ytmp3free.cc_meet-your-delegate-ep11-ft-penn- blockchain-yout... Fri, 4/15 9:18PM 29:49 SUMMARY KEYWORDS maker, delegate, blockchain, club, people, governance, dao, guess, university, crypto, questions, possibly, vote, semester, platform, yield, proposals, vc, members, penn SPEAKERS ElPro, LongForWisdom 00:03 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to meet your delegate number 11. I'm Patrick. I'm one of the GovAlpha contributors at Maker DAO. And we're joined here with Jun, who is representing Penn blockchain, who was our latest candidate to become a recognized delegate. As always, this these meetings are recorded and will be posted to YouTube. So we asked people to try and avoid talking over each other. And if you wanted to ask any questions, you can either raise your hand or put them in the chat or feel free to interject if there's a lull in the conversation. We're going to start with a short presentation that June is going to give us about Penn blockchain and about their delegate platform. And then we'll open the floor to some questions, aiming to keep this to around 30 minutes. In total, so June, feel free to take it away for us. 00:46 Sure. Well, hello, everyone. My name is June. I'm currently a sophomore undergrad at University of Pennsylvania, Wharton Business School. I'm studying finance and blockchain technologies. And I guess I recently I've been, you know, involved slash keeping up with, I guess what Maker has been doing in the general space for you know, a couple of years now. And more so recently, I met some of the Maker team at the Harvard blockchain conference, got super interested and excited about what's going on behind the scenes. And you know, I reached out to them from Penn's blockchain standpoint, I'm here on behalf Penn blockchain, representing sort of possibly becoming or becoming a delegate right. For, for Maker, just a quick, I guess, Intro independent washing themselves as a whole. We're a completely student run flushing organization from the University of Pennsylvania, for both our undergraduate and graduate schools, as well as our PhD schools. Currently, the blockchain club, I want to say around two three years ago was when I first got its modern day forum was around you know, less than a dozen or so people this year to this semester. Currently, we have around 5060 And next semester, we anticipate over 100 people joining the club. Our club has committees covering governance, research, education, business development, and web development slash web three, I currently am on the government side of things hence why I'm here on this call. Our team has different members leading governance initiatives for different protocols such as OB a compound, you swab, dydx, index, Co Op, etc. And, you know, hopefully, hopefully Maker Maker DAO soon, every week, our governance leads, we'll share updates with our club about just the different proposals and, and different, you know, things happening and their respective protocols. And then we'll get on either get together on Discord and, you know, hash out possibly when we want to go with, with a vote, or whether or not we want to, you know, like, propose something ourselves if we if we deem that necessary, right, our internal voting process usually takes place either on Zoom during, like, you know, that this couple of months ago, like during the COVID times, right, or the more so COVID times, and more recently, we've been either holding in person sessions once a week, just a nice, you know, half hour hour long session where we debate different things going on, as well, as you know, the different proposals being proposed. Right now, some of our, you know, general governance initiatives that involve staying active within our discussion forums, drafting new proposals, when appropriate, staying up to date with the goals that we recover, discussing models and parameters with different, you know, mouse companies, right, like, like, online, I'm sure you guys are aware of communicating with internal team members when need be, as well as you know, hosting speaker events with with projects and conducted in conjunction with o'clock, a lot of these projects where if you don't want to get more of a community, university presidents presidents, and they'll reach out to us and sort of, you know, set up either fireside chats, or possibly the next year for our bed, Washington conference, one, you know, speak or host an event there as well. And as for, you know, Maker side of things, currently, right now, you know, right now, all of our delegation has been given to us by different VCs, who essentially want to have, you know, their university presence in a sort of maybe more democratized educational and decentralized space. And so, you know, like, for example, Andreessen said in crypto, a lot of them have been have, you know, delegated voting rights for some, some different tokens, right. And I guess initially speaking, that's maybe where, you know, I and Washington would want ahead, Maker, I think, is one of those really cool platforms in a sense that with their delegation, the way they do their delegation, as you guys sure have, I was really interested in the way that, you know, Maker themselves incentivize us to be good delegates, and they're there, you know, governance alpha, sort of, you know, like overarching code that sort of sees how up to date and how involved you are with everything has been really nice to sort of, is a really nice way to sort of keep you on your toes and also reward those who are due to more than one else. As for internally inside the club, our goal is the same sort of setup this mounting system. And so essentially, most of the you know, especially if we ended up getting like a VC to sort of delegate rights to us, their tokens that that fun name would go into our into our club. However, you know, if and we were to get, you know, money from from Maker as a delegate, then we would essentially set up beta bounty programs where for participation, right for example, if I were to, you know, create a pose, if I were to, you know, vote really be really active in the community, at the end of the day, you know, I could receive a Dai, proportional diagrid to or Dai bounty to whatever Maker sort of pays our club. 05:24 And then overall, currently, right now, maybe just like more, more personally side of things. I'll be I've started to help. I think Adrian's on this call, but help with him said, and mark on a new initiative, I guess, sort of we proposal is out soon, and just a new initial new initiative to possibly have some of the surplus that some of the surplus buffer be invested, again, different projects. So I guess the analogy I could sort of maybe Maker compare to is much like how maybe when when I give money to tether and tether issue stables, they sort of, you know, invest that money in like, short term government bonds, etc. Right. And some, you know, like, albeit, like low yielding very safe, but some yield. And I think, you know, maybe some initiatives from from, you know, Maker Dows perspective, you know, could be a nice, you know, possibility to explore it. But yeah, that's, that's the main main gist of everything on that you guys bear for coming. It's cool. And I look forward to being a delegate for this platform. 06:30 That's great. Jean. Thanks very much. I'll open the floor to questions if anyone wants to ask you any questions about Penn blockchain? And ElPro 06:41 they do. It's Frank, again. Thank you for putting this presentation together and your platform, really excited to see and be the first university to take an interest in Maker. So I wanted to ask you, what are some of the benefits that Maker can get here? As far as having a student body Council such as the pen DAO pen blockchain club? Would you say that perhaps in the near future, some of those individuals, I think you mentioned there's about 100? Members? Would some of those individuals be interested in working the ecosystem? Or do you think many of them are just doing it? Because perhaps is a hot trend? Do you expect any of them could possibly, eventually want to work in DeFi? And just kind of give us color on what the demographics is? Their interest? Yep. 07:33 Yes. So I guess I'll start off by talking about the crypto interest within our club first, and then sort of relate that to the Maker DAO. So currently, at Penn of blockchain in you know, in the last, I want to say like a year, maybe give or take one semester, there has been incredible amounts of interest in crypto, more and more people are, you know, finding BB dropout pattern as almost a more elusive and maybe more interesting play than going into banking or private equity, and many of those, you know, generic, or any of those, like traditional routes that everyone knows, flocked to see, there's a lot of my friends actually have either, you know, dropped out take gap semester, starting their own projects, we're starting work in DCs, you know, the Denver Gen Ed buses around our atmospheric spaces, you know, crypto is coming, and it's the next day, right. And it's one of those things where, you know, more and more people are 100% be more involved in different Dalits and projects, and more and more, like, considering slash even going into a web three related role for their for their careers. So we're makers perspective, I think, you know, maybe more so tailoring towards why why Maker would want or maybe why you'd want to delegate the university platform, from our perspective, you know, like, there's, there's, I guess I'll first by saying, like, there's a good reason why, you know, a lot of different companies and stuff are getting, you know, like, are reaching out to universities, for for not only like sponsorships and admin collaborations, but also, you know, just sort of get their name on platforms, right? It's because a lot of these top universities, you know, they're out there, a lot of their, you know, new recruits will be from these universities in the future, right? And a lot of these people who are going through like the schooling system, sort of see the potential of crypto are open to the idea of crypto and want to eventually get instant crypto for right. And this, this cascading this, this, maybe universities getting into governance side of things, right is a very quick and exponential, I want to say increase, E honestly, like, you know, just a year ago, right? There is barely any any interest in getting universities onto delegations, right, there was, you know, barely any university and, you know, there's there's really like no VC sort of, you know, delegating rights, you know, a couple years ago and stuff, and, you know, the past year, year and a half, you know, so many more universities have been, you know, onboard getting involved. And then, you know, honestly every every big university at this point is either has or is starting to create a crypto club. Right. And so, with with respect to Maker, I definitely you know, and expecting slash would be very surprised if there weren't more University blockchains getting tried to become delegates in the future? ElPro 10:09 Yeah, for sure. I think when I met you at the harbor blockchain conferences, Princeton had flown like something like 1616 members of their blockchain clubs. So super excited stuff. Yeah. I'll let somebody else ask the question. LongForWisdom 10:32 Sure, like, maybe go for this one else. So I guess you mentioned some of the other sort of doubts that blockchain had been involved with us or like eBay compounds, uniswap things. I think sort of sort of, I guess, compared to those dowels Maker tends to have a, I guess, larger volume of governance, decisions, proposals, etc. So I guess I'm just curious if you guys are sort of are aware, you know, sort of taking into account like, if there's any concerns you have with it or anything like Yeah, 11:14 are you sort of saying just because Maker governance has made me more like involved? Or there's more need for bandwidth? I LongForWisdom 11:20 guess? Yeah, there's just I think there's just more proposals and votes. And yes, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for 11:27 sure. And I think that's sort of why so why we're introducing a balanced system for that. Right. Like, you know, like, at the end of the day, a lot of people sort of are, you know, and the little like, financial incentive definitely motivates, you know, like, maybe people who could choose between, you know, hanging out with their friends, or going on to the Maker forums and checking something out, right. And so I think with with, I guess, I guess, to sort of go back a little bit, no other platform really, essentially, pays us at this point, the platform itself, and it's mainly just VCs, paying the call, right to sort of our you know, for further incentives. While with Maker is like sort of delegation platform, there will definitely be like a more budget for us to E L L incentivize people who do spend more time with knickers. And you know, in the future, like, especially next semester, there'll be a lot more influence influx of people. And so we'll definitely have a lot more roles to cover and people to cover those roles. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks. Remember? Yeah, 12:30 I was gonna go Go ahead. Go ahead. 12:33 Yes, it was it was. 12:35 So basically my question, because I'm quite intrigued by the unique setup that your club has, you know, being a university based delegates. So you mentioned that you've got quite a number of members of the club now, does the club have any requirements to become a member? Or is it open to any student? Who's at the university? 12:55 Yeah, so um, I think, you know, in the spirit of web three, and All right, we, as a club, are very interested in moving from just the club into a more like DAO, we're still, you know, finalizing that transition, it's a lot better from just like, you know, like, a compliance standpoint. And also, just for more innovation, we're allowed to do what we want to do and move things faster, instead of going through a traditional, you know, like, web 2.0 structure, right. And I think, from that standpoint, we're still maybe hashing out exactly what it takes to be a DAO member, everything from there, but just overarching things that I do know, is that you essentially have to be a student at University, Pennsylvania, any other colleges, any sort of, I guess, some type of background is Penn is divided into four undergraduate, for undergraduate colleges, you know, like business school, our School of Arts and Sciences, yada, yada. And then as well as there's multiple master's degrees, Master schools, and as well as many PhD programs, as well. So you have to be you know, currently enrolled at the university, Pennsylvania, to to apply after you are in it, you know, like, if you want to take a gap semester, and yada, yada, that's like a case by case basis, but no one's you know, you do good work, no one's gonna be like Russia to kick you out. 14:17 That's great. Thank you. And similarly, along those lines, when the club is deciding on kind of policy positions that you're taking, when you're routing, you mentioned that you discuss it as a group, and then you come to a conclusion yourselves, is that a kind of a one person, one vote system that you use for that, or just some people have higher weights than others kind of who may be more senior members of the club? 14:38 Yeah, currently, right now, it's one vote, one person, one vote. However, I will say, you know, a lot of the senior members or I won't even say the senior members, the people who are more involved in sort of, you know, maybe normal know, horror of what's going on, essentially, you know, like a lot of times comedy or the conversation and so for anyone who sort of like you know, like what's Maker, you know, the people because, you know, our club is a wide array. And for people who are very DeFi, native crypto native versus the people who sort of learned about Bitcoin a couple weeks ago. So those people who sort of know what's going on definitely steer the conversation in the club. And essentially, at that point becomes like, which one of these people sort of give the better argument? And then at that point, it's a fully democratic one person, one vote process. ElPro 15:20 Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Go ahead. All right. I'll go after you. Nice, nice music you got there, by the way. Um, so Juna, I noticed when I looked at your platform, maybe I should have brought this up to you. When you asked me for, you know, a few pointers on what it takes to be a Maker delegate, but you guys didn't state like, what your, I guess? What's your stance on the direction? Or the vision that Maker doubt should take? I guess, is that possible? Because different students might have different visions of what DeFi should be? So I guess I'm trying to figure out why. Your platform you haven't stated your position as to whether Maker should go for growth or Maker should be conservative? Yeah, pretty sure you've seen you've seen the debates on on the forum? Yeah. Yeah. 16:13 To be to be, I guess, short story or short answer is, as a, as a club, we haven't fully decided that yet. longer answer that. I mean, longer answer is well, you know, I met the team maybe like, three, three weeks ago, since then, there's been a Harvard lashing conference, the Columbia hackathon Bitcoin Miami was last week, a lot of us have been traveling and a lot of us have, you know, we'd haven't exactly had the most time to sort of fully flesh out where our club stands at every point. And that's something that we will be doing the future. However, the discussions that we have had so far, point towards a, a trajectory, where we do want to sort of innovate and, you know, a growth type type of trajectory, we're okay with, you know, not okay with us as a club. So far, not set anything in stone, right. But so far, we would like to take maybe a little bit more risk, and maybe, you know, some earn some, you know, passive growth path, past yields, and sort of, you know, like, become, you know, a little faster moving in the space, I guess, you know, like, personally speaking now, like, this is just me speaking, you know, with, with Adrian and Mark, on the strategic strategic core, strategic core Finance unit, we've been, you know, sort of exploring ways of possibly, you know, I have carving out a small chunk of a surplus buffer to explore different DeFi, you know, liquidity incentives, yield incentives for for providing more use case for, for use case and liquidity for Maker and Dai. And then as well as you know, possibly spinning that up until I get a little bit of a fun to sort of, you know, possibly explore different areas that, you know, Dai can sort of keep up with maybe the yields that are in the state. E ElPro 17:55 Would you say that, that some of the pen DAO members are experts, more experts in finance than anything else? I mean, do you have any cryptography fanatics? 18:07 Yeah. For sure. So, there's actually, there's a large range of people that are club, I'll say, a lot of there's, there's honestly, a lot of people who cover everything, or not a lot of people cover everything. There's people who cover everything, right, whether they specialize in one thing or another, across our different across our different, like, segments of the club, right? There's no research, there's people who, you know, would probably be optimized for a VC role. There's people who can be optimized for developer roles, people who'd been occupied for consulting roles, right. And so from from that sense of things, I think maybe that's the reason why so many, like different companies have been reaching out and sort of be like, hey, we want to, you know, establish a direct job posting line and see if there's any, like potential ways we can, you know, get some members to to work for us. I guess, to answer your question. Yeah, there's name something and there's most likely multiple people on our clubs who are very interested in specializing. ElPro 19:04 Good stuff. Good stuff. today. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, man. Sorry about that. 19:11 I'm actually gonna steal agents question which is, how do you intend to source your delegated? MKR? Essentially, so coming from the students or VCs or if you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that's what 19:30 Yeah, so just initially off the bat, I guess I'll so I guess Adrian's question before the call, right. Today. Was that does does Penn blockchain have any Maker currently? Right. And from our standpoint, no, we we don't hold delta we don't hold. You know, we have I guess we have some ether gas. Right. But as for currently, from pens blockchains and, you know, standpoint, we don't have a fund. We don't have any anything inside the actual club right now. That is market law. or market short or say, right, all our all our funds are essentially just like stable coins or like US dollars that we use for funding our club activities. And we're looking more into having a, you know, a treasury management spin off or some type of fun and, you know, the semesters to come. You know, obviously, so far, we've, you know, like, before we move to like a DAO sort of like infrastructure, we have more autonomy, that sort of, you know, like investment of our own that sort of speculative stuff on our on our own senses, you know, there's a lot of maybe legal hurdles that we have to go through, and just a whole lot of, you know, questionable eyes, right. That, you know, there's a lot of, like, overarching, like, things that we have to be in E E compliance with, right. That should hopefully, you know, diminish as we, you know, become more of a DAO structure. And as we become more and more, I guess, as the space develops, right. So currently, right now, Maker actually has ZERO. Universe, Pennsylvania has 0.1. Maker, so like $20 Worth, yeah, that's primarily actually just to be able to vote on the immediate projects before we get any delegation, just so we have, like, you know, a little bit to exactly as Mark put in the chat, uh, well, we're, we're well Maker right now. But just to be able to, you know, actually have some sort of some sort of sort of our votes show up as you're participating in the future. As for where we're delegation is going to come from, ideally, you know, the VC game initially off the bat is very, very nice, sort of, you know, like, dumb knowing that, you know, for example, like different VCs now that we've talked to, probably right now, um, I was talking to a couple guys from Andreessen, you know, ask them, hey, you know, like, you give us delegation for these, these these, you know, this is our plan for Maker, you know, you would you would you care to stare similar for us type deal, right, sort of give them the pitch on that end, initially speaking, you know, I think that maybe we were able to, they'll be able to trust us the most just from, you know, just starting off platform. And then as we were able to, you know, sort of grow and sort of have a good, good, I think Frank told me good cred, right, in the in the forums, Will, we'll be able to get more delegation from just normal users pay. And then as well as the club members themselves, I know a couple of us have some Maker as well. And we were, you know, internally talking and joking around with each other, how we are most likely going to delegate that to to our address as well or to the university Pennsylvania, Petrus. 22:23 Sounds good, good, man. Now, I just think I want to, I think it's been much repeating, but I agree in other people's comments, as far as sales, I think it'll be interesting to see your bounty system, working with students with different skills. Getting that we right now, delegates have been asked to vote on a plethora of different subjects, that we go to see how you guys can like, specialize on each and each one of them. Great to have you. Sure. 22:50 Thank you. That's great. Okay, well, if no one else has any further questions, I've got another one. So essentially, what what do you and I know, it's difficult for you to comment because you're just a representative of the club rather than an individual delegate, but what do you think are kind of some of the major challenges that Maker is facing? And what would be kind of your stances as a delegate in terms of trying to counteract those challenges? 23:23 Yeah, for sure. Maybe just like, personally, strategies are personally personally things I've seen, maybe, I guess, more so from the outside so far, that, you know, I'll bring up and have brought up and things that we have maybe possibly discussed, are sort of a a rather, you know, like, you know, Maker is huge, right, and every decision has to go through multiple different, you know, different channels before it can, you know, come in to live and be it come into fruition. And so I think maybe a way of maybe expediting that process, or a way of maybe screws, being more quick to act with different things that happen on the space, I think that could be something that we want to explore and, you know, maybe, you know, work towards, obviously, you know, there's a lot of things that, you know, that statement is there's a lot of things I don't know, that happens behind the scenes, that sort of, you know, maybe prevent that from happening, but I think that's always maybe like a good overarching goal initially. And then as well as sort of the main area of interest that I was sort of most interested in was because, you know, a lot of the I want to say like a lot of the backing a lot of the collateral and a lot of you know, the you know, there's there's a lot of money, I guess, sitting sitting stable right now not earning any extra yield not doing anything. And that, to me, personally, is the area where I think we have to do something, whether that's like really safe, whether it's taking it off chain with the real world world assets, maybe earning some some yield there or maybe, you know, doing some DeFi farming and stuff on chain. I think there's definitely there's definitely something we should do with that. What that is is exactly as you know, Oh baby, what would mark Adrian Subash and I are already you know, the different coordinates and stuff we're trying to maybe work towards, but definitely something we'd want to improve slash look into in the near future. ElPro 25:16 Hey, I also noticed on a visitor your website and the club's website and I noticed the blog is not maybe it's my laptop here. But is the blog running up and running? And do you foresee possibly some of the members writing doing a bit of, you know, a couple of write ups on Maker governor's governance, stuff of that nature? 25:37 Yeah, I mean, that has actually come up in our internal talks before, maybe not specifically with Maker, but just with the different governance initiatives that we do have. And so I think, you know, maybe more, so I won't say the future. But one of the key agenda points I have actually for next semester is for the different people on the different governance teams that have a either bi weekly or monthly checkup, just blog posts or summary of like, Hey, this is what I did in, you know, for example, like, this is what I did for IV this this month, this, these are different things. These are the different things we discussed, yada, yada, and then sort of either publish that on our Twitter account or on their on the blog. As for the actual website itself, I'll be totally honest, I can follow up after this call and see, reach out to who, who actually operates the whoever at which someone our team that operates the website, and make sure that's updated? Because I'm not quite sure it is right now. ElPro 26:35 Yeah, no, good. Oh, good. And I would imagine you guys are going to run events down the road, maybe pen blockchain conference or something. 26:43 Yeah. So maybe this is just like a little more overarching. And just more like general with the club. We got a decent amount of grants from a couple of different 1000, mainly edgy DAO. They were the ones that sponsored the Harvard blockchain conference. And next semester, E E yeah, hopefully, like I've been saying this, you know, like every two months or so for the last like two years, but hopefully, you know, once, once COVID passes, and things are maybe more safe. We were very close to actually having an in person conference this year, that ended up being online over a day, we brought in some really nice speakers. Check it out on our website, if you haven't, but for next year, we're planning on renting out a hotel for the weekend, having a bunch of speaker panels, conferences, career fair, much like fried meat for, you know, a few guys that are at the heart of washing confidence. No, we are, you know, one one, we want to have something similar, especially with the new credits that we have. 27:37 Cool, looking forward to that. Thank you. 27:41 Thank you. Thanks, Jean, we're kind of coming up on the half hour mark now. So I think you know, we're putting the point we want to wrap up. I just have one one final question. I'd like to ask if that's okay with you. How does your club operate when the university is on vacation? So do you have do you have ongoing meetings during that period? Or is there going to be a kind of month long, two month long periods where the delegate is dormant? 28:15 Yeah, so it depends per it depends on what committee you're in. And then also, I guess, sort of depends on whether your, your, your interest. So at the end of this semester, like for example, this summer, right, we'll have people who are interested in keeping up, right, still be active in our respective committees or shift committees, one of the committees I will say that will be acted as the Governance Committee, you know, like, governance doesn't take a summer break, right. And so we will still be active in our governance forums in that sense from summer. As for different things, like for example, like, internal like, education or internal like events, slash like meetings and stuff, outreach, that will we'll take a break for the summer and the people who want to work from there will can migrate over to our team for the for the summer and keep up with the governance initiatives. But as for for Maker stance, you know, we'll still equally be as equally involved in active 29:11 Okay, thank you, Julian. That was really interesting half hour talk there and assuming there's no further questions from anyone in the call, I think we'll end it there but um, the recording of this will be going on to YouTube. And you're available in the forum or in discord if anyone has any further questions. Is that fair to say? 29:30 Yes, of course. Um, my Discord is one bug. Ju Anbu G. Number 92259225. Yeah, so if anyone has any questions, definitely reach out. has any questions, definitely reach out. ElPro 29:45 That's great, too. And thanks very much. E