token circulation and to provide greater incentives to investors. Does your great project have a plan about token burn?
Ans — We use token burns in a number if areas actually. Every time a new user enters the system and spends FIN to get an identity we don’t collect the tokens they get burned. This adds a deflation to the systen to counteract the rewards. Eventually the voters will control the burn rates!
Q3. After a user makes a prediction, how long do they have to wait to see if they guessed or not? How many days does this prediction last?
Ans — To start with we will be using a week long voting period. So users have a week to vote, and then the market trades for a week. We’ll do this for a while to see how it goes, but we’ll eventually have daily and potentially even hourly markets.
Q4. What are the Finance.vote DeFi products we can vote as MiniDAO’s token holders? How to operate the 2nd layer governance mechanism specifically?
Ans — We’ll be releasing some names soon, but to start with it will be a small number. We’ll open them up to more and more projects over time. Eventually it will be up to the token holders decide, if you want your favourite project to have a miniDAO you’ll be able to vote for it 🙂
Q5. What mechanism has finance vote put in place to help reach sybil safety? In the event where a user tries to corrupt the consensus outcome by splitting votes across multiple ballots by creating multiple accounts, how do you mitigate this kind of attack?
Ans — Ah this is a good question. We’ll be using an auction mechanism to mint identities. Normally people trying to create multiple accounts use bots (Twitter has a huge problem with this). If someone tries to by lots of identities at once the price of them will go up. a lot! We’re going to make it expensive to attack our system, just like Proof of Work on bitcoin.
Q6. As Education for crypto currency is necessary nowadays , what’s your plan to to attract those people who don’t know about cryptocurrency?
Ans — Yes education is very important. I’ve actually been training teachers for many years. So a big part of what we want to do is teach people how to make good decisions about crypto. We want users of finance.vote to learn more and more as they use it. We think it will be very educational.
Q7. Most new DeFi projects are just copies of existing ones, they are just useless. So, what’s unique about your project & what makes FIN trustable as a long term project for users and investors?
Ans — This is very true. I think we’re completly novel and we’re not forking a single line of code from any other project. In fact a big part of what we’re doing is getting people to vote on which projects people think are good, so that you don’t end up buying some poor quality meme coin. We’ll be the place you come to discover what are the best tokens in the space.
Q8. The goal of the DeFi is to create a new financial system that eliminates subjectivity, bias, and inefficiency by relying on programmable terms. Does your project support this vision and how does it participate in the DEFI space?
Ans — It does indeed support this goal. We want to put power in the hands of users to control these systems of the future. It all comes down to voting technology. It’s the only way we can collect information for people and put them on the blockchain. We think we’ve got a huge part to play in that.
Q9. If our votes match what happens in the future, what incentives will we get from finance.vote?
Ans — You’ll win a share of the reward pool. It depends on how much you voted and how many players there are. But we think it will be very lucratic to play and once you have an identity it’s free apart from the network cost. We’re paying users to share their research with us.
Q10. The voting systems used in most countries today are ineffective and outdated for modern voters. It encountered problems such as: expensive, slow, difficult to access, due to conflicts, … So does Finance Vote have any solutions for these problems?
Ans — Ok this is an interesting one. completely agree. Voting systems are broken for sure. The idea that huge decisions can be made with our current democratic systems is a big mistake.
We’re starting with finance and crypto because that’s where the early adopters are, but we have big plans for taking this voting technology a lot more mainstream in the future 😉
Here are some important links of Finance.vote👇
Official Website — https://www.finance.vote/
Twitter — https://twitter.com/financedotvote
Telegram Chat — https://t.me/financedotvote
Medium — https://medium.com/@financedotvote
