The LAO World Newsletter: December 2020

$750k raise, 30% APY, Yearn experiments, Deadmau5 collaboration, and more. Check out what’s happened in the LAO World in December 2020. Updates from portfolio companies, Flamingo, and more.

Welcome to The LAO World newsletter, your monthly recap of recent announcements from The LAO portfolio, updates about our other projects, and some notes from our team. New to The LAO? Check us out.

December Wins 🏆

• Ethereum Push Notification Service announced its $750k raise.

• dHEDGE launched Performance Mining.

• ZapperFi reached $1 billion in transaction volume.

• Deadmau5 dropped a collaboration with artist Sutu on SuperRare.

The LAO Rundown 👾

BoardRoom provides a complete blockchain governance platform that empowers organizations with the power of the blockchain. Boardroom enabled a 3Box Integration to create voter profiles, working closely with the 3Box team to pull voter profile information using their API and to enable voters to claim and edit their profiles directly on the Hub's UI. Boardroom also pushed a proposal page redesign creating a better way to visualize governance proposal results, and created delegate lists that feature the top voters from every project on every individual hub, ranked by voting weight or by snapshot strategy voting power. For projects that allow delegation, the team also included a delegation setup modal.

BrightID is a social identity network. It allows people to prove to applications that they're only using one account. BrightID concluded 2020 with 8,600 verified users enjoying 11 integrated applications. It is now running on 4 separate nodes to get closer to its decentralized nature. In December, the team held an amazing hackathon event as part of Gitcoin’s 8th round hackathon series and had 5 projects built on BrightID technology. Watch the hackathon's demo finale.

The Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) is a decentralized, incentivized notification ecosystem for the Ethereum network. On December 8, EPNS announced their $750k raise from leaders like Balaji Srinivasan, Scott Moore, Anthony Sassano, Mariano Conti, Kenneth Ng, and many more. In December, the EPNS team also launched their iOS app (yes, go download it!). Up next for the EPNS team is the platform mainnet launch alongside their governance token $PUSH. Check out the EPNS 2020 Year in Review and an interview with project co-founder Harsh Rajat and DeFi Dad.

dHEDGE is an asset management protocol connecting the world’s best investment managers with investors on the Ethereum blockchain. In December, dHEDGE launched Performance Mining. You get rewarded DHT when you invest in pools on the dHEDGE platform that have good performance. The APY for Performance Mining is currently around 30%. Check out dHEDGE’s end of year recap on Twitter. 

Idle allows users to automatically manage their digital asset allocation among different DeFi protocols. The Idle team had a busy December. An experimental Idle-based $USDC strategy launched in Yearn V2 Citadel. Coverage protection is now available via Cover Protocol. The Smart Treasury implementation is undergoing review. The Community roadmap discussion and future directions are now under discussion. And IdleTokenHelper, a tool to simplify Idle protocol integration for third-party services, is now available.

Maple is a dapp built to facilitate the issuance, investment, repayment and governance of corporate debt. In December, Maple welcomed two more developers to the team. Their seed raise was also covered by Coindesk. From a business development perspective, Maple entered into a partnership with our first Pool Delegate, Orthogonal Trading, to co-manage the first Liquidity Pool on launch and have built up interest from institutional borrowers of over $8m for this launch pool of a targeted $10-15m.

Pods is a decentralized non-custodial options protocol where users can participate as sellers or buyers of either puts or calls. In December, the Pods team kept working on code. Since November, the team has been very focused on the audit and is looking forward to completing it this month.

Potion is a decentralized protocol for the creation of put option contracts based on Black-Scholes pricing. In December, Potion Labs completed its initial phase of research with exciting results to be shared with the community in early January 2021. Keep an eye out! And in the meantime, learn more about Potion.

Transak is a simple and compliant way for customers to buy and sell crypto assets with a bank transfer. In December, Transak welcomed Siraj as our Head of Customer Support and Operations, Aman as our Assistant Manager of Customer Support, and Alessandro as our Head of Growth. Monthly volume in December was $1.64 million (+23% MoM), with a cumulative volume of $7.58 million and 1,900 monthly active traders. 

SuperRare is a blockchain-based network and marketplace for artists, creators, and collectors. December was an awesome month for SuperRare. Deadmau5 dropped a collaboration with artist Sutu. The team deployed permissionless auctions to mainnet. And a first of its kind Motion Design X CryptoArt Exhibition launched.

ZapperFi is a DeFi dashboard for monitoring your portfolio, including assets, debts, liquidity pools, staking, claimable rewards, and yield farming activities. In December, ZapperFi reached $1B USD in transaction volume!

FlamingoDAO

On October 5, 2020 we announced the FlamingoDAO, the first DAO incubated and formulated ty bhe LAO community. Flamingo  Flamingo will support the expanding NFT metaverse, helping support and seed investment in companies, platforms, and dapps exploring the innovative possibilities of NFTs. 

The FlamingoDAO was conceived during conversations with members of The LAO who are digging deep into the NFT ecosystem. Like The LAO, Flamingo will act as a “hive mind” to support the best individuals, projects, and groups building the emerging metaverse.

The FlamingoDAO went public on October 8, and will stay open until all available units in the DAO are sold. As of now, about 26% is left. 

Read Flamingo’s announcement blog, and learn more on the website.

Quick Hits 🎯

Some updates from OpenLaw and the LAO!

• FlamingoDAO has 26% left. Near Foundation joins Flamingo.

What We’re Reading 📚

• The nuances of on-chain art in the NFT landscape (tweet thread).

• Privacy is Rebalancing the Scales of the Internet from Aleo.

• Blockchain, gaming, and Xbox from EY.

Jobs 👩‍💻

• ZapperFi is looking for a Full-stack engineer and a Product Designer. Learn more.

• Potion is hiring a HR Consultant / Remote Team Specialist / Operations, Project Manager / SCRUM Master, Smart Contract Senior Architects / Engineers / CTOs, and junior or senior Frontend / Integration / theGraph engineers. Learn more.

• Pods Finance is hiring a Software Developer, Researcher, and Financial Engineer.

• Transak is hiring a Finance Director.

• BoardRoom is hiring a Product Designer, but anyone should feel free to apply to their general app.

• BrightID is actively looking for developers with various skills. You could start working on open bounties and get handsomely paid. See here for the currently open bounties and fill out this form to introduce yourself. Join our Discord to connect with other developers.

Thanks for checking in to the December LAO World roundup!

See you soon,

The LAO Team