Penguin Party
Gamifying Software Development
Welcome
Thank you for joining me today - For those not familiar with me, my name is David Felton, otherwise known as Hiturunk, I’m a Uniswap Protocol Politician and the founder of a startup called Penguin Party.��I’ve worn a lot of hats in life: I’m a self-taught Programmer, a musician, a visual artist, a writer, and generally - I like to think of myself as a very creative person.��I have been a user of Computers since 1998, when I was 4. I began taking an interest in programming in my pre-teens. I’m the first, and maybe the last, of a generation that grew up not just as a native to digital technology - but of free and open offline computing. I have used every operating system from DOS to now. I taught myself to read and write on a computer before I could talk.�
Who I Am
� I hate monotony and I’m always looking for change. I’m from a small, rural, and poor Southern state, but I grew up moving all across America, and I’ve lived in a LOT of places: California, Colorado, Michigan, Louisiana, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida...for you Europeans it would be like saying you grew up having lived in every country in Europe.
I’m 26, and for my entire adult life I have been constantly at work in low-paying, labor intensive jobs. My usual hourly is less than $15/hour. I have scrimped, and saved, and worked my way slowly up to financial independence. When the Coronavirus hit, unlike most Millenials my age, I had a moderate amount of money to live on. I have not worked since last October, and yet I still have over $10,000 to my name.�
Who I Am (Cont.)
I don’t say these things to brag - I say this to illustrate something important and intrinsic about my self - I was molded by the 2009 financial crisis that led to the creation of Bitcoin.�� In it, I watched as the rug was pulled out from under good, honest, and hard-working Americans like my parents (who were small business owners before the recession) - and who lost everything: Their homes, their businesses, their cars...ultimately, my parents lost something far more important in the recession - their marriage.��While the greedy bankers who caused the recession got bailed out, because they were “Too Big to Fail” - the common man lost what little he had. “Too Small to Survive” is what I called it. The financial crisis made me realize the common man was under attack.�
How I Got in to Crypto
I joined the Crypto Community in 2012 - back when Bitcoin could still reasonably be mined on a CPU or graphics card. I became politically obsessed by the anti-fiat/Central Bank ideals Satoshi espoused and the anger he felt at the recession in his early postings on Hacker News. ��I was a victim of the hack of Mt. Gox and I was also affected by the closure of GLBSE [The Global Bitcoin Stock Exchange]. These things put off my interest in crypto for a number of years, and it was not until mid-2017 that I would re-enter Crypto - This time as a miner of Ethereum.�� �
2017 Changed My Life
During the 2017 bull-run, the first real “Investment” of my life paid off: the graphics cards I had bought to mine ETH turned a good profit. During those times I learned the basics of solidity and experimented with Ethereum.��I learned a lot, I earned good money, and I got lucky enough to sell the top. After the crash from the all-time-highs, I spent the next few years working, mining as a hobby, and accumulating what ETH I could.�
Being a Founder
From then to now, I have mostly been a quiet participant in Ethereum and Defi. Once before I attempted to start a start-up, but never really had brought my ideas to fruition.��This is my first time as a startup founder and as a lead developer - it has been an extremely interesting experience for me. It was a leap I was forced to make to adapt to the changing political and economic conditions of the world.��Admittedly, were it not for the Coronavirus and the Economy - I would still be cooking in a restaurant, or waiting tables, or answering questions about your Credit Report as a representative for a company like Experian [Which was my previous position].
�
I Want to Talk About The Great Reset
The state of the economy has become intolerable: the world leaders will gather again in Davos this coming May to discuss and finalize their plans, in line with Agenda 2030 and “The Great Reset” initiative of the United Nations/World Economic Forum to forcibly confiscate the last of our wealth, forcibly close our businesses by decree, and to purposefully and intentionally erode the national sovereignty of the free and independent nations of Earth - a continuation of what has happened all year.��No matter what country you are from - I am sure you are as fearful as the rest of us about the state of affairs in international politics - and the virus which sweeps now throughout the world. But I am here with good news, we are in the midst of the most amazing technological change in Human history. The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Blockchain technology.
The CypherPunk
This year was one of the strangest in my life, and I am sure we all feel the same way.�� We are winning our revolution - the fiat money systems have begun to collapse - the banks are insolvent - and those who dictate the legislation of our countries have - by emergency decree - rushed to try to repurpose the worldwide Coronavirus Pandemic to their advantage by pushing forward legislation to reset the Global Financial system. ��Cryptocurrency is the cure to the corrupt old-world systems. We are winning our financial war. Now we must relearn what it means to GOVERN and to labor in a new age - and we must adapt to a new way of doing things.
The MetaGame
My journey to found Penguin Party began much earlier than even I realized; another speaker at the Conference, who is speaking tomorrow: Metagame, was hugely inspirational to me. I joined the project in a fun and meta way: By fixing the first onboarding quest at the time with a github PR: https://github.com/MetaFam/metagame-wiki/pull/122�� Metagame woke me up to a stunning realization - We are all unknowingly playing the Metagame - the infinite and oxymoronically collaborative competition to develop, create, build, and reap the rewards of our infinite capacity for labor.��But it was not until some time after I began playing the MetaGame that I created my first real Quest. (Penguin Party)
The Meaning of the Metagame
The most valuable form of labor mankind can contribute is creativity - and so many of us have - for so long, been disincentivized from our natural, childlike desire to mold reality and to follow our dreams.�When are people at their most Creative? When are we our most productive? ��The answer is obvious! When we play. We can fix everything that is wrong with the world right now if we can collectively realize this true potential within ourselves: When we enjoy what we do - we are more productive. When the incentives are aligned - systems function.
Penguin Party IS:
The Penguin Game
So what do we mean when we say that we want to gamify software development?�� It’s really quite simple: By minting a governance token and distributing it to open-source code contributors you incentivize development and create an emergent economy of labor. This is the first real model for free-market open-source software development - software not created and owned by corporations - but by emergent communities of real people with aligned incentives.��And it’s not just software that can be gamified - it’s all behavior. Say Penguin Party wants to expand it’s marketing - it could run a “mission” - Something as simple as saying: “the first ten users to post on twitter get an OG badge!” can have a stunning amount of success at engaging the community.
My Platform as a Protocol Politician Was Simple
When I first ran as a protocol politician, personally, before creating Penguin Party, I outlined three pillars of my platform:
Enter the Protocol Politician
Penguin party was accidental - totally. Aren’t the best things usually that way?�When the Uniswap airdrop happened, I saw a distinct opportunity to have a say in something I cared deeply about: Freedom, Privacy, Decentralization, and of course - at the center of it all: Uniswap. The rarest kind of Unicorn - an emblem of freedom and trustlessness in an increasingly Tech-Giant dominated world.��Uniswap is critical infrastructure for Web 3.0; developing and protecting it is of paramount importance to the entire Ethereum economy.��So, I jumped in and ran as a Protocol Politician. At one point I had over 1,000,000 Uni delegated to my address.��I realized, suddenly, this was too much power for one person to wield - I needed at least two others to run a multi-sig to ensure the votes were used in accordance with the voters’ wishes - to protect the Democracy of Uniswap. I created 🐟, and gave it to every voter so they could use a snapshot vote to direct me on how they wanted me to vote with their Uni - and slowly: Penguin Party began to take shape.
We Did It!
I believe in a short amount of time, as a community, we have managed to achieve two of these goals:
�-We incentivized decentralization of the protocol when we opposed UP1 & UP2, no change to governance succeeded and Uniswap remains free and sovereign with the original governor contract and quorum.��- More importantly: our championed goal of “Funding further development of Uniswap” has manifested itself in U.P.3 to create a Uniswap Development Grants architecture. �
The Future is Ours
Through the plethora of tools in our toolkit - Penguin Party is able to interact with governance and experimentally develop improvements for Uniswap’s end-users.�
I believe we, as developers, with 🐟 - as well as other Social Tokens like Metagame’s SEED and Equity Tokens such as BUIDL have successfully demonstrated that the open-source governance token software development model works.
�As more governance systems arise, so too will more Protocol Politicians - and other decentralized political parties like Penguin Party. We have laid the groundwork for others to follow.��
Lessons Learned
Decentralization is key.
Entrusting power to central entities, be they people or governments - leads to problems. An example from our project was a developer on the team named cComp dumping his 🐟 while destructing the dashboard that was used until that point for project management [The Codecks account].��It was inexplicable, happened without warning, and was disruptive to the project psychologically and physically. I never expected a developer would even want to do such a thing. Wherever possible, we should decentralize anything used in the course of our work to prevent situations like these.
Lessons Learned (Cont.)
Developing Software is About more than Programming
Developing living software requires that end-users know about and use the software and that developers contribute to it. Contributing to the organization of a Community is as valuable and labor intensive (if not more!) than developing the actual software.��There are a lot of ways to look at this, but what I essentially mean is: Not only does software have to be developed, it has to be marketed, it has to be tested, and it has to be modelled and analytically examined.
�These efforts take more of my time than the actual ideation and invention.
Lessons Learned (Cont.)
Other People Don’t Always See “The Vision” - You Have to “Make It Real”.
Several times throughout this project, I would an introduce an idea such as Penguinswap to the other developers - and they didn’t understand why I would want to build such a thing or what the relevance to the project was. I learned quickly that explaining the idea over and over again, or debating the semantics of the idea doesn’t work.��Instead, as inventors, innovators, artists, and developers - what works is demonstrating the idea by buidling the minimum viable product...before trying to explain the concept to end-users or other developers.
The “🐟Cycle”
The Governance token of a Decentralized Organization should flow out of the treasury to active contributors, and back in to the organization’s treasury continuously.��This creates a virtuous cycle and incentive alignment. It naturally balances the economy of the token.��The token must flow back in to the treasury and sources of revenue for any decentralized organization must be found and utilized by Decentralized Organizations to accomplish this goal.���
The “🐟Cycle” (Cont.)
It is the simplest way to return value to stakeholders who believed in a project early and provided liquidity or capital to a project to execute a continuous buy back of the token from them.
This method of distributing value, unlike a dividend, does not create a taxable event for the stakeholder.
How the Penguins Met DFOHub
I was volunteering as a moderator-like community member in the Uniswap discord when I met the DFOHub team - This was during the ‘Vampire Bot’ Unimergency that DFOHub experienced.��The DFOHub team tried to bring up the problem with the preferred routing pairs of Uniswap to the Uniswap team and the community volunteers of the discord - Mostly, this was dismissed within the Uniswap community. ��At first I did not fully understand the problem - but as I learned more, it became obvious to me that improvements to the routing logic were crucial to the development of Uniswap and projects depending on it like DFOHub - The immediate solution was simple: Forking the Interface and adding additional tokens to the preferred routing pair algorithm based swap code. PenguinSwap was born.
PenguinSwap
Starting out as a governance party for Uniswap - It makes sense for us to work on the Uniswap Interface - Penguinswap is our lovingly crafted fork of the Uniswap Interface with various features such as extending the preferred routing list with tokens such as LID to get our communities the best trades for their tokens. �� How it benefits the 🐟 stakeholders: Potential Revenue from Swap Fees if we use our own Router, Exclusive features for 🐟 holders, and Optimized trade routing for our community’s tokens.��Ideas such as: 🐟-net - a network topology of Uniswap with manual pathing selection and limit order relaying are what we mean by planned trading features that would be potentially exclusive to fish holders. Ideas such as manual trade pathing selection will fix issues such as untradable pools and defeat “vampire” bots. As well, we are thinking about solutions to front-running bots.�
Penguin Party’s Governance Tokens
Penguin Party’s Financial Tokens/Protocols
Tori V1 ⛩- A wrapped-interest-redirected aDai v1. The interest-bearing power of the underlying aDAI is redirected even when in a liquidity pool to Penguin Party. Every Tori V1 wraps and unwraps 1:1 with adai v1.��Revenue: A Transaction tax is applied on every _transfer(), currently: .2% for the Party.�Interest from the underlying aDAI is collected for the party.��Tori V2/V3 [Commonwealth Protocol] 👈⛩👉 - A deflationary meta-stablecoin protocol that allows multiple v1 and v2 aTokens as well as other stablecoins and cryptos to be freely wrapped and unwrapped in to each-other [swapped] with zero slippage.�� There are plans to integrate the Unified Stable Dollar and other non-dollar-based fiatcoins such as digital Euros, Yuan, Yen, or any other digital fiats we see as upcoming alternatives to the dollar - though we plan to initially focus on dollar-based tokens.��Revenue: A Transaction tax is applied on every _transfer(), currently: .2% for the Party.�Interest from the underlying v1 aTokens can be redirected for the party [but is not currently].�In the upcoming V3 of Commonwealth, wrap and unwrap fees are collected by Penguin Party,
Wrapping Up
I hope that Penguin Party can serve as a demonstrative model for how political party-like organizations can develop and protect protocols that have governance as a feature.��The entire point of Buidling and Open-Source software is that others can improve upon the ideas that I and others have put forward and developed - and it is my sincere hope that some of the things I have helped push for encourage innovation, democracy, freedom, and sensible governance.
“Thanks for All The Fish!”
I’d like to thank you all for your time! It’s been my honor and pleasure to have a chance to speak here and to have had a chance to represent the common person in Uniswap governance.��I am very personal, and you can ALWAYS find me in the Uniswap, Penguin Party, Compound, and DFOHub Discord chatrooms. I encourage anyone who’s interested in what I’m working on to reach out to me by PM or in public - I’m always available to collaborate, debate, or give my input on something for the constituents I aim to represent in governance.��Thank you everyone, and Happy Holidays. BUIDL on Penguins!
LINKS
If Penguin Party is an interesting project to you, come join us in the discord, or feel free to just hit our Github Repos with a PR!��Discord: https://discord.gg/m3Fz65A�Twitter: https://twitter.com/HiturunkE�Penguinswap: https://penguinswap.eth.link/�Penguin Party Token List: tokenlist.penguinswap.eth.link/�