May 8th — May 15th
Disclaimer: I am not a member of the BUNNY team or anything like that. Just an active user working on my reporting skills here.
Things move quickly in the Defi space and Bunny is no exception. A lot of moving pieces and plans to report on, so I’ll get straight to it!
General Bunny News
Discord Happenings
The Epic Emissions Change of May the 11th (reduction from 5:1 to 3:1)
As expected, a fair amount of displeasure and surprise was expressed by newcomers who were not aware of the emissions change or how it works — check the Proposals section below for possible improvements on this.
There was some back-n-forth drama and a few “heated” conversations, but after a few days the community moved on — though there were still a few “where’s my bunny profits?” inquisitors 3–4 days later.
The conversation spawned by the emission change brought a question to my mind: what’s the ratio of holders vs degens in our BUNNY community? Or, actually, can both these strategies coexist in a single human mind? A degenholder? A holdgen? (official branding TBD)…
Essentially, how many people are happy to just hold and stake their BUNNY at a $200–300 range vs how many are in it for that tasty $1000 BUNNY, so they can presumably then dump it at 2–3x profit?
Of course this question is unanswerable at the moment, but certainly for now the more vocal side is the degens: “Wen Binance?” and “Why no Binance?” seem to be daily queries.
And the response is inevitably “How do you know BUNNY is ready for the big stage?” — with a further hint with this response: looking at the market cap and the current tokenomics, it’s probably not.
Another question the Epic Great Legendary Emissions Change of May 11th brought up was one of “customer service”. When people are investing money into something, they feel they are a customer — and they are right (or perhaps conditioned?) to feel this way.
And as a customer they are due certain amounts of service. The developers that hold their funds should be communicating with them and supporting them when they are in need.
However, the Defi space doesn’t — and in my opinion, shouldn’t — operate in this fashion, at least in its current version. In a sense, yes, in Defi the customer is still king; however, this simply means that, as Kings, they have the power to put their funds where they want, while also taking on the responsibility of managing and controlling their own funds.
The old adage of DYOR (do your own research) definitely applies here, but there should also be a new adage of TYIT (track your investments thoroughly) to remind us all that we need to continue following anything and everything related to our funds, at least on a daily basis, in order to claim our rights as Kings. (another branding TBD on the TYIT acronym)…
Venus Vault Issues
The Venus Single-Asset-Vaults (SAVs) were a hot topic this week as well. In the beginning there were a few vaults not producing any profit and hence a rush of valid questions like “Umm, so should I be making 0 bitcoin here?” and “Wait, how does this all work again?”
Turns out there was some issue with the vaults not producing anything and eventually the devs found a fix and reportedly helped those with loss profits, etc. Not anything too exciting in the end, but mainly it’s a good sign that the devs/mods are willing to help our kingly bunny-hoppers when something has gone wrong and we have the proof to back it up.
The Binance Smart Chain 100 Million-Billion CAR Pile-Up
(CAR = Crypto-Asset-Rabbits, again, official branding TBD)
Another spicy topic this week was the validator hardware issue on the Binance blockchain…or at least that’s what the rumors were saying... Traffic on the Binance Highway 101 continues to increase and apparently there was an accident in the all-important CARpool lane. More stalled CARs means more GAS along with significant delays!
Relief came later in the week with GAS coming down and speed picking up, but it did highlight the need to look more carefully at the Binance Highway 101 and start planning for the next inevitable “accident”, in which case my advice would be to just sit tight and hold off on making unnecessary transactions.
Sidenote: Experience ETH users were quick to point out that “expensive” is all a matter of perspective (“$100 GAS over here, gents!”), but then BNB users were quick to respond (“$15 GAS is half my investment tho!”). Just more evidence that BNB is the “working man’s blockchain” while ETH still belongs to the “crypto elite”, not ‘elitist’ of course.
Contract Security Questions
As a young project in a rapidly-expanding, volatile, and dog-eat-dog stage, BUNNY has had plenty of questions into how the devs can guarantee security for its users. The short answer is “they can’t” and I think that’s the best one for all defi protocols. If you don’t believe this, just check out the rekt.news/leaderboard for all of the well-intending, audited, and established protocols that are being hacked/exploited on a weekly basis.
HOWEVER, bit-by-bit, question-by-question, answer-by-answer, we are getting a better sense of what the BUNNY devs are doing to help keep funds SAFU-ish. Check out some of the links to the dev talk on a recent Vietnam Binance Blockathon for a better sense of the project:
(and big thanks to autolyzer for putting this together)
Open these with a right click to open them in a new tab :-).
Intro — https://youtu.be/smbv6y6Voys?t=4860
Security — https://youtu.be/smbv6y6Voys?t=6006
Process for new ideas/strategies — https://youtu.be/smbv6y6Voys?t=6405
Project philosophy — https://youtu.be/smbv6y6Voys?t=6763
Cross-chain strategy — https://youtu.be/smbv6y6Voys?t=7785
Next steps — https://youtu.be/smbv6y6Voys?t=9059
Also, somewhat relevant to security, one discord user this week brought up some important questions about the BUNNY minting process, the various wallets, and the voting process.
A few days later, a BUNNY Mod came back with some insights from the devs:
“100% the devs do not participate in governance votes. Bunny is issued to the treasury as bunny is minted, at 1.5 Bunny for every 10 minted. From the treasury, the team pays out devs, uses the funds for recovery (like with slippage in migration, or the recent SAV issues), migrations/integrations, audits, operations, etc.”
I’m not an expert in wallet research, but this seems fairly verifiable when we have a list of the pertinent addresses (forthcoming!). In the end, investors need to inform themselves as much as possible and then make decisions based on that information — blind trust in any dev isn’t necessary, or asked for, really, but asking the right questions is.
A few times this week I’ve seen users asking for the community or mods to “convince me or sell me on your platform — why should I put my money here?” and the response is always going to be “no, no, my man, that’s your responsibility”.
No salesmen or “accounting to the shareholders” in this space.
But that’s what makes it a special financial environment — it’s trustless. Honestly, even if someone gave you a response with an excellent sales pitch all about their “guarantee of safety”, would you believe them?
I mean, should you believe them?
No. It’s trustless! Woo-hoo!
Price Concerns
The market moved in many ways this week — up, down, all around — as crypto markets are bound to do for the foreseeable future. Interestingly enough BUNNY stayed pretty consistent — around the $285 range — despite all the turbulence and whirlwinds around it.
People came into the discord worried about the price of CAKE or the price of BUNNY or the price of everything and anything. Worrying is OK and natural, really, but I’ll stick with my new maxim for crypto prices: “When in doubt, zoom out.”
If people are worried about BUNNY at $150, remember that it used to be $3. If people are worried about CAKE at $25, remember that it was stuck at $10 for…like…forever.
In the end, as long as the value of BUNNY stays over 1/3 of the BNB price, BUNNY stakers are profiting. That’s all anyone needs to know. And honestly, for me, even if it dips below 1/3, I would wait it out. Bunnies are savage creatures — just google “Caerbannog” and you’ll see.
Scambots and Scamguys
Currently, our discord does get the occasional round of scambots and fake mods coming in, and I’ve been told a fix is on the way (captcha verification bot?). In the meantime, if you get a chance, head on over to the #scamalert thread and try making a haiku with their computer-generated names. One of our resident watchmen (props to autolyzer again) recently came up with a good one:
Filthy physical
Glittering low director
Another weekend
Noteworthy Proposals of the Week
Making changes to the site’s landing page for warning the people of important votes, like the emission’s reduction. It should be noted here, however, that users complained about exactly that kind of newsfeed on the site previously which is why they took it down. People might complain either way…
Improving the how-to guide or making it more prominent and easy to access. I think they’ve made significant strides with this in just the last week and they are doing a better job of providing quick links / blurbs to people with common questions.
Increasing the marketing campaigns. Some users want more promotion on Twitter and other marketing platforms in order to attract more users and advertise the profitability of the protocol. I guess that’s kind of what I’m doing here? Meh. This idea can wait in my opinion until BUNNY has developed some of the other important pieces like that end-of-Q2 crosschain project.
New governance token / voting system. There was a lot of discussion this week in all of the threads about how the voting process works and what the tokenomics are or should be for BUNNY. There are some intelligent ideas all over the place especially with regard to the emissions/burning system and it’s exciting to see what ideas actually get implemented in the end.
BUNNY can use its youth to experiment and then receive feedback from the market and its users. This is one of the advantages of Defi all around: there are no regulatory oversight committees or bureaucratic maneuverings that we have to go through to make changes.
Experiment, learn, and use those lessons to experiment some more! (As long as you keep my investment safe of course).
A Bunny Community Ecosystem that rewards long-term holders or active users with little gifts like BUNNY apparel or NFTs. Not quite sure how they could do this one — for again what makes us holders, degens or degenholders?
Still, I wouldn’t mind a free BUNNY sweater or something, please and thank you.
For next week, if things settle down a little, I’ll try to lay out some different vault strategies — perhaps for different levels of investors? And talk more about some of the FAQs. We’ll see…all depends on what happens this week in the exciting Kingdom of Bunniness.
