Hey everyone!,
Uzi here, co-founder of Symmetric. First off wanted to thank everyone for their time and input, very much appreciated!
When I first reached out to Fernando in December after speaking to Luuk, I wanted to make sure he knew about us and that he was not opposed to a friendly fork partnership. I deeply respect what he said that day and repeated when I ultimately met him and some of the core team last month, “this for our community to decide, not me.” I admire the strength of community at Balancer DAO. I also admire and share the commitment to decentralization.
And Fernando was right, at the end of the day this proposal was for the Balancer community to decide on. We are thankful for the opportunity and for the consideration, and have kept quiet in this process as we did not want to interfere with Balancer governance. Even when we felt things might be a bit inaccurate, this is ultimately your process alone.
Even as this proposal is certain to fail, we will continue to build and are hopeful we can learn and work together while we do. All of our tech is open source and will continue to be, as I know Balancer will be as well, and we hope to find arenas for mutual benefit. We believe in transparency, collaboration, and the friendly fork model. Ultimately, we believe that Balancer is a fantastic project, we have a lot of common values, and we thought a formal partnership would make sense to both.
As we move forward here, I do want to clear a few things up:
• Regarding our relationship with Luuk: We are not paying Luuk anything as an individual in any way, shape, or form. We are not paying PrimeDAO in any way. He wanted to help us as he believes in the same values of transparency, decentralization and collaboration. We did complete a token swap with PrimeDAO, because we are building a launchpad using LBPs on both Celo and Gnosis as a joint project.
• Anonymous or semi-anon: You can find out who we are on the Symmetric Medium page. We are fully doxxed and have been since we launched. Also, it might be google translate that confused me about the message in the Chinese community, but I want to make sure the Chinese community knows we are not anonymous.
• SYMM <> BAL pairing: This was meant to be a way to create a mechanism to connect the projects and liquidity. Ultimately, this was always meant to be a point of discussion. We also saw it as a way to allow BAL to exist on other networks and find a way for BAL holders on Celo and Gnosis to participate in governance. We saw it as mutually beneficial. In hindsight, we should have explained this better or visited this separately.
• 100K USDC grant: We are building launchpads, with Prime Dao to help provide a safer and more stable mechanism for launch of new projects on Gnosis Chain and Celo. And new products using managed pools. Additionally, prior to BFF proposal we started discussions with 2 other networks to bring Symmetric to them. We left a large chunk of grants and incentives behind to try to work with Balancer as we identified this as our top priority, the grant would help counter the loss and allow us to look at chains where Balancer DAO wanted to establish a presence instead and negotiate better terms as partners… The grants page states that ‘Balancer aims to become the number 1 source of decentralized trades" and I believe it will - and we hope to contribute to that!
In the coming weeks and months you will see v2 launched, a new launchpad, new partnerships new rewards and farming structures, really cool investment vehicles built on top of Managed Pools, new governance process and tons more, feel free to drop by and check it out.
We know we have a bright future, believe in what we’ve built and what’s coming next with Balancer v2 tech on Gnosis and Celo. Both chains where we have an established presence and have support of those communities. We thank Rene, Martin, and Mojmir for their public support here, and countless others from the Celo and Gnosis community for their help along the way!!
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We went with Balancer tech for a reason. It is the best in league - secure, flexible, and innovative - we are proud to build on it and we want to thank the community and the team at Balancer for this opportunity and remain hopeful that is not goodbye - but a see you later!!