If Working Group Leads are the heart and soul of Phonon DAO governance and DAO Leaders are the muscle and sinew that hold it all together, then what does that make our Community Leaders? Easy: They are the eyes and ears. Community leaders watch the progress of the Working Groups and listen to DAO — What’s working? What’s not? Is a Working Group not living up to expectations?

The goal of this post isn’t to convince you to nominate yourself to be a Community Leader — if you’re here, I’ll presume your interested, so let’s dive into the nuts and bolts. (That said, please do check out our formal governance structure for the official position description.)

Prerequisites

You must be a member of Phonon DAO (i.e., a Phonon DAO Token holder) to be a Community Leader. There must also be an open election window (check in our Discord for more details about the next election window).

To nominate yourself as a Community Leader, you will need to answer these questions:

• Discord Handle
• Summary Experience in DeFi/DAOs
• Reason for applying
• Describe your involvement thus far in the Phonon DAO
• Qualifications — What will you bring to the DAO as a Community Leader?
• Confirmation that the applicant can commit the time required for the position; Other projects they are working on
• Anything else you would like to share?

Step-By-Step Guide to Nomination Yourself to Be a Community Leader

Phase I: Add your Nomination to the Nomination Thread on Discourse

1. Head over to the Community Leader Nomination page on our Discourse, and click on the open thread.

2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Reply.”

3. Type in your nomination, and click “Reply.”

4. That’s it — your nomination is live! I would recommend you keep an eye on the thread to respond to any comments/questions/concerns from your peers.

Phase II: Voting

The next step will be for all nominees to be moved to another Discourse thread, at which time DAO members will vote for their preferred candidate(s). At this point, there’s really not a lot that you can do, other than advocate for yourself. If there is competition, perhaps we’ll host a “debate” to allow candidates to discuss topics that are important to the DAO.

The top candidate(s) will be moved to Snapshot for official approval.

So you want to be a Phonon DAO Community Leader was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If Working Group Leads are the heart and soul of Phonon DAO governance, then DAO Leaders are the muscle and sinew that hold it all together. Our DAO Leaders spearhead the process to update our Long-term Strategic Plan, serve as first point of contact for outside entities wishing to engage the DAO, and coordinate supplemental budget requests, among other things. They wear a lot of different — but useful — hats.

The goal of this post isn’t to convince you to nominate yourself to be a DAO Leader — if you’re here, I’ll presume your interested, so let’s dive into the nuts and bolts. (That said, please do check out our formal governance structure for the official position description.)

Prerequisites

You must be a member of Phonon DAO (i.e., a Phonon DAO Token holder) to be a DAO Leader. There must also be an open election window (check in our Discord for more details about the next election window).

To nominate yourself as a DAO Leader, you will need to answer these questions:

• Discord Handle
• Summary Experience in DeFi/DAOs
• Reason for applying
• Involvement thus far in the Phonon DAO
• Qualifications — What will you bring to the DAO as a DAO Leader?
• Minimum accepted compensation
• Confirmation that the applicant can commit the time required for the position; Other projects they are working on; time they can commit to the position weekly
• Other experience, perspectives and insights that would enable the individual to satisfactorily serve as DAO Leader

Step-By-Step Guide to Nomination Yourself to Be a DAO Leader

Phase I: Add your Nomination to the Nomination Thread on Discourse

1. Head over to the DAO Leader Nomination page on our Discourse, and click on the open thread.

2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Reply.”

3. Type in your nomination, and click “Reply.”

4. That’s it — your nomination is live! I would recommend you keep an eye on the thread to respond to any comments/questions/concerns from your peers.

Phase II: Voting

The next step will be for all nominees to be moved to another Discourse thread, at which time DAO members will vote for their preferred candidate(s). At this point, there’s really not a lot that you can do, other than advocate for yourself. If there is competition, perhaps we’ll host a “debate” to allow candidates to discuss topics that are important to the DAO.

The top candidate(s) will be moved to Snapshot for official approval.

So you want to be a DAO Leader for Phonon DAO was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Working Group Leads are the heart and soul of the Phonon DAO governance structure, as well as our main mechanism to accomplish goals. This blog post serves as a step-by-step guide on how to get elected as a Working Group Lead to manage your own working group, as described in our governance structure.

Prerequisites

You must be a member of Phonon DAO (i.e., a Phonon DAO Token holder) to be a Working Group Lead. There must also be an open election window (check in our Discord for more details about the next election window). This guide assumes you already have an idea for a Working Group and have thought through your needs and goals.

To nominate yourself as a Working Group Lead, you don’t need to write a tome, but you must answer these questions:

• Discord Handle
• Involvement thus far in the Phonon DAO
• Proposed Working Group and description
• Working Group goals, be specific
• How will you measure success?
• Budget required to meet these goals during the term, including compensation
• How will you administer funds? (we recommend a multisig for budgets greater than $10,000)
• Why is this Working Group needed now?
• How does this Working Group fit into the Phonon DAO Long-Term Strategic Plan? If it doesn’t, how should the Strategic Plan be updated?

If you want to see an example nomination post, see here.

Expectations

The DAO expects you to meet your goals with the resources you specify during the nomination process. We also expect you to be a good team player and communicator, both with your peers on the DAO Council, as well as with your constituents in the DAO at-large. You will be expected to attend at least one monthly DAO-wide meeting.

Step-By-Step Guide to Becoming a Working Group Lead

Phase I: Create Your Nomination Post on Discourse

1. Head over to gov.phonon.com (create an account if you haven’t already) and click on the + to create a post.

2. Give your proposal a descriptive title (e.g., “Proposal: Operation Black Dahlia Working Group”), make sure you select the “Working Group Leads Nominations” category, and add your proposal to the body.

3. At the end of your proposal, add a single choice poll “Do you approve of this proposal?” with options Approve and Disapprove.

4. Click the Create Topic button to submit your proposal.

Phase II: Engage with the DAO and respond to feedback

Now that your nomination is live, expect the DAO to ask questions and provide feedback. Some may ask you to tweak your proposal before they are willing to vote for your working group — this is normal and to be expected. Be engaging in responding to questions and feedback. Should you decide to tweak your proposal, add a section at the very end explaining your change, as well as the date.

After your proposal has been on Discourse for five days, close the vote. If at least 5 people voted in your poll and you have a simple majority’s approval, you can move to Phase III. If you didn’t get 5 people to vote, or the majority voted against your proposal, you may start again at Phase I, provided there’s still enough time in the election window to complete all the phases.

Phase III: Create a Snapshot vote

1. Head over to the Phonon DAO Snapshot and click New Proposal.

2. Give your snapshot a descriptive title (e.g., Working Group Approval: Operation Black Dahlia), and paste the link to your Discourse post into the Discussion field. For the Description, add something simple, such as:

This snapshot is for approval of the Operation Black Dahlia Working Group.

Click Continue.

3. Under Voting system, choose the Basic voting option.

4. For Voting period, choose a period that starts Now and ends at least 5 calendar days (120 hours) in the future. Click Publish.

Your Snapshot is now live! If you achieve a simple majority approval and at least 10% of Phonon DAO Tokens (from circulating supply) have voted, then your Working Group is approved, and you are a Working Group Lead — congratulations!

If your Snapshot vote fails, you may start again at Phase I, provided there’s still enough time in the election window to complete all the phases.

Tips & Tricks

If you are thinking of a Working Group that would require a team, start trying to build now! Feel free to discuss your ideas in Discord for preliminary feedback before drafting something for Discourse.

I believe we will only be able to succeed when we help each other. With that in mind (and as long as this sentence still exists in this post), I would be happy to read over your proposals to provide feedback. Hit me up here, Twitter, or Discord. Happy governing!

So you want to be a Phonon DAO Working Group Lead was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the 9th 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

• Community AMA
• Native vs Backed Phonons
• PDBG Recap 3/2
• Chain Analysis

Phonon DAO Community Call 3/3

Thursday, the 3rd of March, will be our first community AMA. We want this to be an open forum where members of our community and the greater crypto community can present their questions, comments, and concerns to the PDBG and Core Devs. Our aim is to provide transparency around the phonon product as a whole, what the PDBG has been working on and achieved over the last 2 months, and any other questions you may have about the DAO or Phonon Network.

If you have questions you would like answered tweet us @PhononDAO or join our discord server.

If you are already familiar with certain topics of the DAO but have questions that would help others, feel free to ask them as well.

The AMA will be hosted in our discord main stage at 1pm EST on 3/3. There will also be a chat channel to ask questions if you would not like to talk.

What are Native and Backed Phonons?

This week we released a breakdown of what native and backed phonons are and how they are used in the Phonon Ecosystem. The above chart gives you a glance of their similarities and differences.

This post explains:

• What native phonons are,
• How nPhonons derive value,
• Native Phonon use cases,
• and what backed phonons are.

PBDG Meeting Recap

DAO Wide Overview

Some topics were briefly touched as more of statements rather than discussion. The first point made was that the DAO is here to service the network, not the other way around.

Conversion updates were given. Currently the circulating supply of $PHONON is about 6b. However that is not the converted amount and conversion depends on how you define it. If we look at conversion as the total that was in the redeemer contract and has now been dispersed, we are at ~54%. If we consider conversion percentage as the amount of GRID community holders have redeemed we are at ~45%.

Right now there is about $4.4m in liquidity for the PHONON token which is far greater than the GRID token. The lack of community conversion is something that will need to be addressed in the coming months. The DAO plans to cut off conversion at some point in 2023 so if you know people who have not converted yet, give them a heads up.

We are also looking to expand the DAO multisig, right now it is 3/5 and would like to expand to 5/9. The structure for voting on new signers was notbeen decided due to concerns about a potential attack vector. This would be allowing anyone to become a signer and a group being able to apply for multiple positions. Within the next week there should be a formal PHiP to lock in the handling of new signers.

Governance Process

A proposal for how the governance process should work was discussed in the meeting, I recommend reading the proposal but a brief overview is that there will be four ‘agents’ in each of the four working groups (Economics, Product, Operations and Governance, and Communications) and those agents will serve for 6 months. They will start by creating a budget request for the and will be the ones leading the charge on fulfilling the goals of each group.

Flat vs Hierarchical designs were discussed, the members that spoke up were ore in favor of having a hierarchical approach in the beginning to help move the large undertaking forward in a timely manner. Compensation was mentioned and two approaches were suggested. One approach was for the agents to include salary in their budget request. Another was having the DAO create KPIs that they would need to meet to receive certain payouts.

A follow up discussion about fulltime employees and paying them began. One side was worried about paying out too much PHONON at relatively low prices. The other side brought up network effect and being too judicial with payouts can hurt us by failing to capture a broader audience in a timely manner.

Website Update

Communication for developing the scope of the engagement will happen over the next few days. In the initial meeting the team that will be building out the website have agreed to be paid in both stablecoins and PHONON. The team had ideas of creating a visual language that makes the website unique to Phonon. Three phases of the website are developing the baseline, creating the visual language, and developing the documentation section of the website. The goal is to have the new baseline website completed by the launch of the testnet.

Testnet Launch

Karl announced that the technological pieces for the launch of the testnet are ready. This means that there is a basic wallet that can interact with ethereum to create, transfer, and destroy phonons. There still needs to be a structure to log how people are using the testnet and report issues before it launches.

The launch is estimated for 3–4 weeks. This will give the DAO time to structure the onboarding of users. Action steps are recruiting people to join the testnet. We need 200 people to be involved. Creating a signup sheet should be a priority.

Marketing

Lack of marketing was brought up as a concern, specifically engagement on twitter. It was suggested that hiring a fulltime person to run the socials and build engagement would pay dividends down the road. Since this is the first concrete announcement of when the testnet will be so it makes sense to start a marketing push now.

We need effort around getting podcast appearances, creating discussion on twitter, and marketing to crypto adjacent groups that would find this interesting.

Marketing begets mindshare, mindshare begets resources, which allows you to build a network.

Until a fulltime social person is brought on its important for all of the DAO members to be active in building social engagement.

Chain Analysis

Per. Phonon Guide Google Sheet

For information on the Ondo vault head to the google sheet.

Phonon Hoodies

You can purchase Phonon clothing at https://phononapparel.com

Resources

Discord

Website

Forum

Blog

Github

Phonon Spreadsheet

Phonon Store

Instagram

Reddit

Twitter

Help us get the word out about the Phonon Network by sharing the Brief on Twitter!

To support me, follow my twitter @0xDanM and @PhononUpdates.

The Phonon Brief #9: Feb 25-Mar 2 was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the 8th 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

• ETHDenver
• PDBG 2/16 Recap
• PDBG 2/23 Recap
• PheverDreams
• Chain Analysis

ETHDenver

The Phonon Brief and the many members of the Phonon DAO are back from ETHDenver. Last week you may have noticed there was no Brief last week so we will be doubling up on recaps!

Despite the DAO not having its own booth at ETHDenver, it did not stop discussion of the project. The GridPLus booth helped distribute Phonon hoodies around the event. If you were not able to make it to ETHDenver and would like a Phonon hoodie, you can purchase them here or by messaging me in the discord.

Dr. Karl Kreder was on a panel discussing scalability and the Phonon protocol. Below is a short clip from a longer discussion that you can find here.

PDBG 2/16 Meeting Recap

Community Call

The Bootstrapping group will be hosting the first community call. See 2/23 PDBG recap below for more information.

Communications/Marketing

The communication team had a meeting earlier this week that went over updates to our website and core messaging. There have been some strides on creating an updated vision and messaging which will be added to the website in the coming weeks. Some statements about the use of secure hardware as a key messaging point were brought up as a concern due to the fact that it could be off-putting that additional hardware is needed. The suggestion was to use more attention grabbing statements, such as, feeless, perfectly private, supports all assets, limitless TPS, and instantaneous.

Product

Native Phonons have been a huge discussion in the discord this week. There are two arguments, one side saying nPhonons are distracting from the core work of the network and that nPhonons will take value away from the PHONON DAO token. The other side believes that nPhonons solves a lot of issues on the network such as change making, it is strictly off-chain and requires no connections to the outside world. An additional benefit that was brought up is the bootstrapping aspect that will entices users to get on the network and speculate the future nPhonons price.

The argument that native phonons are replacing other goals such as private DEXs and p2p payments was rebutted by Karl saying that this was already built into the initial design and is not taking additional resources. The current cards could ship with this mining capabilities but separating them opens up opportunies for the DAO.

To expand further on how the nPhonons will work inside the network. As past post have mentioned there will be different bit nPhonons that will be able to be mined. Early on it may be most apporapriate to only mine 8 bit phonons but as the use of these tokens increases price of the 8 bit which take the longest to mine could be less appropriate then ining 7 bit phonons and that cycle could continue down as it becomes more economical to mine lower bit phonons.

While nPhonons are a speculative asset initially, value is expected to come from the use cases they play in the protocol. The network will require change makers for swapping of different value tokens. If I wanted to swap one btc backed phonon for the equivalent value in eth backed phonons I may route through a change maker who takes my btc trades it for nPhonons then takes the nPhonons and purchases eth backed phonons to send back to me. This could also be done with any backed phonon but native phonons give you the ability to have smaller units of account since they are mined directly on the network and do not require gas from the L1 to transfer to the network.

A second way that nPhonons will bring value to the network is that they are the ultimate private form of currency. While all backed and native phonons are transacted privately on the network, backed phonons have their prior history from the L! attached to them.

PHONON Tokenomics

One of the main value propositions the DAO is looking to capitalize on is through the sale of mining cards for native phonons. The DAO will control the number of mining cards that are produced each year which will then be sold via a reverse dutch auction for PHONON DAO tokens. If the DAO only produces 5000 cards a year that will limit the number of nPhonons that can be mined. If the nPhonon price is increasing this would make it more economical to buy the mining cards which would first require the purchase of the PHONON DAO token then a subsequent burn or sale to the DAO treasury for the mining cards. The second value proposition is that the DAO token governs this monetary policy of the mining cards which creates a positive feedback loop.

PhononGod gives a breakdown of what the reverse dutch auction would look like in one of his PheverDreams that you can find here.

PDBG 2/23 Meeting Recap

Community Call

The Phonon DAO is hosting its first community call. This will allow the entire community to sit in an hear a high level overview of what the four working groups have been working on and what they have achieved over the past 2 months. Then the call will be opened up to the community for an AMA.

There community call will take place on Thursday March 3 at 1PM EST.

The meeting will not be recorded so if you are interested please find time to attend.

ETHDenver Recap

Some meaningful takeaways when explaining Phonon were that the network would be able to run on smartphones and that there is not a huge hardware requirement to use. Another lightbulb moment was that this does not require users to adopt a new network and phonon works along side your existing tokens.

Phonon Website Updates

The DAO is working on hiring designers to update phonon.network. Currently we are in discussion with the designers who created the GridPlus website. They are a traditional company who is not accustom to working with a DAO, and we are struggling to have ongoing communication because they are use to working with one point of contact.

In regards to payment the DAO would prefer to pay in PHONON tokens and preferably on a vesting schedule. These current designers would likely charge a stablecoin or a real world wire transfer. Estimated costs are $5,000-$10,000 and the PDBG reaffirmed that we have a $50,000 budget to complete some of the tasks that we are looking to achieve.

Another option for the website would be via a request for proposal where anyone can show us their portfolio and bid for the job.

Next steps will be to meet with current team and explain what we are looking for and if they can help us accomplish that. We will also open this up to the community to gage interest in self funding the website.

Roadmap Funding and DAO Expenses

There was more discussion about potentially selling some of the treasury either to a VC or to the community both requiring some form of lock up. The group was all in agreement that this is not something that should be rushed. If we were to go the VC route it would be important to go with a fund that provides as with the most value add. To determine this we would want to listen to multiple parties explain how they could benefit our DAO. It would also be important to look for a partner that would come on board for a lesser amount of tokens rather than selling a large amount of the treasury at a low value.

The PDBG understands that there are some objections to going the VC route which is why we believe this discission is not something the PDBG should make and we will bring the conversation to the community before moving to a formal proposal and vote.

Another topic that was brought up is the DAO’s largest current expense, paying the PDBG. It was brought up that if the PDBG term is extended past the initial three months we should consider cutting the monthly payouts. This acts as an accelerant to moving towards a more formalized structure and away form the bootstrapping group. Multiple members agreed that this should be done and there were no objections at this time.

PHONON Tokenomics pt.2

This past week a summary of potential tokenomics was published in a google doc and then discussed in this meeting.

Before jumping into the document a question was raised about the 10b PHONON cap and if that is set in stone or if a vote could be passed to change it. The supply is currently capped at 10b but this contract is a fork of the ENS contract which allows for minimal change. There are three options the DAO could make. It can vote to add a maximum inflation rate of 2% per year, it could vote to solidify the 10b cap and get rid of the potential for inflation, or it can do nothing.

nPhonon RDA Example — The aforementioned google doc has much of the information discussed in the meeting so please read that as this post will only address the parts that were specifically discussed.

The above image is an estimate from the document of what the token burn could look like. A question was raised about how these numbers were estimated and it was stated they were just a framework for thinking about it. For example the price of nPhonon cards could be 135,000 PHONON per but selling 7500 cards may be unlikely since our community is relatively small right now.

Manufacturer Bonding — The next discussion point was in regards to manufacturers bonding of PHONON tokens to be a part of the protocol. The PDBG agreed that is is necessary for GridPlus to be required to bond tokens, otherwise it could look bad when approaching other manufacturers. No special treatment should be given to GridPlus in any phonon related activities.

Discussion continued with how much PHONON should these manufacturers be required to bond. One area of note was that bonding based on a perceived value would not have to be overcollateralized because there is no way for a manufacturer to rug all the funds held on cards they created, they would only be able to maliciously double spend before being caught by the network.

One option for bonding was to require the manufacturers to bond a certain amount of PHONON based on the perceived value of the cards they were selling. If the community was willing to buy 1000 cards at $600 per card they should have to stake a percentage of that.

Next a question about how many manufacturers would be willing to join the protocol. Justin mentioned that there is a manufacturer of NFC crypto cards that mentioned at ETHDenver they are interested in becoming a manufacturer and investing in the project.

Governance Staking — A governance staking model was briefly discussed and the group seemed to be in-favor of this idea but the discussion was not pushed forward. The funding of this staking and other potential mining opportunities could come from the PHONON left in the redeemer contract at the end of the year.

Pheverdreams

Our fearless community member Phon/ongod has been grinding away with daily well-thought-out posts about Phonon and their views of the protocol. While their content is not for the faint of heart as they hold nothing back and do not subscribe to the current norms of society. In a very internet native/4chan way they provide great insight and work hard at furthering the discussion and excitement of Phonon. If you have not checked out their post yet, do yourself a favor and head over to the Pheverdreams substack.

If you are not a fan of their style of writing, a fellow community member has been publishing the Phriendly Pheverdreams as a suitable for work alternative.

Chain Analysis

45% of all community GRID has been converted

Per. Phonon Guide Google Sheet

For information on the Ondo vault head to the google sheet.

Phonon Hoodies

You can purchase Phonon clothing at https://phononapparel.com/

Resources

Discord

Website

Forum

Blog

Github

Phonon Spreadsheet

Help us get the word out about the Phonon Network by sharing the Brief on Twitter!

To support me, follow my twitter @0xDanM and @PhononUpdates.

The Phonon Brief #8: Feb 11-Feb 24 was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are two types of phonons: native phonons and backed phonons. Although their value is derived from different sources, they are functionally interchangeable on the phonon network, where they share these benefits: No transaction fees, infinite scaling, perfect privacy, and instant settlement.

The Phonon DAO has decided to move forward with experimenting with native phonon mining on the upcoming testnet. In preparation for this, let’s discuss native phonons and how they differ from backed phonons.

A phonon is a token that is transactable on the Phonon network. It is immutable and secured by hardware (think credit cards and the eSIM inside your smartphone). All phonons — regardless of their type — are equal and interchangeable on the phonon network. That said, phonons are broken into two categories: native and backed.

Native Phonons

A native phonon is independent of any blockchain. Technically speaking, it is a hash associated with its secure hardware’s ID. It is mined on a Phonon card (and in the future, any Phonon-approved hardware). There is no fee to mine a native phonon — the costs are time and negligible electricity.

A native phonon’s value is derived from its mining difficulty (i.e., how rare it is). This rarity (and therefore the native phonon’s value) is denominated by the number of leading zeros in the binary representation of its hash. It is more time-consuming for the card to mine a native phonon with several leading zeros, so these are worth more:

• A one-bit native phonon has one leading zero and is the easiest to mine.
• A two-bit native phonon (two leading zeros) is twice as difficult to mine as a one-bit phonon and is equal in value to two one-bit native phonons.
• A three-bit native phonon is twice as valuable as a two-bit native phonon.
• …
• The largest native phonon is a 255-native phonon, though mining cards have limits to how much they can mine before they physically break.

It’s important to note that native phonons with only a few leading zeros will be worth very little, at least to start. For example, current tests show that a card can mine approximately 40 hashes/second. At that rate, a one-byte (that’s an 8-bit) native phonon can be mined every ~3 seconds. A two-byte native phonon can be mined every ~6 minutes.

The user interface will evolve as we approach production, but it will be incumbent on the user to set their upper and lower bounds on the value of native phonons they are willing to mine. The Phonon DAO will release more information on native phonon emissions in the future, but it’s worth highlighting now that cards will have a hard-coded maximum number of bits they can mine (in any combination of native phonon that the user desires, as set by the user interface). This emission curve will reduce with time.

Finally — and I would argue most importantly — a native phonon’s value is inherently verifiable by other phonon hardware, thanks to clever cryptography. No need to check in with a blockchain to verify the on-chain asset.

Backed Phonons

A backed phonon is a keypair tied to an on-chain asset. It is minted by interacting with a supported blockchain, and the fee to create a backed phonon is dependent on the blockchain. A backed phonon’s value is derived from the asset backing it. For example, a 2 ETH backed phonon is worth (surprise!) 2 ETH. You can think of a backed phonon as the keys to unlock it’s on-chain counterpart. Using the Phonon network, you can securely and instantly send these keys to anyone for free.

Both native and backed phonons share these characteristics:

• Free to transact: A phonon transaction is simply an exchange of data packets, be them native phonons, backed phonons, or a combination of the two. Whether you’re using your phone’s NFC to pull phonon off your eSIM or using a card reader at the coffee shop, the transaction is free.
• Infinitely scalable and instantly settled: Transactions are peer-to-peer and independent of any blockchain. No need to wait to be included in the “next block.” Transactions are instant, regardless of the number of phonon transactions happening at the same time.

Native Phonon Use Cases

A common question we receive is, “What is the point of native phonons?” Imagine a scenario where you only need $3 worth of phonon to pay for a bagel. It would cost you more in gas and transaction fees than the actual phonon is worth. This is where native phonons shine: They are low value and live on the Phonon network to provide liquidity. Remember, as well, that phonons are immutable. If you need to make change for a relatively inexpensive transaction, you could send your backed phonon worth $100 of ETH to a changemaker, who would in turn send you $100 worth of lower-value native and backed phonons.

Another use case of native phonons is instant value verification. Backed phonons are simply keypairs — they have no idea what they are worth. If someone is offering to pay you in backed phonon, you (or your wallet software) will want to verify the on-chain assets by querying the blockchain. It will be hard to verify that $30 SOL backed phonon if the blockchain is down. This isn’t a problem for native phonons. They are instantly verifiable, no network required.

Phonon DAO

Within the Phonon DAO, we are still working through the process to refine our global mission and values — we would love your input! Drop into our discord and let us know what’s on your mind.

Native and Backed Phonons was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the 7th 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

• Product Roadmap
• PDBG Recap
• Chain Analysis

The Phonon Product Roadmap

This week the Phonon Product Working Group had a meeting to work on the short-term roadmap. The meeting covered key Phonon Network infrastructure pieces and the requirements necessary for achieving them. The DAO will provision 300 cards for the Phonon Testnet and up to 10,000 cards for the Phonon Network Beta.

The next discussion topic was the Phonon Wallet which is what will provide the ability to create phonons and transfer them privately. The testnet will initially allow for the transfers of BTC and ETH. Support for ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 will be added to the protocol in the coming months, potential through a bounty program.

Native Phonon mining is the next development planned on the roadmap. This will require the emission schedule to be determined which is the maximum number of native phonons that can be emitted if all cards mined to their maximum capacity.

The launch of the Phonon Testnet will towards the end of March. The DAO will be building out documentation to help people join the testnet and will be selling sets of cards and card readers. There will be a standard set that comes with 2 phonon cards and a card reader, and a dev set that comes with 4 cards and two cards readers so transactions can be without having to find a counterparty. The DAO will be incentivizing this testnet by providing PHONON for completion of certain tasks that have not yet been defined.

The DAO will also be looking to hire a firm to run a high-level security audit. Testnet will run for approximately 2 months.

Additional info on the product updates can be found below in the PDBG recap.

PDBG Meeting Recap

This week’s meeting jumped into overarching DAO needs to begin the transfer out of the bootstrapping groups hands and into the working groups.

Website and Socials

On the web and content side the Socials need more members actively running them along with the email address. Currently, Justin is the sole person running them. We then went into some length discussion about revamping the phonon.network website. Justin and Karl mentioned that the current website designer is working on some added features and design for the website, along with the designer from the GridPlus.io website. An RFP could be initiated for this, but consensus was fine with waiting on the current designers to implement updates.

Real World Foundation

An overview of our real world entity was relayed to the group. The legal counsel who worked with MakerDAO and Uniswap recommended that we create a foundation in the Cayman Islands that can carry out anything in the real world decided by the DAO. A secretary and a director are needed for this which will cost around $20,000 per year and these members are still being vetted. For example, this foundation would be able to sign any necessary documents that go along with a centralized exchange listing.

VC Interest

VC funding was a topic in the product meeting and was readdressed here. Karl had mentioned that there are some VC’s interested in getting involved with Phonon, Polychain Capital was one that was mentioned. The communities general take on this was that VC’s at this stage seems to early and could end up being a regretted decision at our relatively low price. Waiting until we have a working product could give the DAO more leverage in negotiation terms further down the line. It was mentioned that we would be interested in hearing from some of these VCs in regard to what they offer and how something like raising funds would work.

Product team should decide on an amount of working capital they need and the economic group can help figure out how to best achieve that goal.

Mission Statement

Mission statement is still being worked on. Two visions being debated, one as a peer to peer cash world and the other as a Layer 0 descriptions. A mission statement meeting will be held to hammer out the final draft ideas so we can get the mission statement on the website.

DAO Testnet

The testnet is going to be our alpha where we can flesh out the basics of participating in the Phonon Network. Karl and the team are working to have this out in the next 5 weeks. When that launches there needs to be documentation on the website about the testnet and how someone can join, where they can get necessary equipment, and what the incentive structure will be for taking part. It will also be important to get technical support users to help guide less technical people through certain processes.

Native Phonon Mining

Understanding mining is critical for using the testnet. Karl gave a detailed breakdown of the native phonon mining. A native phonon is mined on each card, it functions the same way as a hashshare on bitcoin. It is mathematically provably unique based on the number of leading zeros. Relative value is determined by relative rarity, the number of leading zeros doubles the rarity which essentially doubles the value in a rational market.

There are three parameters that can be set, mining efficiency, total number of bits of difficulty that can be minded on the card, and total number of phonons that can be mined on a card. Using those parameters coupled with the number of cards in each produced and sold in each parameter set we can create a supply curve overtime. Karl beliefs this curve should not have a maximum like btc but should have a curve that has an inflation in perpetuity to allow for microtransaction and use of value.

Issues brought up are how do you make sure no one is premining phonons and how do you verify that native phonons are genuine? Premining can be solved by the manufacturers producing lists that have card IDs with the parameters that they have produced, then if anyone notices variation or cards that are not on that list you know that the manufacture has violated terms. To verify that they are valid, native phonons included signatures of the generator, so everything is traceable back to where that activity happened. This would then allow you to set up a blacklist similar to https.

Next a question was asked was how is this going to be related to the PHONON tokenomics. The most straightforward would be through a reverse dutch auction of a limited number of cards with a certain number of parameters and that auction was settled by PHONON tokens it would intrinsically link the native phonons to the PHONON token.

Are multiple manufacturers able to all produce the same native phonons or will there be separate native phonons like there is btc and ltc? There is a certificate set that will represent the various manufacturers which would allow you to expand native phonon mining to all manufacturers or you could have it based on one single manufacturer.

An example of all of this in practice and how the tokenomics works would be if in year one 20,000 mining cards were produced that had 100% efficiency allowing for 10b bits to me mined in a year, the in the following year another 20,000 cards arid produced with a lower efficiency. These cards could be sold through a reverse dutch auction which would allow the market to determine the price of each card based on the perceived value of the native token and their ability to mine. The auction would be settled in PHONON tokens which would require people to purchase tokens and pay with them creating revenue for the DAO while increasing the PHONON price. As the cards gain in value the amount necessary for the bid on the cards each year would be higher and higher. During the testnet we are looking to implement a version of this to bring thoughts on how this works and what the UI would look like.

A separate meeting needs to be managed to discuss how many cards and what the emission curve should look like. The Phonon DAO can also vote on what the emissions should be each year for this curve which is another value prop for the PHONON token.

The other tokenomics at play is requiring manufacturers of cards to bond PHONON tokens to add an additional layer of security against bad actors.

Chain Analysis

Notable changes: 42.89% of all the community owned GRID has been converted, up from 34% last week.

Price is up from $0.0095 to $0.012

Per. Phonon Guide Google Sheet

For information on the Ondo vault head to the google sheet.

A big shout out to @hunt_ak for designing the new Phonon Brief banner!

Resources

Discord

Website

Forum

Blog

Github

Phonon Spreadsheet

Help us get the word out about the Phonon Network by sharing the Brief on Twitter!

To support me, follow my twitter @0xDanM and @PhononUpdates.

The Phonon Brief #7: Feb 4-Feb 10 was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the 5th 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

• The Phonon App
• PDBG Recap
• Chain Analysis
• Resouces

The Phonon Alpha App

On Jan 26, a blog post announced that the alpha code for the Phonon App was made open source. This means that you will now be able to load up the Phonon wallet and try it out.

In order to try it, you will need to have some experience with programming. At a high level, you will need to clone the phonon-client repository and start up the webUI. Then you’ll want to clone the phonon-app repository, install dependencies, and start that up as well. The app talks to the phonon-client to create, update, and redeem phonons.

There are more detailed instruction for getting started on the GitHub under the Readme document.

PDBG Meeting Recap

The Phonon DAO Bootstrapping Group meets every Wednesday at 12:30 EST. If you are ever interested in listening, feel free to join in the Discord.

Liquidity

This week started out with discussion around the first full week of liquidity on SushiSwap. As mentioned in the last few briefs we launched a partnership pool with Frax Finance, where they provide their FRAX stablecoin and the DAO provides PHONON tokens.

The first impressions the group has had is that SushiSwap routing is not allowing for multihops. The only PHONON pool on SushiSwap is the PHONON-FRAX pool. When a user wants to exchange ETH for PHONON, SushiSwap should first convert ETH to FRAX then FRAX to PHONON. However, if you attempt to make this trade the SushiSwap router will not calculate your estimated PHONON and not allow a trade to be made. The extend of the issue is not currently known but it is assumed to be affecting the DEX Aggregators as will. Currently the majority of SushiSwap trades are from Arbitrage bots and not actual users. SushiSwap has not commented on the situations despite multiple attempts to contact them.

This liquidity option is not a long term solution and the DAO will be considering changes in the future that include removing liquidity from SushiSwap.

Questions about Trust

A common questions from new people in the Phonon Community is about trust. How can I trust the certificates that say the card is acting the way it should?

This questions was was answered by first explaining that each Phonon compatible device has a unique “certificate” that consists of signature from the producer hashed with the physically unique and unclonable chip on that device which is required for compatibility, the certificates show provenance so you can be sure where it was created. How this works is that GridPlus (the sole current producer) has a keypair that signs the ID saying this card has two properties. The first, that the card is running the Phonon code and the second that it has a PUF, or physically unclonable function.

When a two parties are engaging in a transaction the cards use the cert to check each other and verify they are on the approved list of certificate manufacturers for the Phonon Network. This list is comparable to how https works and the cards are manufactured the same way a bank manufacture a credit card to not allow for manipulation.

What is stopping a manufacturer from acting maliciously and if they did could I be rugged?

To become an approved manufacturer of cards on the Phonon Network the DAO will require a certain amount of PHONON to be staked by the manufacturers to help prevent malicious attacks. However, even if a card was created in bad faith the limit of loss is restricted only to users who interact with the malicious party. Meaning, if a malicious act was conducted the Phonon DAO would be able to remove that card cert from the approved list of certificates. Thus limiting the loss and having the manufacturer of that card forfeit their stake. Buying a malisious card will not allow your fund to be stolen unless you are transacting with the bad actor. Once the bad actor is discovered anyone using those cards will be able to settle back on a blockchain.

Contributor Compensation

Early in the week a forum post was published outlining some potential compensation to be paid to early DAO contributors. The post was well received and some adjustment were suggested before this goes to a formal proposal. The post outlines payment for a few categories of people, community management, Media, Development, the PDBG, and the DAO stewards.

Valid comments were made about adjusting the community management and media categories to include ongoing payments rather than a one time amount. The goal is to encourage future participation as well as reward past contributions.

Working Groups

Four subgroups were created to facilitate more efficient use of time going forward. These four subgroup will meet and work on their specific duties each week then report back to the general PDBG meeting with updates.

The four groups are:

• The Economics working group will focus on a variety of token related issues and opportunities, this includes, liquidity, protocol fees, native phonon structure, and much more.
• The Product working group will focus on defining the roadmap for the DAO to pursue(e.g. what projects the DAO should focus on funding, timelines, etc.)
• The Operations & Governance working group will define areas of the governance structure such as quorum and proposal structure.
• The Communications working group will be facilitating all things marketing and optics. They will be creating content and marketing marketing materials, helping to run the discord and social accounts, and deciding how to frame the uses cases of the Phonon network and token.

If you have any interest in participating in these groups head to the #join-a-group channel in the discord.

Chain Analysis

The Chain Analysis has moved to a google sheet and you can access it here. This sheet is a work in progress and will regularly be updated with new information. If you have suggestions on what should be on here, leave a comment below on tweet me @PhononUpdates.

Resources

Discord

Website

Forum

Blog

Github

Phonon Spreadsheet

Help usget the word out about the Phonon Network by sharing the Brief on Twitter!

To support me, follow my twitter @0xDanM and @PhononUpdates.

The Phonon Brief #5: Jan 21-Jan 27 was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we are lifting the curtain on the code that powers the Phonon wallet proof of concept that you might’ve seen around the web. For technical folks, this means you’ll have the chance to load up the Phonon app and try it out. Everyone will be able to contribute their ideas and request features.

The ultimate vision of Phonon is easy and free transfer for any blockchain asset. While this app doesn’t quite have that functionality today, we’re working hard to make that a reality soon.

The goal with the application is to make it possible to create, redeem, and send Phonons wherever you are; which essentially means using cryptocurrencies as, you know, a currency. To fulfill that goal, we need an application that can run anywhere. That’s why we built this app using web technologies for the user interface. It keeps the frontend super portable, so no matter the platform, Phonons can still be traded.

This app can be built for iOS, Android, and for the web. It should have mostly the same features across each platform. Until it’s available in app stores and online, this is the only way to test the app out yourself.

In order to try it, you will need to have some experience with programming. At a high level, you will need to clone the phonon-client repository and start up the webUI. Then you’ll want to clone the phonon-app repository, install dependencies, and start that up as well. The app talks to the phonon-client to create, update, and redeem phonons.

For more detailed instructions on getting started, you can find the detailed instructions on GitHub. There you’ll find a Readme document that tells you how to get started. Anyone who is familiar with React and TypeScript should be able to contribute.

Feel free to drop feature requests in the PhononDAO Discord or visit phonon.network to learn more.

The Phonon App Alpha Test is Now Open Source was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the 4th 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

• Phonon Mining (Native Phonons)
• FRAX-PHONON Liquidity Pools
• PDBG Recap
• Chain Analysis

Phonon Mining???

Things are heating up as the Phonon core devs deliver on another incredible use case for the Phonon Network. This time in the form of Native Phonons. I’ll do my best to summarize but I highly recommend you read the blog post that goes into more detail.

Native Phonons are tokens that are generated by Phonon Cards via mining (or any minting mechanics, staking). Unlike a phonon that is created to house on-chain assets from blockchains, (ethereum, bitcoin, etc.) these Native Phonons can be understood and verifiable on the cards themselves. They can be created in any unit of value and can be traded with zero gas costs.

Why is this important? Trading on-chain assets using the phonon network is simply exchanging private keys. The network has no knowledge of what bitcoin or any crypto asset is. This feature is what makes the network, blockchain agnostic and a true Layer 0, but it also comes with a weakness; The recipient, or their client software, must verify the on-chain asset associated with a phonon prior to accepting it. Native Phonons originate from the cards themself and can be objectively verified to be a genuine asset with a specific value. This allows for the free exchanges of assets which is always possible once on the network but intitially requires gas when minting and redeeming phonons from your blockchain of choice. This enables p2p cash and micro transactions natively on the network.

The basic form of an on-chain phonon is currently metadata and a key-pair. A form that a native phonon could take is a card certificate, a random number and a signature of the hash of the pubkey and random number.

The native phonon would have value if when the random number is hashed with the pubkey of the card certificate it creates a mathematically unlikely result, say a hash with a number of leading zeros. This hash could then be represented in the binary form and said to have the value of n-bits corresponding to the number of leading zeros found in the hash. For example if we work in binary this would be an example of a native phonon with 5-bits (0x07 -> 0000 0111).

To understand how this works head over to the blog post linked above. If this idea excites you come join the discord and you can play a role in the economic structuring of the native phonon mining.

PHONON Liquidity Launched

The PHONON-FRAX pool is finally live on SushiSwap, thanks to the help from the Ondo Finance team. The pool adds an additional $4m in liquidity for the PHONON token bringing us to about $6m total between Sushi and Uni. This gets us close to our Q1 goal of $8m in TVL.

Not only does this partnership bring us additional liquidity, the Phonon DAO will also be receiving 1000 FXS (roughly $30,000) per week. This is an all around big win for the DAO but we do view it as a temporary solution. If you have ideas on how to better provide liquidity for our growing ecosystem, once again, head on over to the discord and share your thoughts!

PDBG Weekly Meeting

The second Phonon DAO bootstrapping Group meetings was a productive one. We are still formalizing the process for theses meetings and in the future should have full and separate recaps for those who can’t attend. For those interested in sitting in and learning about the needs and roadmap of the Phonon DAO, join us on Wednesday’s at 12:30 EST.

The conversation started with a brief recap of the launch of the SushiSwap liquidity pools. The DAO has also submitted an application to participate in the Onsen program via SushiSwap. This program is how Sushi determines who to pay liquidity mining fees to. Hopefully, more info on this to share in future briefs.

GRID Conversion was next on the docket. Currently about half of the conversion contract has been redeemed. However, only ~30% of the GRID community tokens have been redeemed for PHONON. (Last weeks meeting mentioned the possibility of putting a deadline on the conversion in 2023 and sending the remaining PHONON in the contract back to the DAO)

Many low tier CEX’s have been reaching out with offer to list PHONON. Most of these require some form of payment for listing and for now the PDBG has decided to hold off on this. We do have contacts at some of the larger centralized exchanges and will likely pursue this as we move further along the roadmap. There have also been talks with liquidity providers who work with these large exchanges, these providers work with loaned tokens and the option to purchase at current prices at various intervals. While this is something we want to consider in the future, the low price we are currently sitting at makes this a dangerous options if/when our price is 50x from here. In a future meeting we will be looking at bringing a member of a large CEX to help us understand what steps should be taken to have a successful listing on their exchange.

Finally there was a long discussion about the roadmap, vision, and mission statement of the DAO. Many descriptors of what the Phonon Network does have been taken by other projects who do not meet the standards they claim to. This makes it hard for us to define a vision and mission statement without using crypto buzzwords that many projects misleadingly use.

Key traits that we are focusing in on when creating the mission statement and vision are scalability, interoperability, privacy, and providing transaction without censorship.

A second struggle that was discussed in the meeting is that the Phonon Network keeps evolving so defining a clear roadmap is tough. Similar to Ethereum when it launched, predicting exactly where we are today would have been impossible. This topic brought us to the discussion of the new concept of Native Tokens and the future they may play in the Phonon Ecosystem.

The meeting ended with a goal of creating some potential mission statements and testing them on twitter to see what gains traction. If you read something that catches your attention regarding the Phonon Network please share it with us in the discord!

$PHONON Chain Analysis

Price: $0.0122 (Jan 20)

Phonon liquidity As of Jan 20

SushiSwap

Uniswap

Total liquidity is at $6,300,000.

FRAX-PHONON Pool

as of Jan 20

Initial funding: 172,984,044 PHONON and 1,968,372.44 FRAX

Current Size: 167,148,429 PHONON 2,048,341 FRAX

Fees Collected: $192.74

FXS Rewards: 0

Contract address: 0x758b4684be769e92eefea93f60dda0181ea303ec

• Max token supply: 10,000,000,000

Redeemer Address: 0xfdcc959b0aa82e288e4154cb1c770c6c4e958a91

• Redeemed: 3,766,695,167 = 8,535,885,562–4,769,190,395 (as of Jan 12)
• A ~10.7% increase from last week
• This still only marks 30% of all community owned GRID being converted.
• The founders have not redeemed their 600m yet.

(Active) Treasury Address 1: 0xd90b33936a40418271584aab190c4bbe7fb95e2b

Holdings

• PHONON — 559,073,174
• FRAX — 2,048,341
• PHONON 167,148,429

Debt:

• 1,968,372.44 + 5% APY

(Vesting) Treasury Address 2: 0xbcfb07c16af74a1b1db7fea7fc9605d3f649500f

• Holdings: 732,057,218 PHONON
• Vesting is a four year linear vest.

Notable Addresses:

• GridPlus Treasury: 0x1253385b0fc7e022df906aeec4a8270cdc8ea6f9
• ConenSys Address: 0xeeaa36420519d85efab3b7120ac5afa5a5825bfb
• SushiSwap Pool: 0x8a1d0Db124D33772082A0f4558eC17d7C9F6e525

Thanks for reading The Phonon Brief! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribe to my substack to get notified about new Briefs and PDBG recaps. https://phonon.substack.com/

The Phonon Brief #4: Jan 14-Jan 20 was originally published in Phonon DAO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.