The new year is upon us, and throughout crypto, it feels like a page has turned. Many disreputable characters of the last bull are gone, Ethereum is scaling, and Wall Street is jostling for access to our markets. The resilience of DeFi never fails to impress us. We are not creating something ephemeral here. We are building to last.
We want to accelerate Curve’s recovery from the bear and its grand rising. We want that for all of DeFi. The end state we all work for is to reinvent the rails from which the world’s liquidity moves. It’s here and obvious to us. The task is to build, innovate, own, and do everything we can to help reach this inevitability sooner.
And we have plans. And now we can accelerate those, too.
We are proud to announce that the LLamas core has received a grant from the Curve Grants Council. These funds have allowed us to invest, hire and rapidly accelerate our plans to build a pipeline of products that will be released this year.
In the big picture, the goal of everything we’re building is to become a kind of conduit between Curve, other DeFi protocols, and funding sources — a layer of talent, energy, community, and reputation that compounds the talent around in Curve’s ecosystem.
More concretely, this means launching products that help the ecosystem mature and reach escape velocity.
The next months will see a slate of product launches from The LLamas team. These efforts are designed to benefit our holders and community members. We’re developing multiple new revenue streams for our shared treasury, co-owned by each and every holder of a LLama. At the same time, we’re working on integrations and opportunities that make the NFT a must-hold asset.
The collectibles are already unique in crypto, fusing art and community with DeFi. These are pictures of llamas that generate yield. That’s new. But by the end of this year, a LLamas NFT could also help get you a job. Or it could get you into a seed / venture round for a budding crypto project. Or access to exclusive farms and drops. Ideally, all of the above.
In this post, we wanted to give a brief overview of what’s coming. We hope you are as excited as we are.
POWERED BY LLAMAS: MAKEIT.GM
As we put it recently in our 2023 wrap-up, “Crypto is a tribal culture with a talent problem.” Our mission is to fix this, as best we can, starting from a position of strength within the Curve community and branching outwards. We exist to nurture and reward talented contributors. We on-board new developers into the ecosystem and keep our diehards active and engaged, for the long-term benefit of Curve and DeFi. And we want to do this in a highly accessible manner, abstracting away various political and technical complexities to provide welcoming, user-friendly entry points that make it easier for contributors to find work and for projects to hire them.
Since last year’s launch, we have bootstrapped a jobs marketplace in our Discord server, matching contributors with tasks in a channel called “badge-in-prod.” Essentially, we play matchmaker. We post a “badge” — a job that a project needs done — and a bounty they will pay.
Right now, the process is entirely manual. Our vision has always been to make it automated and permissionless, based on NFTs that accrue reputational artifacts.
Enter Makeit.gm, a dedicated platform for our reputation system and jobs marketplace. Made possible by our Curve grant, which allowed us to recruit two full-time developers, the site is launching this year.
Deep breath. This is a big moment for us.
Makeit.gm is for anyone and everyone looking to make it onchain. Projects can use it to source talent, and developers can use it to contribute. The site will welcome newcomers, on-boarding them to DeFi workflows, while helping current onchain natives build their standing in the space.
Our badge mechanism — the backbone of the site — allows contributors to “level up” their reputation in a way that bestows benefits both tangible and intangible. For example, a LLamas badge with certain attributes may boost a person’s yield from the LLamas treasury. It’s also a mark of a clout, a brag point that could attract other job offers and opportunities. In the short history of The LLamas, community members have already made key contributions to some of the most influential and innovative projects in DeFi, buffing their badges in the process. Each badge becomes a powerful sort of on-chain résumé — a one-of-a-kind, non-fungible flex.
Along with a new auction house (see below), Makeit.gm will be one of our first products that is “Powered by LLamas” — a standalone effort that is owned and built by us, and that integrates with everything else we’re doing, but without our favorite wooly friend appearing in the name. This helps us scale more easily, for one. Additionally, it removes some friction for newcomers who might not be familiar with the finer points of Curve culture. You shouldn’t have to be a bespoke degen to know where to start. We all know the rabbit hole will lead to the LLamas anyway.
Leading the charge here is the gigadev Alecks, one of our earliest community members and contributors as well an expert in the verifiable credential space. He is building Makeit.gm along with the one and only Dina.
We are eager to show you Makeit.gm, and we can’t wait to see how the community puts it to work.
AUCTION HOUSE. ON THE MOVE.
When we offered LLamas NFTs to the public, we conducted the sale through a scratch-built auction system, inspired by the Nouns model but reimagined to suit our vision. The auction house was coded in Vyper, the language that continues to make impressive inroads in the Eth developer community, including Curve’s core devs. To our knowledge, the auction house is the most prominent NFT-related dapp built to date in Vyper.
We believe that as more dapps migrate to Vyper, the auction house will remain relevant. And the sale worked well: We raised 1,600e for our shared treasury, co-owned by every llama.
The success got us thinking about what else we could do with the auction code. Could other projects use it to launch their own products, and could llamas benefit in the process?
Well, a few months and conversations later, we are now partnering with blocmates, the giga-gmi, fast-growing crypto research and news site, to launch their LARP pass (Lifetime Access to Research Pass). The LARP is an NFT that “will grant the holder unlimited lifetime access to our new blocmates research section, on-chain analytics, and trackers,” among other perks. The LLamas is providing a custom-skinned auction house for blocmates to conduct the sale, in exchange for a percentage of ETH raised through sales of the passes. The offering will take place on Arbitrum.
As fans of blocmates and their scrappy, incisive coverage of this space, we’re very glad to be working with them. We also hope this sale opens the door to other partnerships that leverage our system, creating a new revenue stream for the LLamas treasury. PFP collections, gaming resources, mintable passes of any kind — any NFT sale on Ethereum or ETH L2s can take advantage of the auction house.
TAPPING CURVE
The LLamas is powered by Curve. Staked CRV and locked CVX make up the bulk of our treasury, earning yield, and each LLamas NFT is backed by a portion of those coins.
Now our llama friend and developer pyk is building a yield tap for LLama owners. You will be able to stake your NFT and earn yield, making LLamas one of the only PFPs in crypto that have a claim to actual treasury assets that are revenue-generating. Right now, pyk is testing the contracts, and after they are audited, as the market turns, we will be ready to turn on the tap.
In the meantime a percentage of treasury owned llama yield will be directed at the team as we scale and further invest back into our system.
Another sort of Curve tap we are working on is a micro-grants front-end Curve to better find, nurture and empower contributors. This will be a more liquid, agile tool than the traditional process – owned by Curve and managed by a group of core contributors, future sub-committees and members of the Grants Council. The council, separate from the larger Curve DAO, can act quickly to award small amounts of funds for worthy projects.
Applying for grants from the larger DAO can be a daunting process, especially for grassroots projects with more modest goals. So we will make these applications easier through a new interface.
We will be staffing up to build this — please reach out if you are interested.
FXN 🤝 LLAMAS
One of the more intriguing projects in the Curve penumbra is the f(x) Protocol, created by our friends at AladdinDAO. The protocol takes ETH and gives it a kind of split personality, separating the familiar asset into two components — one with very low volatility (it’s essentially a stablecoin) and one with high volatility (for more degen uses).
The FXN token governs the protocol, and 3% of its supply is earmarked for “community boosters” and threadoooors who help the protocol by making content (our co-founders, Hawth and Panda, and core dev, Dina, are both boosters, for instance). Vote-locked FXN holders vote every month for the most effective boosters, and tokens are distributed accordingly.
We really like this mechanic, and we’re proud to say that The LLamas is now the first protocol whitelisted as a FXN community booster. This means that veFXN holders can vote to distribute tokens to The LLamas’ shared treasury. For both projects, we think, it’s an idea that just makes sense…
If you have veFXN and/or vlcvx — and especially if you own both veFXN and a LLamas NFT — please consider boosting us! The wstETH we receive through boosts will provide another source of yield for the treasury and for LLamas stakers.
We’re hearing things that a new epoch is on the horizon.
To help get this flywheel spinning and give something back to the Aladdin folks, we have hired the excellent JustJousting to build a dashboard for all Aladdin products, including the f(x) Protocol, CLever, and Concentrator. This dashboard will be similar to the powerful visualization JJ created to show the intrinsic value of vote-locked CVX. The Aladdin dash is in testing and already looks sharp.
While we tighten our bond this year with Aladdin, we will be parting ways with another project, Brrito. The brainchild of our friend kp. We helped advise the project in its early stages, and we’re very happy to see that Brrito is growing and has launched its own Discord. We wish Brrito and kp all the best.
And keep an eye out for the next one *cough* RAAC *cough*
ACCELERATING THE ECOSYSTEM: VENTURE-LLAMAS
Some llamas have already noticed a new channel in the Discord, “venture-llamas.” This is a way for us to advance the space by supporting new and experimental projects by developers in our community, while also driving value to our holders. Although this effort is very new and we don’t know how it will play out, the idea is to give llamas access to seed / venture / angel rounds in projects that are aligned with our mission and the wider goals of DeFi. Can a llama also be an angel? We aim to find out.
The first, official venture-llama project is Frok.ai, an AI experiment by Tadpole Labs. The Tadpole team includes one of our early llamas, the developer and Llama Risk analyst Knows. On the surface, Frok is an AI chatbot that understands crypto projects and speaks in an uncannily human cadence. But there is more to Frok, much more. For almost a year, Tadpole has been building and testing in stealth. Soon, very soon, they will hatch.
As you can see, we have a lot in store for 2024. Whatever happens in the broader space, we think this will be a big year for llamas and our friends, and we’re grateful as ever for your time, support, and talent.
Keep your eyes peeled for more news about our product launches, and as always, stay woolish.