Anthias Labs is seeking community input on which project would be most beneficial for us to work on next for dYdX.
About Us
Anthias Labs is a boutique blockchain r&d firm focused on public goods tooling and actionable research. Since launching, we have received grants from Euler, Compound, Aave, and more. We also developed a new metric for liquidation probability in lending markets called the Anthias Liquip Score. Feel free to check that out here: https://www.anthias.xyz/liquip.pdf. Our work has come from community member recommendations, which is something we pride ourselves on and strive for.
To see more about us and our work, see out site here: Anthias
Motivation
We are currently looking for community feedback on which of the following ideas the dYdX community thinks would be most valuable to dYdX at this time. We are also open to feedback on these ideas and recommendations of other ideas as well. This post is in relation to this forum post here by @RoboMcGobo.
Specific Ideas
Here are some ideas we have in mind for research and tools that the Anthias team would like to work on for dYdX:
Idea #1: Research into how dYdX’s protocol decentralization in v4 can be accompanied by a true decentralization in governance. This would include research into governance incentive design and incentivizing users to actively and honestly govern the protocol as a collective, while not draining the treasury of dYdX, as simply paying voters directly would be the most obvious solution but would be likely detrimental to the health of the business. This research would finally include some active steps that the DAO can take based on the research to achieve true decentralization of governance with active participation (metrics signifying active participation to be determined during the research).
Goal: Gain a better understanding of how governance in v4 can function most properly along with new mechanisms that might incentivize further governance participation without costing the DAO
Idea #2: Integration of dYdX into Anthias with emphasis on making risk tooling that all dYdX users can benefit from. This integration would include sourcing and displaying position health of all positions on dYdX as well as informing users of accounts that are close to falling below the maintenance margin requirement. (This integration could potentially be done in tandem with Idea #3 below).
Goal: Give dYdX users the ability to quickly gain insights about major positions on dYdX to avoid liquidation cascades and display dYdX’s commitment to easy-to-use risk tooling and risk management for its users.
Idea #3: Research into a new proper metric for assessing the probability of liquidation for a perpetual position as well as calculating days until liquidation for perpetual futures on dYdX v4.
Goal: Develop a metric that can more accurately predict how close a dYdX trader is to liquidation and how long this trader has to make an adjustment to the position. This would hopefully allow for more profitable traders and happier users on dYdX.
Conclusion
Please let us know your thoughts on which of these ideas would be most directly beneficial now to dYdX! And if you have any recommended changes to the ideas above or problems you would like us to work on instead of one of the listed ideas, please comment them here or reach out to our co-founder Charlie directly at @OxBroze on Telegram.
I think we should focus more on implementation than only-research projects atm, so in 3 ideas just idea#2 is tangible consideration, but I think its similar to Chaos Lab project Chaos Labs.
Personally I dont see above Chaos Lab’s dashboard is helpful, maybe due to I’m not professional trader?
That would say, initiative is good, but we should focus on building more useful tools, some ideas I think I would like to support now:
Increase $DYDX token usage such as onboarding it as collateral on big platforms like Aave, Compound or Spark.
Increase $DYDX liquidity on Cosmos, specially on Osmosis to make the price and liquidity on par to Binance.
stDYDX? I believe Stride is working on it, but its great if more parties participate to.
another frontend that compete to current one, you can take a cut to users that use your frontend (similar to Uniswap mobile user)
Thats it for now, thank you.
Hey @nguyenhd2107 thank you this feedback, and these ideas are awesome. Very tangible and with direct benefit to the dYdX community. Thanks again for reading through and taking the time to share these.
I agree with @nguyenhd2107 that any steps taken for dYdX should at least result in direct integrateable steps. In the end taking small steps towards the goal is the path forwards. Of course it is needed to understand the bigger picture and put the dot on the horizon, but the outcome of each step should at least be a starting point on the journey towards that goal.
Looking at how little the bonded amount is (Mintscan), I guess there is also an immediate need to teach people what dYdX v4 is about in general. Including chain security, staking and the rewards coming from staking, etc.
So work towards finding and implementing the most effective marketing tool to get people familiar with that is also a useful step imo.
Thanks for reading through and sharing these thoughts @LeonoorsCryptoman. We will keep that v4 marketing tool in mind. Could be very interesting and hopefully show direct benefits. If you have any further thoughts on how this tool would function, please feel free to share.
Thank you Charlie for this wonderful proposal.
StableLab is definitely interested in pitching in here.
We have experience in 20+ DAOs and have seen a thing or two that we believe is worthy of consideration.
dYdX has a unique opportunity to evolve governance so that it is tailored to its specific requirements, which I can imagine are quite different from that of a lending protocol, e. g.
Hey @rspa - awesome to hear that you guys would be interested in this. StableLab would be the ideal partner for that research. I will send you a message, so we can chat. - Charlie
We would be interested in Idea #1 while taking the past researches like the one by Flipside into account. Ideally, as others said, not just research but also actionable solutions and implementations should come with it.
Thank you for reading through the proposal @tane. We are very keen to pursue that idea, and thanks for attaching that other proposal as well–we will keep that in mind. If you have other ideas come to mind on that topic of v4 governance, please do not hesitate to share.
Not so sure; I have yet to see a very effective marketing tool which onboards the next wave of users.
In the end the group of current crypto-enthusiasts is still relatively small, whereas the group whom we can and should onboard is enormous. So it should be aimed to teach people about the advantages dYdX has and what it can do for people; easy methods to trade, to send funds, to earn interest on your money, etc.
@LeonoorsCryptoman Agree. We know that dYdX has the dYdX Academy as a beginner resource, but that seems to be more blog-focused. Maybe there is need for an academy-esque tool/platform that 1) looks to onboard not just people already in crypto but people outside of crypto by elucidating the benefits of dYdX and 2) walks through a step-by-step via small tasks (similar to Layer3) in order to help these new users gain familiarity and recognize the benefits of these products and protocols. (Or maybe this tool already exists, and another community member can point us to it)
Your ideas are great on this, so if you have more thoughts on ideal interface here / how you think this should function ideally, please do not hesitate to share those thoughts here.
I am wondering, what kind of easy to use learning platforms can be found outside the crypto-industry?
I know for example language-learning platforms like https://www.duolingo.com/ which is a major success. Do we have other similar examples which we can learn from to get a better learning experience for our users and onboard them?
