Fairpool

We talked about "tool marketing": building small focused tools & giving them away for free (as marketing). With LLMs, we can build a lot of small tools cheaply. If the tool is valuable, people will share it with friends naturally. If the tool can show links to other products, we can give them away for free & use them for marketing. Examples of the tools include: receiving notific...

We talked about the optimal policy. A policy is a program that gives you a list of actions (a todo list). It uses the information about your company & the world in which it operates (the database). Mathematically speaking, a policy is a function from the current state to an action. The action is performed by the agent. If the agent needs to operate autonomously (without getting the data from the p...

Is it rational to chase yield? We examined the process of making an investment decision with imperfect information. The takeaway is that it's rational to use battle-tested & well-known methods to generate yield (like staking ETH or lending other assets via Aave), but it's irrational to maximize the yield via less-known projects.

We talked about the verification of the environment. We arrived at the two conclusions: 1. The environment is a program. It will be run many, many times while training the agent. Thus, it can be battle-tested with runtime assertions. Such assertions would crash the environment, and we would inspect the stack trace & the logs to understand the root cause of the bug. 2. The environment is our mo...

We clarified our strategy: why we're working on a decision-making system instead of "just building products". We're sick of making ad-hoc decisions based on "intuition". It clearly doesn't work in counter-intuitive domains. The high percentage of failures among the startups is a hint that it's a counter-intuitive domain. The general advice on startups confirms t...

* Binance & Coinbase have been sued by the SEC. * Both exchanges took a defensive stance. * The SEC alleges that Binance. US has routed the customer money to investment funds - we're not sure if it's true, but if it is, then Binance. US may not have enough money to handle all withdrawals. * Binance International may provide a "loan" to Binance. US to cover the withdrawals. Ho...

We talked about attack vectors in crypto. Broadly speaking, the attack vectors can be divided into "physical" and "logical". Physical attack vectors: * Theft * Extortion * Kidnapping * Duplication (physical copy) Logical attack vectors: * Without secret extraction * With secret extraction Logical attack vectors without secret extraction: * Phishing * Spoofing * Social engineeri...

We talked about the concept of the critical mass in marketing. The customer needs to hear a marketing message from multiple sources before they can make the decision according to this message. We think that in crypto, the required number of sources is actually even higher than a traditional marketing because in crypto it's vital to buy before others buy, which means the (future) opinions of ot...

We talked about building a correct environment for the neural network (AI CEO). It's possible to train a neural network that runs the company. However, such networks are different from ChatGPT and other LLMs because they are trained to achieve a specific numeric goal (e.g. maximize revenue) in an adversarial environment. Building such an environment is a challenge, especially for a crypto proj...

We talked about exploiting new marketing channels. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok are old marketing channels. The cost of promoting a new token is high, and it's hard to predict the ROI. However, there are new marketing channels with low cost of promotion. Some of these marketing channels are not even called "marketing channels", and these are the most valuable ones. For example, in the e...

We talked about Ethereum staking platforms. Some time ago we've converted our USDC to ETH. This ETH can be staked. It makes sense for us to do it, since ETH staking withdrawals have been enabled with the recent fork, so our capital won't be tied for a long time. We've currently shortlisted Blox as a non-custodial SaaS provider. Looking forward to expanding our runway through native sta...

We talked about the recent hacks that occurred over the crypto space (looks like the hacker got access to wallet seeds) & about staking our treasury to extend the runway.

We talked about the scaling of startups. Recently, Paul Graham tweeted that scaling the startup prematurely is the single most dangerous mistake founders can make. He also mentioned two causes: wishful thinking on the part of founders & pushing to scale on the part of investors. However, there's no definition of what it means to "scale prematurely". We propose an approximate defi...

We talked about using AI to run the business. ChatGPT is all the rage now, but there is a more important innovation that's flying under the radar. It's called DreamerV3 - a neural network architecture that's capable of finding an optimal strategy in an open world without pre-training. DreamerV3 has achieved favorable performance in many games. However, its most important achievement is...

We've talked about the functionality for changing the referral addresses. We want to decide whether we need to allow the user to change their referrals. When the users buys the tokens, his address is associated with a referral address of an influencer. Should the user be able to change the referral address? ("switch" to another influencer) On one hand, yes - because it gives the user...

We talked about the general applicability of the formal languages in business. Initially, we turned to formal languages because we wanted to verify the Fairpool smart contract. But actually the formal languages have much broader applications. For example, they allow making decisions with any level of precision. Additionally, they allow to execute those decisions as programs - automating what could...

We've talked about formal verification of the smart contracts. We want to ensure that our smart contract doesn't lose money. While it's impossible to get a 100% proof of the absence of bugs, it's possible to test the critical parts of the contract using formal methods. Using formal methods = proving theorems about the contract code. We're currently experimenting with Lean 4 for...

We talked about the permissions system of the Fairpool shares. The Fairpool contract distributes the trading fees to multiple parties: * The seller * The current holders * The referrals of the seller * The contract owners (marketers, developers) The Fairpool contract should work for multiple use cases, ranging from personal tokens to DAOs. Therefore, it's better to implement a dynamic list of shar...

We talked about ways to close the loophole in the earnings distribution algorithm. Ideally, the earnings would be distributed to every holder on every transaction. However, that would require a lot of gas. The required amount may exceed the block gas limit. This is unacceptable, so we have implemented a workaround. We randomly select 256 holders for each distribution. However, it's possible for th...

We talked about the enforcement of the trading fees on the Fairpool contract. When the user sells the tokens, the Fairpool contract charges trading fees. When the user transfers the tokens to a different address, the contract doesn't charge the trading fees. However, the transfer function could be abused to circumvent the fees. The user could make a deal through the OTC marketplace or just another...

We've finished the transition to the new pricing formula in the Fairpool smart contract. We've also contacted multiple auditors & reached a preliminary agreement with Zokyo (our private investors). We're currently updating the Fairpool contract with minor yet important functionality: the agent fee distribution & the referral fee distribution. The agent fee is distributed on every sell tran...

We're changing the Fairpool pricing curve. During the feedback sessions with potential users, we've had a hard time explaining how the pricing curve works. The most difficult part was explaining how the pricing curve parameters influence the shape of the curve. So we've decided to change the pricing curve formula to make it easier to understand. Coincidentally, the parameters will also become simp...

We've talked about current progress. First of all, we've deployed a couple of tokens on Goerli testnet. We're currently making improvements & fixing minor bugs in the UI, to ensure that the users would have a good first experience. We're planning to go to Dubai for networking - it's likely we'll get some good contacts there. We're also expanding our team - hiring a blockchain developer and a f...

We have migrated the Fairpool contract to a better pricing formula. While migrating, we have discovered an interesting fact: the bonding curve parameters don't matter for the purposes of taking profit. For example: Alice buys for 1 ETH Bob buys for 10 ETH Alice sells for X ETH (X > 1) Alice profit is the same no matter what the bonding curve parameters are. This seems weird, because the price c...

We talked about whitelabeling of smart contracts - a special licensing agreement that allows forking the smart contracts, but only if the developer address is kept in the contract, so that it continues to receive the fees as recurring revenue. We think it's the optimal solution for the blockchain development dilemma - should we release the code under permissive or restrictive license? We must rele...