Audits first: ‘No strings-attached grants’ to prevent DeFi debacles
Fair Launch Capital’s business model may help prevent future YAM DeFi debacles.
A new project called Fair Launch Capital claims to be offering a new way for founders to fund crypto networks.
According to an Aug. 26 tweet from Fair Launch Capital (FLC), the project will provide access to capital for founders to fund their crypto networks and projects.
On a website so basic, it makes Curve’s DOS-style interface look like 4K game graphics, FLC said it is not a venture capital fund and will make a “no-strings-attached grant” to cover a project’s initial audit and launch costs.
“The primary barrier for founders who want to use an FL is the high cost of a code audit,” stated the new project’s Twitter account. “This forces them into the position of either shipping high risk contracts, or not shipping at all. We’re here to change this.”
Some high-risk DeFi projects — with and without tokens — have quickly attracted large amounts of capital despite launching without a proper code audit. One of the more infamous examples of this is Yam, which had almost half a billion in assets locked before the token price crashed within just a few days of its launch. The bug responsible for its downfall — which may have been identified with a proper audit — left approximately $750,000 worth of crypto permanently locked.
The core team behind FLC are crypto investors Gavin McDermott and Joe Gerber from IDEO CoLab Ventures and former Coinbase employee Reuben Bramanathan and say they aim to offer an alternative to this practice with a community-driven approach to DeFi projects. IDEO CoLab Ventures has backed a number of crypto startups including the blockchain accelerator program Startup Studio.
FLC says it “enables founders to bootstrap new crypto networks that are earned, owned, and governed by their community from the outset.” This would allow participants to avoid the “bum rush” common in many DeFi Projects, without presales, pre-mining, or token allocation.
After launching, the project’s community would take a governance vote to decide whether to forward the grant money they received to the next founders that wanted to try a Fair Launch. FLC stated that the core team would be choosing a single project for the first experiment with this new model soon.
“The FL is young, and we believe yield farming and liquidity mining are early mechanisms that will evolve and improve,” FLC stated. “We hope our approach will enable a new generation of networks that can bootstrap in more economically symbiotic ways.”
