Gentlefrens

Since our previous article, Frens has undergone some major developments. We have begun to establish ourselves onchain; received far more funding than anticipated; deployed our website; executed our first investments; and more.

Meanwhile, EthereansOS has released its new dApp, the culmination of over a year of hard work by the team. Despite little fanfare, the release was a watershed moment for the project. The Frens and EthOS missions are dovetailing nicely.

Today, we recap everything that’s happened in March and April, review our current standing and start to lay out our road map for the coming month.

Our Frenship So Far

The real frens are the gains we make along the way, and we have gained much already.

Frens Multisig

Frens now has a multisig. This is a 2/3 Gnosis Safe that holds our entire treasury (for precise holdings, see below). By establishing Frens onchain, it serves as the first stepping stone on our path to becoming a Delegation, which we may do this quarter. $OS holders can now monitor our financial activity and hold us to account.

Track the Frens multisig on Zerion.

First Funding

The same day, we funded our Safe with the ETH we won from the latest EthereansOS Organization treasury split. These splits, as our community knows, redistribute $OS inflation earnings from the last quarter back into the EthOS ecosystem. 25% of this ETH is reserved for Delegations, who compete for it by rallying the staked support of $OS holders; the amount each wins is pro rata to how much staked $OS each receives.

As Frens has not deployed itself as a Delegation yet, we could not compete in this round. To account for this, we forged a Frenship with Exchange Hunters, a Delegation led by Toby, an old and well-respected fren of the EthereansOS community. Toby let our supporters stake for us through Exchange Hunters; after the split happened, he sent us our share of the winnings. This worked out to be the humble sum of ~0.6 ETH.

If the Delegation system was more securely designed, Frens may have received more than this—significantly more. As things are, it is too easily exploited to favor the self-interest of individual actors, hurting the community’s collective integrity in proportion.

Vasa, lead EthOS dev, has announced a fix for Delegations is in the works. We look forward to examining his proposal carefully and for now offer our tentative support.

Second Funding

With less than 0.5 ETH, we tempered our ambitions. While our Comms work doesn’t require funding (for now, anyway), our Frenship work will, and without more funding, Frens could not have achieved much in that area, at least not beyond preliminary research and inquiry.

Fortunately, we were in for a nice April surprise.

Delegations have always formed an important part of the EthereansOS ecosystem, and one of the most prominent of these is CypherParty. Maxxflyer, another classic EthOS fren and leader of CypherParty, has recently opted to reduce his Delegation’s workload.

As a result, it has less need of funds, and Maxx has gracefully passed some over to us.

$28,944 USDC to be precise.

It is hard to overstate what a boon this is for us—a ~20x increase to our budget. It allows us to not only realize but expand our original vision (for more detail, see below). We are deeply grateful for the funds and will ensure they deliver max value to $OS.

Website

If it was 2017, and Frens had a shitcoin, it would have done a 10,000x by now, because we launched our first website. We are rather proud of how it is turning out. At the moment, it offers a glance of Frens in a nice CypherFrog aesthetic. As we develop it further, it will offer a deeper look and branch out directly to some of our core offerings.

Scope it here.

The State Of Frenship

In little over a month, Frens has established a strong foundation for our enterprise. We now have the funds and infrastructure in place to start working on the full extent of our newly expanded scope. Below, we offer a breakdown of our new treasury and budget, and before the end of April, we will publish a proper road map for the coming months.

Finances

Reserves

$5000

We will reserve this portion of the funds for new ambitions in the future and to refuel ongoing efforts as necessary.

Investment

$3750 + 0.5 ETH

In our previous article, we discussed our plan to invest a portion of the Frens treasury. Originally, in response to the sustained dominance of memes this cycle, we had $DOGE and $PEPE in mind, as well as $OS. But after consulting with some community frens, we opted for a more varied selection, and executed our first investments last Thursday.

The Frens investment basket is composed of the following assets:

~0.491 $ETH
~41.55 $MPL
~138 $pPEAS
~127.5 $PEPECOIN
~80,592,935 $PEPE

and of course:

~369 $OS

As of this writing, our basket is worth approximately $5000. Although humble, we think investing can provide a source of sustainable revenue for the Frens enterprise. It also offers the community a fun opportunity to manage a basket of coins together. Along with other forays Frens has in the works, it may also provoke conversations about collective governance more broadly, and in turn produce governance by $OS holders.

The coins are held by our multisig. You can track their performance on Zerion.

Team Pay

$2694

Frens has a fair amount of work on our hands, especially now that we have expanded our scope. This payment will help incentivize and motivate us to get it done.This payment will be processed tomorrow. We will announce this in a separate post.

Admin

$500

We will be taking advantage of various services to assist with our work: social media; AI platforms (especially for image generation); ENS domains; website hosting; and more. This money will go towards registration costs, subscription costs and so on.

Frenship

Community

$500

For EthOS to succeed, the community must be reunited and be given a reason to feel optimistic again. We are acutely sensitive to the lowered state of our collective mind—well aware, as we are, of the sunken state the project remains mired in—and have almost finished setting the stage to raise our spirits and right this weathered ship’s course. Most of this work costs nothing, but we want to reinforce it with some $; for example, by giving rewards for meaningful community engagement and competitions.

Onboarding

Solutions

$500

The new dApp is a big upgrade: fast, intuitive and easy on the eye. We believe we can streamline adoption further by developing easy-to-replicate models with guidelines that cater to popular EthOS use cases. Instead of trying to customize setups for Organizations, Farms etc. or even multi-protocol ecosystems themselves, users could simply select from prepackaged solutions that we have tested and curated for them.

The money for this would be for operational costs, e.g. gas for model testing.

Forking

$3000

We believe there would be value in forking

1. EthOS stuff (code, frontends etc.)

2. Other projects, to deploy and operate on EthOS

If we can, Frens will fork these ourselves, or pay developers to fork them for us.

Incentives

$5000

Without incentives, we are unlikely to see adoption at scale. New and existing projects will be wary of deploying on a 'new' platform. They will want to hedge this risk with guarantees. Frens will provide these in the following ways:

a) gas fees
b) liquidity
c) rewards for farming setups
d) direct payments
e) other (TBD)

Projects may need to meet criteria to receive incentives, e.g. use EthOS for a certain period of time; give us certain feedback; or promote EthOS.

Hackathons

$3500

Frens will study previous Delegation efforts in this area, research Hackathons more broadly and develop a strategy for how to wield them to the advantage of EthereansOS. Ideas include staging our own or piggybacking on others, i.e offering rewards if a participant wins one with an entry they built with EthOS tech.

Industry Relations

Sponsorships

$3500

Alongside our inquiry into Hackathons, we will scout the industry for appropriate targets for sponsorship deals. Rather than merely shooting for simple product placement, these deals will result in sustained adoption and brand awareness.

Comms & Special OPS

Currently, we have no money set aside for our Comms and Special OPS work, neither of which we anticipate will require funding; if they do it will be a negligible amount.

For a refresher on what they involve, re-scope the slides from our original Deck below.

We will have more to say about our Comms work in particular when we publish our road map a few days from now.

Forever Frens

Roadmap

When we three started Frens, we resolved to commit to it until the end, even if that end turned out to be a bitter one. We did this because we believe that despite the way things seem, the kernel of EthOS is still a truly valuable one.

It just needs to be seized by the right hands.

Before the end of April, we will publish our road map for the near future, which will lay out in practical terms how EthOS is going to get by just fine.

All it will take is a little help from some Frens.

GM.