Saddle x Mune Finance AMA
Jamie |Mune 00:00
No Not, not audio styles, not audio style. But here we are. Here we are. That's okay. It looks like it's a quiet house.
Eric | Saddle 00:14
Yes. I think we're still waiting on a few there were a bunch of people interested. So I think people are gonna be joining in soon.
Unknown Speaker 00:25
Yeah, we'll have the trickle.
Eric | Saddle 0:28
The classic trickle.
Jamie | Mune 0:32
Exciting. I'm happy to be here. And we've got a Hekmat and Karthik here as well. We're also from the Mune team. And Hekmat may or may not be fielding some questions, if anything that piques his expertise rolls in.
Eric | Saddle 00:48
Perfect. Yeah, we can use the Townsquare chat as well for those who want to drop some questions in there. I can write a quick message.
Jamie | Mune 01:09
Hello, Christian.
Eric | Saddle 01:19
Alrighty. Cool. Yeah, we have Christian here as well. So we can talk a little bit about Project SEMPI and b4b, but first and foremost, wanted to- we can go ahead and get started. Is that cool with you, Jamie?
Jamie | Mune 01:32
Yeah, for sure. Ready as always.
Eric | Saddle 01:37
Awesome. Cool. So we're gonna get started today. Welcome, everybody to today's AMA in The Saloon, a little different format. So feel free if you want to chime in. And we can keep this pretty conversational as well. We have the Mune team today and winner of the b4b session one bounty, so really excited to have them here and ask a few questions about their project. But first and foremost, wanted to acknowledge some of the recent events that are going on in the world today. I know that ethos of web three is meant to decentralize and connect.
We totally hope that everyone in the Saddle community will continue to stand together and build together. This is a safe haven that we’ve built over the past year, so really excited that everyone can continue to build together. So just want to acknowledge that as we move forward here. But to kick things off for the Mune team. Jamie, can you tell us a little bit about the project? And then how you guys ended up finding Saddle?
Jamie | Mune 02:37
Yeah, definitely. So we found Saddle, like many people probably did, through Curve where we've been for a long, long time now. Well, in DeFi years anyway. The open source movement is incredibly important to me, personally. And I like those values reflected in the organization's I patron.
But as for Mune’s origin, it’s actually a little bit of a family business. And it's sort of my wife's idea. And we became parents in the last few years. The birth was a complicated affair, and it had no well, it had no financial impact on us, personally, not long after that, we discovered that it possibly could have ruined the lives of some of our American DAO mates.
And we started thinking, and we saw an opportunity in our portfolios to give. As for the names origin, it's a bit of fun, actually, Mune is the same, it has the same origin as my avatar. Our daughter just loves ducks and moons. Anything in space, really, it's not-and it's not just ducks, any bird that can go into the water also is fascinating and hilarious to her.
Eric | Saddle 03:52
That's amazing. I love that. We're all about space here at Saddle as well. Going from sea to space.
Jamie | Mune 04:00
Yeah, and we hope to bridge that.
Eric | Saddle 04:03
Yeah, that's great. Cool. So you can tell us a little bit more about the product and specifically why stableswaps.
Jamie | Mune 04:10
Stableswap is a personal favorite of mine. It's also a personal obsession. It's battle tested. And I think more importantly to Mune, it's nuanced, right? So its use cases more specific. And as a whole participation as a user or an LP is more comfortable and steady we could say. We could have easily spun up a pancake swap fork and facilitated swaps between all sorts of meme tokens and low volume bears. But we don't feel that would have put us in a lasting position to do any sort of good for anyone. Right stable swap opens us up to partnerships with established protocols, and hopefully gives us the opportunity to reward our users with some tokens they actually want for the efforts of their capital. I mean, save the planet earn BUM token has a nice ring to it. So I guess we'll let the community know if we're missing the ticket here. But I think stableswaps the way to go.
Eric | Saddle 05:10
Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's what we're all about here, as you know. So I guess with that, why fork Saddle and look at our code that way? And then also why Polygon?
Jamie | Mune 05:25
Yeah, so, why Saddle? Why Polygon? So for Polygon, it's two things primarily. It's the massive support for other major protocols, including the the primary, unspeakable competition. And it's also all the progress they're making as an organization in various layer two technologies. On a web. Yeah. On an entirely personal note, I've got my eyes locked on Polygon Hermez,(-) super neat stuff. Like super neat.
I don't know if everyone here hasn't had the chance to check it out, definitely do. And as for why Saddle that, like I said before, stableswap, it's open source. I don't want to toot you guys too much or anything, but from now on. If you do want to use reliable, stable swap implementation in your project, legally, you're probably going to find yourself reaching into the SEMPI network at some point for support, or at least you should, I'll be there to help. I'm sure you will, too.
Eric | Saddle 06:27
Yup. For sure. Yeah, we'll be right there. Awesome. Cool. So Mune has a very interesting twist to the business model. Would love to learn-I know you alluded to it earlier with your daughter, but would love to learn more about that.
Jamie | Mune 06:45
Yeah, this is the big thing, isn't it? This is like the meet the éléphant de maison. How can we give away half our revenue and stay afloat? Right? And really, though, this comes down to SEMPI, and less SEMPI-more this new, for lack of a better term, sanctioned forking model, that SEMPI is forwarding? Our organization is able to adopt the progress, right, of Saddle’s development with relatively low friction.
And we get things like immediate alerts, should there be any issues regarding the security of the contracts. We also have the resources and expertise again, not to toot too much. But most importantly, we inherit all that with like, no additional overhead. Right. And that leaves us a tremendous amount of wiggle room to have a positive impact on the planet. We feel anyway. Right? Other people might choose to do something else with that wiggle room, but we research and development and whatnot, other positive things, but we feel this is a good lead into the region movement. Right.
As a DAO in general, we would hope to have a large treasury of secure assets for redirecting yield to good. And we saw no better starting point than then stableswap. Overhead is unpredictable, as I'm sure you know.
Eric | Saddle 08:13
Yes, we know. Amazing. Yeah, that's an amazing way to put your-the power that you guys have created here and do good. Any charities or any places that you are looking to deploy hat capital to or any partnerships in place at the moment?
Jamie | Mune 08:36
Yeah, so is actually a super tricky one, right? We are going to be featuring charities and we have been, whose goals sort of live up to what we hope for in a nonprofit. And we feature them on our website. But the truth about that is is that one bad donation can potentially do more harm than we could realistically expect from the same amount of money if we donated it effectively. And that was an English sentence, I promise. The point that I was making is that in the current climate, it's easier to do a lot of harm by accident than it is to do a little bit of good on purpose. So being choosy to candidates is something we're going to take very seriously. Shout out to Christian here. From Saddle.
We're looking into organizations like GiveWell right at his behest. And overall, we're engaging ourselves more in the Effective Altruism movement to better understand what really does and does not make an effective donation. And on top of that, I think it's it's definitely a goal of ours both short, mid and long term, to establish our community as a reliable source of that sort of research. Right and into the future.
Eric | Saddle 09:58
Yeah, definitely. And so on that note with community, how are you planning on attracting the right contributors to the project?
Jamie | Mune 10:08
Yeah, so I think the way that we're going to be doing this is by really pushing our values, right? As a DAO. The primary value that we have is philanthropy, right? We exist to facilitate gains for good. We want our users to make money. And we also want them to feel good about doing that, right? We just want to widen the road to financial freedom, so others can walk it with us. You know what I mean?
It's a model we're hoping will attract just the right sort of person to lead the next great wealth transfer-the sort of person who looks at a 12% yield and says, would I really mind losing a couple of percent, if it meant, you know, everyone had a fair shot. Actually, on that point, another of our primary goals that I think will really attract the right sort of person is the almighty compensation, right? Which I know you know, a lot about, with the SDL getting handed out all over the place for all the b4b and project SEMPI. And it's a very powerful motivator, right?
We feel that any contribution to our protocol with the potential for great good when scaled, like effectively through us should be rewarded accordingly. Right? Because profit, I think, is, it's undeniably the most powerful motivator and to ignore it, as we feel some modern nonprofits may do may be to lose a vast resource.
Christian | Saddle 11:42
Just want to go off of what you said. I think there's definitely huge potential to market yourself as like an ESG alternative in the DeFi space, because there's a ton of institutional capital flowing into the space under the guise of ESG. Right? People are exactly what you said, like they want yield, they want some returns. But you know, hey, if we knock off a couple basis points, you know, no big deal. Because I can sleep easy knowing that my proceeds are going to a cause that I think is genuinely doing some good for the world. So I think marketing yourselves with that angle is not only going to be very effective, but I think will pay dividends over the long run for sure.
Jamie | Mune 12:24
Yeah, and we believe so too.. We're actually really excited-we feel a wave of for profit, positive impact projects, is sort of on the horizon and we want to kind of catalyze that movement as best we can. I think it has a chance at potential to a lot of good.
Eric | Saddle 12:43
Definitely, yeah. And then I guess, with that, Jamie, what are some of the core values that you're trying to instill with the community? The core values of the DAO?
Jamie | Mune 12:55
Yeah, the primary one is philanthropy. Right? We want people to give the secondary one, as I said previously, is compensation. Right? We want people to feel that they're not just giving for nothing. We want them to feel that when they give, right-they also receive, right? And not in a greedy way. But in sort of a communal way. You know what I mean? That you feel valued for the effort that you put in. And you know that the effort you put in also sort of proliferates out, right? Inward effort proliferating? outward? Those are the two primary values. Right. And it's it's difficult to move beyond those, but we do actually have a open draft of sort of a constitution that we plan to immortalize in the ERC. 720. We want to make it happen-
Eric | Saddle 14:00
All of us here. Awesome. So how can people learn more about your project about Mune and get involved in the community?
Jamie | Mune 14:10
Yeah, so we have all the primary socials. We have a standard incredibly inactive Telegram. We also have a moderately active Discord. You can find us at Mune.finance and you can also click through the Twitter link that you see in my profile there. I'm sure we'll be able to post some links in the chat here.
Eric | Saddle 14:37
Yeah, yeah, go for it. You drop some of the socials in the chat for sure. And then any advice to the community on how to get involved with b4b with SEMPI and then we can transition to Christian as well here, but love to hear from you Jamie on like your experience and b4b and and how to tell others to get involved in b4b.
Jamie | Mune 15:00
So I'll start with my experience has actually been awesome. I've had a lot of fun. I've met a lot of people, I've really felt barriers broken down, right? Because I feel crypto can be, it can seem like an unapproachable space. When the reality is that most of the true experts have only been experts for so long and are still willing to help. You know what I mean? That you can hop into a Discord and you can connect with people who in traditional industry are unreachable. You know what I mean? The tops of the organizations. And I think Saddle in particular represents a huge opportunity to do that. They're willing to work with you. Right? So just go out and just get active. start chatting. Start building start learning. code, the code base is there no reason to ignore it?
Eric | Saddle 15:54
Amazing. It's right there.
Hekmat | Mune 15:58
This is Hekmat from Mune. I’ve been silent, allowing Jamie to speak since when you have a guy that charming why wouldn't you? I just wanted to add that, I mean I found Jamie and Mune, finance during Saddle. And so I just encourage everyone, as Jamie was saying, just, you know, keep your feelers open, keep watching the space and Saddle and across the DeFi and, you know, you'll be able to find your home and whatever works for you.
Eric | Saddle 16:28
Thanks, Hekmat.. go ahead, Jamie.
Jamie| Mune 16:36
I was just gonna say it's an unbelievable opportunity. I think our team member here, Karthik, has a similar story. He met us through Encode, specifically through b4b. Right. And we've become very close. I've even introduced him to my daughter. It's a great place to learn, make friends, have some fun, make money, do some good. Everything that you want from your, your later adult life.
Eric | Saddle 17:04
Love that. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, I think some of these times and especially during the pandemic, I mean, I've even found myself getting closer and like making really great friends through this community through different Discord communities, Telegram, etc. And it's even more more real when you meet those, meet those relationships IRL to come to consolidate some of that. So that's, that's fantastic. Very cool.
Jamie| Mune 17:30
Yeah, definitely.
Eric| Saddle 17:32
Yeah. Awesome. Well transition over to Christian, we'd love to hear your perspective on SEMPI. How to get involved and kind of next steps and would love I know, there's a lot of different projects here at Saddle can get a little confusing with with b4b bounty (-), on the technical non technical side of b4b, and then also project SEMPI . So if anyone has any questions on that, and how to get involved, and please tag us in the chat, and we can help you in the right direction. But Christian, if you want to talk a little bit about kind of b4b on the technical side, and then how that kind of transfers into SEMPI, and then I can handle some of the non-technical side of things.
Christian | Saddle 18:14
Yeah, for sure. So b4b is bounties for bandits. And the idea is we throw up some bounties or some technical tasks or non-technical tasks that the Saddle team needs help with, simply because of bandwidth reasons. You know, we can't do everything ourselves all the time and we're trying to deploy on all these different blockchains. So we also want to, in the process, encourage more community support, because the ultimate goal here is to kind of take our hands off the wheel and hope that the community can steer the ship itself. So this is our way of onboarding people into the community.
And the way we do it is, of course to as is the crypto ethos-to align incentives, right? So hey, if you take a look at our open source project that anyone can fork, anyone can develop on, anyone can contribute to, we will actually pay you in Saddle tokens to do the all that hard work that you're willing to do. And the idea is, we not only get more community engagement as a result of this participation, which is exactly what we want to build out community.
But also, we get a better feel for who knows what, who has a proven track record. And the idea is we either onboard people onto Saddle or we go to our SEMPI partners and say, “hey, this member of the community really knows what they're talking about. Given the the breakdown of your team, we think they'd be a good fit. Maybe you guys want to start having a conversation with them.” And so the idea is, you know, spread the community, make it financially rewarding to build to to contribute to be part of something bigger than yourself. And then you know, either you're rewarded or you as possible on ramp to the larger team.
Be at Saddle or one of our forks. And so that could that could be, what the tasks range from technical to non-technical tasks. And Eric will talk a little bit more about the non-technical stuff. But switching briefly over to the SEMPI partnerships- the idea here is, given our limited bandwidth, because of you know, you only have so many engineers and they can only work so hard and so quickly, in a reliable and safe fashion. We still want to spread our roots as far and wide as possible.
So how are we going to do that? So, again, we want to bootstrap this community, we want to make it financially rewarding to be part of this community. So what we encourage is we encourage people to fork our code, the stableswap algorithm implementation, and to fork it onto any blockchain that teams think would be a good fit. Again, the idea we can't do it all of ourselves, and we also want the community to participate. But if anyone can fork, how is that in our benefit? How is that their benefit? How do we align incentives? And what do we do that is through the SEMPI partnership stands for the Saddle Ecosystem Max Proliferation Initiative? SEMPI.
And what it is, is it's an outline of an agreement between Saddle and between a team trying to fork our code. And the way it attempts to align incentives is we say, “hey, you know, we have several resources that you guys can benefit from, because they're just starting your journey as a DeFi protocol.
And we want to offer those benefits to you.” So as benefits would be, you know, marketing, AMAs, for instance, you know, eventually Twitter spaces, engineering questions, questions related to Tokenomics. Right? Anything that we have experience with, we want to offer you guys, you know, an open line, you know, we have Discord servers, we have Discord channels, and it's an open conversation. And we're always trying to be as helpful as possible to help bootstrap this, these new protocols.
In exchange, what we ask for are genuinely things like half of the admin fees or an airdrop to Saddle token holders or a token swap so that both communities become invested in the other protocol...start participating governance, stand to gain financially, of course.
And so the idea is, we want to encourage this forking, and we want to do it in a way that both parties stand to gain and both parties align themselves with each other's communities and start participating more and growing out the ecosystem that way. So that's the SEMPI partnership. Eric, if you wanted to talk more about the b4b non-technical stuff, please feel free.
Eric | Saddle 22:57
Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Christian. That was great. So on the b4b non-technical front, we actually just released session two. So we're discussing the winners from session one. And today, I believe, actually, yesterday we launched the announcement for session two for bounties for bandits. And we actually added quite a few more bounties on the non technical front. So really allowing anybody from newbies to degens to to jump in and be able to complete a bounty. So on the non-technical front, we're looking for people to come in and write some blog posts and copywriting.
We're actually developing a partnership development program as well. So if anyone is involved in other projects, or sees a potential opportunity for Saddle to partner with another protocol, that would be another bounty that we would love to discuss. And Christian will actually be your main point of contact there. Anyone that's looking to lead, a weekly crypto review can either jump in and join an AMA and lead their own AMA going over either a new protocol, a new network and kind of go a little deeper in the DeFi ecosystem for those who want to learn more about it, are happy to do that. And then also a ambassador program. So yesterday, we actually soft launched the program just in Discord.
And the program will actually be a way for new members in the community to level up to become a stallion. So we're rolling that out on a weekly basis. And we'll be rewarding users with SDL to contribute to that. So if any questions on on the ambassador program, feel free to DM me right in the chat and we can get you ramped up on our ambassador program. So really exciting stuff on that front. Cool. I'm just checking real quick for questions for Jamie at all. I think we are good. Cool. Mune team, thank you so much. Any last thoughts? Feedback? Questions?
Jamie | Mune 25:10
Yeah, I just want to say thank you so much for the opportunity here. I really appreciate it was a lot of fun. And I look forward to many more in the future. Hopefully we can engage more of the Saddle community with this philanthropic for profit, positive impact movement. I think we (-)
Eric |Saddle 25:27
Love that. Yeah, definitely. Cool. Well, thanks everybody for joining and we will see you on the next AMA and see you in Discord.
Jamie|Mune 25:38
Thanks, guys. Later
Saddle Finance: https://saddle.exchange/
Mune Finance: https://www.mune.finance/
Saddle Twitter: https://twitter.com/saddlefinance
Mune Twitter: https://twitter.com/MuneFinance
Saddle Discord: discord.gg/saddle
Mune Discord: discord.com/invite/ZB2t26MtgX