AMA with Finance.Vote

Nebo: Hi @DrNickA Thanks a lot for joining us today!

Nick: It’s a pleasure, thanks for inviting me

Nebo: Please introduce yourself to the community!

Nick: Sure, my name is Nick. I’m the founder of the finance.vote network. I’m a physicist by background, which is something I got a PhD over ten years ago. Since then I’ve worked in academia teaching maths, cryptography, learning theory and training a lot of teachers. I’ve just left a post as an associate dean to go full time crypto!

Nebo: Awesome! So what is Finance.Vote and how did it start?

Nick: So finance.vote has been brewing for a long time. I discovered bitcoin whilst teaching cryptography a long time ago and have been obsessed with the power of decentralised organisation for a long time. For years I was building governance structures in universities and realised blockchain was the key to taking mass collaboration on the internet. Specifically voting. It’s the way the we can turn dialogue into numbers. So finance.vote is my attempt to use voting technology, specifically quadratic voting to creat experiences where decentralised users can reach agreement. We’re starting with reaching consensus on the quality of tokens in the DeFi space. We start with something called vote markets, which is voting meets prediction markets. Voters spend a budget of vote power on a range of tokens and if any token they voted on performs the best in the market, they win a share of a reward pool. I think of it as paying researchers for their insights. After this we aim to build DAO architecture using our voting tech, after it has been tuned and battle tested in our vote markets. We want to be the consensus layer for DeFi. I would say the governance token boom this summer, properly kicked things off. For a long time people didn’t want anything to do with tokens. But through the whole bear market i’ve been designing token systems and doing token economics research. I think governance tokens are the reason why the whole DeFi space has moved on so much this year. Sorry, quite a long answer. Hehe

Nebo: Interesting, could you briefly explain Quadratic voting?

Nick: Yeah so quadratic voting was invented by a Microsoft researcher and economist called Glen Weyl. It’s the idea that instead of just having 1 person, 1 vote. You give people a budget of voice credits and they can spend them on multiple things. The more you vote on any one issue or item the more it costs you. And the cost is exponential. So you vote once on something it costs you 1 voice credit, if you vote 5 it’s 5 x5 = 25, 10 it’s 10 x 10 = 100 and so on. We have an internal token called $V, which represents your vote power in the system. We’ve extended this model a little bit and we turn this voting activity in an iterative game. If you get something right in the vote markets, you get more $V in the next round. Which means the voting power moves towards the correct. We’re trying to add meritocracy into governance.

Nebo: I see, what about the utility of $FVT token?

Nick: So we wanted to have day one utility with the $FVT token. It’s the means by which you can obtain voting identities. You burn some $FVT to get an decentralised identity token, which gives you voting rights. You can get into the system without doing this.
If lots of people buy identities in quick succession the cost of the identity goes up.
As the system develops you’ll stake $FVT to gain more power in the system.
It will give you power in the DAO and in our MiniDAOs, which will be like token specific voting and dialogue spaces. Think Reddit for crypto, with decentralised voting.
It’s also used for our incentive dynamics. $FVT is flowed towards users who are correct in the system.

Nebo: There are many blockchain-based prediction platforms, what are your advantages?

Nick: Yeah I’m quite surprised that they’ve got so hot recently. We’ve been thinking about them for a long time, but it was kind of a lonely pursuit. We think we’re different to all of the others out there on a few fronts.
For one, on Augur etc, you can pretty much ask any question and hope you find a market for it. The reality is that many don’t. If you looked at Augur last week there were three markets with liquidity, Trump, trump and Trump. Most are dead and illiquid. We’re focusing all the attention into crypto market ordering to start with and then when more markets are added it will be a governance decision by the token holders.
The other aspect is that we’re not using an order book. We’re using an AMM style approach, which is the network supplies the liquidity. A bunch of tokens are put in the pot by the network and users with a share of them. You don’t need a counter party for a trade. You’re betting against network, not another user.
We’re aiming for Ralph Merkle’s vision of prediction markets, which is that one day they are used for making high level governance decisions.
Rather than just a betting platform of sorts.

Nebo: Those are solid points you mention, when can we expect the platform to go live?

Nick: It’s live right now! https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmeKQ2sFNqLNoNMrk2LAKr7tDMwKdJYZRQBAkXknotVtvS
We sprinted towards getting it done so we could cast our first votes on Election Day :)
The slight caveat is that you can’t mint your own identity permissionlessly yet, because the token isn’t live.
However, we’ll hook you up with some so you and your community can try it for yourself.

Nebo: That would be great! Okay, let’s have the community ask questions now.

Member 1: 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?

Nick: So, our semantic ballot voting is a special twist on quadratic voting. We give you a list of tokens that you spread your votes across them and you’re rewarded by being correct. You spread your votes across a list of items rather than in separate votes, which was what was originally intended. We also add our vote power aggregation system to it. Which I think changes the game. I honestly, think quadratic voting will change the world. It adds nuance to decision making.

Member 2: How to apply social trading decentralized in finance.vote? And how to form private groups to coordinate in an micro liquidity ?

Nick: Yeah so this is our phase two release and we’re really excited about it. Users will be able to, in a group like this. Set up their own voting pool. You will be able to pool ETH into what we call micro liquidity pools and then trade via DEXs based on your shared consensus. It means you’ll be able to have a portfolio for this group that you reach agreement on. Group leads will be able to tune vote power amongst the group and it will all be completely trustless.

Member 3: I have tried to find information about your team everywhere but couldn’t. Maybe I didn’t search properly? Please share with me information about the team. It is important to gain the trust.

Nick: The info is out there. I’m very public and the rest of the team are bit more private, but I think we will go a bit more public with this. I understand that people want names and faces to build trust and it is all about trust.

Member 4: For your incentivized testnet auction, is there any limit to amount of $FVT token to accumulate to qualify for the $1,000 USDT bounty? What other ways can I accumulate more $FVT token before listing?

Nick: Ah, I’m glad you’ve picked up on this. So this will be starting tomorrow we think. We have designed a completely novel auction system, we call auction.vote to do our token launch with and we’re doing a test of it on Ropsten. To get some players involved we’re putting a 1k bounty that will be shared amongst the top 5 Ropsten $FVT holders by the end of it. We don’t know what that will be! It will be a competitive game. I would say start accumulating as much Ropsten ETH as you can and join our TG to watch it go down

Member 5: Besides the cost of identity getting a bit more expensive over a short period of time, is there any other reason for somebody to not make a lot of identities and gamify the system?

Nick: Yeah, so this is a really good question. Sybil resistance (systems that stop people setting up multiple accounts) are important for voting technology. The only solution to really stop people are hard identity solutions, taking people’s passports and what have you. We’re a permissionless system so don’t want any personal data AT ALL. So we’re taking a crypto economic solution. You can set up as many ideantities as you want but it costs you and you have to burn a lot of $FVT. We’ve made it part of the game.

Member 6: What are your plans to educate and raise awareness and adoption among the community to make more people understand FVT and its technology?

Nick: This is an important question for us. I’m educator and I’ve spent the last ten years training teachers in universities. I’m never going to stop being an educator. So I will be releasing a lot of educational content for our identity holders. The consensus in our system will get better the more knowledgeable people are so we’re going to spend a lot of resources on educating everyone! I might go as far as running whole crypto courses, depends if people really want to learn or not.

Member 7: What is the number #1 priority for Finance.vote in the next 6 months?

Nick: I’ll finish on this one. Our top priority is tuning our vote markets and creating a starting the process of passing the power over to our token holders. In 6 months exactly we will release our main DAO the DMF and we start burning management keys. We need to make sure our token holders can run key processes by then. We’re also keen to set up some seriously high level partnerships for that phase, but I can’t say anything too much about that yet.

Member 8: I will support the question above, many investments in different projects now lead to the same thing that products enter the market without Market Maker and the token cost tends to 0. How do you plan to protect the value of your token?

Nick: Just a quick one on this. Our auction raise is entirely going to liquidity on uniswap. We won’t be able to take it out. There will be a liquidity floor to the economy that is there for good. We’re rug proof.

Nebo: Awesome, thanks Nick for answering all of these questions!

Nick: Pleasure!

Nebo: That’s a wrap everybody! Thanks for attending. Winners will be announced in the following hours.

Meanwhile Make sure to follow Finance.Vote on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/financedotvote

And Telegram: https://t.me/financedotvote

Nick: Collect some metamask addresses and we’ll ping over some identity tokens too ;)

Nebo: Sounds good, those who want to test the platform, send me your ERC20 address in PM

Nick: Yes come and join the fun in our group, it’s going to be a busy week. If our test auction goes well, we’ll do our TGE this week.

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