Redacted Cartel, New Order DAO, and DeFi Tokenomics w/ Sami
Navigating DeFi Ep. 4
What’s up everyone. Welcome to Navigating DeFi — a podcast where we cover DeFi projects and concepts in depth.
This week I sat down with Sami, the co-founder of New Order DAO and Redacted Cartel — both of which we discussed throughout this episode. We also talked about the current state and future evolution of DeFi tokenomics and how that affects outcomes for DeFi protocols.
This week’s episode is available here:
New Order DAO
New Order DAO is an incubator DAO focused on DeFi. They work closely with project teams to help them with protocol design, development, growth, and fundraising. So far New Order has incubated three projects:
H20: a non-pegged stable asset for the Ocean Protocol.
Optyfi: an AI powered yield optimizer.
Redacted Cartel: a meta-governance protocol for DeFi.
New Order also explored a unique token model through their governance and revenue share token, NEWO:
To learn more, check out the following resources:
Redacted Cartel
Redacted is looking to build a meta-governance layer that creates and extracts value through the incentivization of governance in DeFi. Redacted (currently) uses OlympusDAO’s bonding mechanism to acquire key governance assets throughout DeFi.
Redacted has grown rapidly, and in the last few months has become one of the top holders of CVX— giving it a lot of influence in the Curve ecosystem:
Redacted plans to expand this control into more ecosystems including Tokemak and Frax to name a couple. They’ll also be launching Hidden Hand soon, which is a generalized bribe marketplace based on Votium. Hidden Hand will allow any project to set up a bribe economy within its governance ecosystem. To learn more, check out the following resources:
Baseplate Thesis
We also touched on Same’s “Baseplate Thesis” during the episode. This is Sami’s version of the Fat Protocol Thesis which is summarized here:
First proposed in 2018, the fat protocol thesis inverses the value accrual model of web 2 into web 3, where in more traditional structures, the “protocols” (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.) produced immeasurable amounts of value, but most of it got captured and re-aggregated on top at the applications layer, largely in the form of data (think Google, Facebook and so on). The Internet stack, in terms of how value is distributed, is composed of “thin” protocols and “fat” applications. As the market developed, we learned that investing in applications produced high returns whereas investing directly in protocol technologies generally produced low returns. This relationship between protocols and applications is reversed in the blockchain application stack. Value concentrates at the shared protocol layer and only a fraction of that value is distributed along at the applications layer. It’s a stack with “fat” protocols and “thin” applications.
In Sami’s blog post, he explores how this thesis can be reapplied on the application stack and reinforced through conviction based tokenomics. Read the Baseplate Thesis in full here.
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