The Phonon Brief #6: Jan 28-Feb 3

A recap of everything going on in Phonon this week.

Feb 03, 2022

Welcome to the 6th edition of The Phonon Brief. Our aim with this newsletter is to keep the Phonon and the wider crypto community informed of the latest news, including product launches, governance changes, and ecosystem updates. If you’re interested in learning more about Phonon, follow our official Twitter and Medium accounts.

Summary

FAQ Progress
Phonon Forum Activity
Contributor Compensation
PDBG Recap
Chain Analysis

The Phonon FAQ

Thanks to the hard work of a few key members of the Phonon DAO community, a FAQ that details many topics surround the Phonon Network is almost complete. A single source of truth surrounding the innerworkings of the network is vital in spreading accurate information to the broader crypto community. The FAQ is being designed as a starting point to answer many questions ranging from, ‘What is the Phonon Network?’ to ‘How would cross-chain transaction work with Phonon?’.

Go check out the FAQ here and be on the lookout for updates to the Phonon website once the draft is complete.

The Phonon Forum

If you have not checked out the forums yet there are some great discussions going on (https://gov.phonon.network). This week some posts that received traction are:

Suggestions for Initial Phonon DAO Marketing Strategies - In this post the author gives an early vision of how Phonon marketing could and should be handled. The ethos of this post is building a strong and knowledgeable community early will pay dividends down the road. Read the full post on the forum and provide some feedback from your experience working with DAO’s.

PhiP-03: FOrmation of a Framework for Phonon Bug Bounty Program - A proposal for an initial bug bounty program has been created.

RFC: Phonon Dao’s Purpose and Mandate - This post was from a few weeks ago but is being revisited as we are continuing to define what makes Phonon so special.

RFC: Initial Compensation for DAO Contributors Paying contributors will be a topic that expands as the DAO expands, some great ideas where initiated here and have been put into a formal proposal here.

Contributor Compensation

Last week a formal proposal containing plans for compensating past contributors and incentivizing future contributions was post on the forums and a subsequent snapshot vote was initiated. A brief breakdown of the highlights of the compensation are as follows:

Full Post here.

*to be paid in PHONON

Recurring Compensation

Community management - $4,000 monthly
Documentation and Technical Writing - $2,000 monthly
Media - $4,000 monthly
Design, Art, and Other DAO Assets - $2,000 monthly
Phonon DAO Bootstrapping Group - $2,000 per member/month from January through April (or the completion of the group)

These payouts will be determined via voting through a Coordinape Circle. To find out more about Coordinape and how that works head to their website.

Past Contributions

Smart Contract Development and Code Review
- Mariano Conti - 8,000,000 PHONON vesting over 2 years
- Tim Coulter - 4,000,000 PHONON vesting over 2 years
Community Management
- 700,000 PHONON to four active community members who helped structure the initial Discord and operations.
DAO stewards - 5,000,000 PHONON each vesting over 2 years.
- Alpaca Fan, Mariano Conti, Tim Coulter, DeFi Dad, Dan Mueller, Jonny Rhea, Evan Van Ness, Anthony Sassano, and Cyrus Younessi.

Media- 300,000 to two content publications

The voting was unanimously passed via snapshot on Feb 2nd and payouts will be made in the coming weeks. These compensation numbers are subject to change as the DAO sees fit. If you have anything you want to bring to the table make yourself known in the discord and start producing content!

PDBG Meeting Recap

Last week the PDBG defined four working groups that will hopefully take over the duties of the PDBG at the end of the term. During this meeting each group gave updates on the progress of what had been worked on since last week.

The Operations group went over the compensation vote as explained above and determined the the PDBG would have $50,000 to use for operating costs that each working group might incur any additional amount would need to be passed via a governance proposal and snapshot vote.

Distribution of these funds was also addressed stating that we would use Coordinape to decide who is awarded the monthly incentives and Utopia Labs to execute these payments to the recipients from DAO treasury.

The Economics working group noted that only 33% of community owned GRID has been converted. This is much lower than the DAO would like and some ideas for why people are not converting are, lack of awareness, dead accounts, and gas fees. After scanning through some of the top 100 GRID holders, many are ICO buyers how have never moved any of the funds. They may be unaware of the conversion after not following the project or some could have left crypto/lost their address.

The Communications group is finalizing the FAQ and requesting members of the Core dev team review it for accuracy. The mission statement is also being worked on feedback is requested on the Notion page.

The Product group is working to solidify the Roadmap and initial engineering task which can be viewed here. They have also decided to focus on native phonon mining which included launching an incentivized ‘testnet’. Processes that need to be handle on this end include documentation, distributing phonon cards, communicating launch of the testnet to attract 200-500 participants. We will be aiming to launch the testnet and incentives by the end of February.

Action items that will be taking place this week include creating a global spreadsheet to track all DAO expenses. This will ensure that all assets can be properly and publicly audited by the community. We will also be building a framework for budget request that are deemed de minimis and therefor do not need a governance proposal to authorize them.

The DAO is looking for an expert in tokenomics to help us structure the native phonon mining. If you are interested or know someone who we should contact, please reach out on discord.