MISSION AND LAUNCH
Crypto is a tribal place with a talent problem. Contributors come and go with each market swing. We believe the protocols, the vision and rails being built here are too important to develop in spurts and stops — based on price action and driven by tourists who aren’t invested in the ethos of the space.
In the spring, we launched the LLamas, a reputation and workforce experiment with the aim of creating a place to rally builders, creators and founders to accelerate the development of onchain, defi economies.
Built by onchain natives, for onchain natives.
We believe that Curve is the base layer and hotbed for real-deal DeFi. It is one of the leaders of defi with a culture of innovation and tenacity. There’s more projects built on top of Curve than many alt-L1s.
The collection’s prompt was developed by wwpk and he made much of our collection. To bring people into the community and give them skin in the game, we opened up our process and invited anons to submit art to become part of the collection. From the getgo, we uncovered many incredibly talented artists and passionate members of the community.
We programmatically launched our project via an auction platform that took a page from Nouns — with a few notable and memorable twists. The turnout was far and above expectations. We received over 1,600e to bootstrap and seed our shared treasury, owned by every llama.
We also received generous grants from Convex, Conic and StakeDAO to integrate and align our projects.
We timed the auction and the treasury DCA with the launch of crvUSD and LLAMMA system. Its novel and game-changing mechanisms make Curve one of the most well positioned ecosystems for the long-term. While we can’t predict price action, we can act upon development.
Our DCA ended with a 200k usd OTC from Mich, given only to friends of Curve.
From midway through the auctions, we have been farming and compounding the treasury at what we believe to be comically low prices. (!remind me in 1 year).
Toon(sm), every llama will be able to access their claim on the yield from the treasury. And a little down the road, boost their claim with badges from participating and contributing to the ecosystem. More on this later.
GROWING UTILITY
The thing about pfps is that they have never really been deeply integrated within defi. Until the LLamas.
For many anons and collectors, the cornerstone of one’s digital identity is a pfp. Whether to flex, signal a set a ethos, membership to a tribe or to just wear an avatar because you feel like it. As digital identity expands from wallet address, to nfts, to something more all-encompassing, being able to bring your identity with you wherever you go is a simple and powerful upgrade. It’s tangible reminder that your every tx begins to build the reputation and lore of your onchain identity. actions are imprinting the lore of your digital identity onchain.
Alunara from Llama Airforce integrated the LLamas into the UI and provided code for other projects to follow suit. It didn’t take long for the LLama pfp integration to spread to many leading protocols within the ecosystem, like Convex and Votium. With more on the way.
We have also partnered with protocols to have their llama be a boost or a pass to access specialized farms and yield opportunities. This is a very exciting utility vertical to the core team and we are working to develop deep partnerships with protocols new and old to grow this use case.
We’re also the first project WL by FXN from Aladdin, so we will be able to contribute and vote on a grand scale. We love to see, use and learn more about all the amazing things being built by the Aladdin crew. And in time, we will be able to include liquid staked eth as a source of yield.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS FOR A PERMISSIONLESS WORKFORCE
Very early in our project, we had the opportunity to chat with Jack and David from Polygon. They instantly understood our value prop and gave the LLamas a chance to contribute, earn bounties and help build the new iteration of Polygon. The contributors who had joined our community did not disappoint.
We wanted to prove that there is a market fit for a specialized group of builders that can contribute to DAOs, chains, and protocols. Built with duct tape and hungry builders, we have found that there is great traction for this idea.
So far our alpha test for the workforce and talent platform has been a success. Anon devs like PYK, Alecks, 0xeabz, omnifient, 0xdapper, Rozales, MeetM, Degeneticist have built some very exciting and (in our humble opinion) huge legos for our partners.
https://x.com/davidesilverman/status/1706914571108151656?s=20
https://x.com/reserveprotocol/status/1689686356455301122?s=20
and many more in progress
They have made in-roads, become indispensable with behemoths of the industry and have collectively have earned around 100k usd for their time and talent.
The LLamas, being a group of onchain natives, have been leveraged as testers for protocols that are pre-launch. We helped test Gemach’s gBot, Litra’s NFT pools and participated in a farming challenge from Notional.
We aren’t CT, so we also post our Ls, because everything we do is a chance to get better. We are still discovering how our system can work. Some of our best devs and friends had the opportunity to pitch, as a dev studio, to build a promising RWA protocol.
It has helped us hone our process but we didn’t bring it home.
Now that we have proven that there is demand for this, we will be focusing on launching a platform that automates this process, scales, allows for anon reputation building and adds mechanisms to gamify the process of contributing.
FOUNDERS AND VENTURE LLAMAS
Being a hub for so many hungry builders is an energy unto its own. I could go on and on about how woolish I am on the group of builders we have gathered.
We launched with a special ai-bot that was an experiment to escape the uncanny valley. The whole picture of this experiment has just been revealed and every llama has been invited to join in the seed and launch of FROK, an ai tool created by evmKnows.
A snapshot was recently taken of llama holders and more news on the seed round is incoming.
Projects live and die by their memes and creative talent, that’s why we’re lucky to have llamaQuest and MetaCVX in our corner. LLamaQuest has been indispensable in being the creative subdao of the project. In short, we love the art.
While we found our stride, we found our voice. So much is happening in defi and within our own ecosystem, Cogsy stepped up and found his place in managing and memeing the chaos. With backend support from Irate, the little biweekly stream is an important tool for staying up to date on everything.
As always, thank you for you time and talent. We wouldn’t be anything without each and every llama. Stay tuned for more partners, badges, venture opportunities, incubated projects, based art, farming contests, gated LP farms, and much more.
2024 will be the year of the llama. Stay hungry, stay woolish.
