Now with this important milestone reached, and a little more than 8 months into the Saber DAO revival story it is high time to look back on everything and see what we’ve managed to accomplish so far in the so-called new chapter in the Saber saga as, what I called, Cleanup Phase or chapter 1 is done now!
The new Saber dApp look, a new domain, and a new docs page is here!
Take a look:
https://saberdao.io/ & https://docs.saberdao.io/
Now with this important milestone reached, and a little more than 8 months into the Saber DAO revival story it is high time to look back on everything and see what we’ve managed to accomplish so far in the so-called new chapter in the Saber saga as, what I called, Cleanup Phase or chapter 1 is done now!
Prepare for a good read ☕️
3 Main Goals
When I took upon myself the task to “revive” Saber through its DAO back in August last year, I had 3 main goals in mind:
1. Remove something of a bad look on Solana. Saber had its debacles in the past, which led to not many wanting to participate in the DAO even though the tech is great. Taking the initiative to revive Saber, would show not only the Solana community but the broader web3 community the power of community coordination within the Solana community. This would eliminate at least one argument from “Solana’’ haters!
2. Improve the situation for the SBR community. Those who got the most hurt by the previous Saber debacles were in the end the community of users. With Sabers DeFi being heavily inspired by Curvefi’s DeFi model, some parts were missing such as a sbrUSD, vote markets protocols, etc. By coordinating efforts to bring parts of the missing DeFi puzzle pieces for the Curve.fi model in place, the SBR utility situation would improve, and by that, it makes sense for more people to participate in Saber DeFi.
3. Empower the community to run the Saber protocol through the DAO. Now, worth noting for this point is that when I took upon myself the mission to ‘revive Saber’ I did so because all of the parts for the DAO were in place on-chain, however, as with any organization someone has to cheerlead it, and do the initial coordination work until the social fabric of the DAO is solidified.
Community power
What’s beautiful to me is how so many people from across the Solana community, and even Ethereum community, have reached out to me in various ways to support the DAO revival efforts. Some did so openly, some more privately, but overall it has been overwhelmingly positive and really encouraging.
I took the initiative and started coordinating everything but I would never have been able to see all these things through if it was not for all the people coming up together on their initiatives and joining the revival story with their active contributions.
The list of people, teams, or organizations that have helped in various ways is long, but to summarize this… This was not all me, this was a true community effort which proves the immense power of the notion of decentralized community collaborations.
The Cleanup Phase
The cleanup phase goal was to get the community active, update the app front end as it was very dated, coordinate DAO and protocol operations, and create a foundation for the community to be able to effectively run and govern the Saber protocol through a DAO. Lastly, but also very important, to get the missing parts of the curve DeFi model in place. I can confidently say that we have almost reached the target here…
📌The new app look is done, and can be found here:
📌A votes market protocol is created, check it out here:
📌LP Finance was acquired by SaberDAO, view the proposal here:
https://tribeca.so/gov/sbr/proposals/71
📌The operational arm of the DAO is now consolidated as well. We have 3 able gentlemen; me, rockooor and Js.
The DAO governance
It was very important to me to empower the community to rule Saber through the DAO. In the short term, it was fine for me to stimulate all the governance initiatives but in the mid-term to long-term SaberDAO can not rely on only my initiatives in the long run.
This has been accomplished as the governance process for the DAO now makes more sense for the community and SBR holders — we’ve seen several proposals by the community being put on-chain to be voted on, and was done so successfully!
The people who revived Saber
As previously mentioned, the revival story would not have been successful if it wasn’t for everyone who helped out in various ways.
Huge thanks to everyone who helped and supported the revival. Everyone in this list is to me true Solana legends who’s done one of the most epic DAO revival stories in web3 history possible:
Kangda
Cazza
Simonicino Acammm Otto
soylanamanletX
… and many more!
DAO governance proposals
Throughout the cleanup phase we’ve had quite a bit of proposals voted- and acted on. 18 voted on so far, with 4 pending proposals currently being discussed.
Pending proposals and currently in DAO community discussions
- CEX Market Making — DEX Market Making — LM Emission reduction by 50% — Update token details & links on various DEX analysis platforms
You can check all the previous proposals on-chain here:
DAO Accomplishments
A lot of things have been done in the last 8 months, let me bring up some of the important items, out of which some are work in progress.
- sunSBR Solution: SUNNY is abandoned and dead, and a lot of SBR users deposited their SBR and locked it forever. Seeing these people as part of the SaberDAO community, one of my first priorities was to make sure the sunSBR holders were made whole. Read more about this here:
- Pool Fee Updates: Saber was charging essentially zero fees on stable swaps. This was generating a lot of volume but did not generate any value. Additionally, this was perceived by me (and others) as hurting the stablecoin side of Solana DeFi with an unhealthy race to 0 fees. We changed the fees from 0.001 to 0.01. Read more about this here:
- Pool WD Fee Update: Keeping LPs locked in pools based on a withdrawal fee felt like a hindrance to a natural LP ebb and flow, as well as in some people’s pov; not the best practice for attracting new LPs. We removed the withdrawal fee from the USDC-USDT pool. Read more about this here:
- Hawksight Partnership: Hawksight has through both the ups and downs of Saber been maintaining its LPs built on top of Saber. Additionally, Hawksight helped the DAO revival in several ways: They removed the auto-compounding which had a very negative effect on the SBR markets. They helped with social signalling that Saber was back in action as well as tested different liquidity incentive campaigns through their platform via a partnership with SaberDAO.
- GrapeDAO partnership: veSBR authentication tool, used in Discord for in-DAO communication
- Pyth network partnership: SolBlaze helped Saber establish a partnership with Pyth to push data to PythNet.
- Established a community council: With 7 members strong, the community council has been acting as a guiding compass throughout the revival.
- Dune Dashboard Helps the DAO stay in touch with the DEX metrics
https://dune.com/0xpibs/saberdao
- Grafana Dashboard Helps the DAO stay in touch with both the DEX and SBR token metrics
- DAO legal entity through @MIDAODS
The DAO needs a legal entity for multiple reasons and we’re seeing that through (WIP)
- Votes market (bribing) protocol:
SaberDAO, UXD and SolBlaze allied and together pooled funds for a grant that was given to @MetaDAOProject to build a votes market AKA bribes protocol (vota.fi) where SBR could get an additional use case through delegating veSBR voting power (alpha out, WIP)
Leverage-product acquisition
- https://www.lp.finance/ So that SaberDAO can expand its product suite with more products using Saber LP tokens. This acquisition also includes the LP Finance team joining the SaberDAO as active contributors (Proposal passed WIP)
Update governance lock mechanics to liquify veSBR (Proposal passed, WIP ve/x model)
- $2M Protocol Owned Liquidity; for the USDC-USDT pool. The DAO saw an opportunity to use parts of the treasury in DeFi to generate yield (Proposal passed, WIP)
- Reactivated the community and DAO participants — Currently 61 members actively participating in the DAO conversations within the SaberDAO discord with more than 9 proposals made by the DAO community members and not the DAO leadership.
Impact from the cleanup phase
- DEX now generates fees from LPs
- Made sunSBR holders whole
- Pool efficiency increased — Ex. USDC/USDT pool consistently does more volume than its TVL
- vota.fi — veSBR votes market — voting power can be delegated to someone else through
- https://www.lp.finance/ acquisition — opening up for more opportunities through the use of Saber LP tokens and more (WIP)
- Proper overview of DEX- and SBR metrics through the Grafana- and Dune dashboard.
- DAO community participation and activity increased. The DAO and the community were previously dead, so we went from 0 to currently 61 DAO participants.
Big Thanks to a few special individuals Now with the first chapter of the new SaberDAO saga about to be wrapped up, and the DAO are to venture into the second chapter of the SaberDAO saga, I would like to give a special shoutout and thanks to Billy from GrapeDAO, rar3, Durden, Ian, Rockooor, Kento, Js and SolBlaze who have been instrumental to the SaberDAO revival.
What’s next? The term for my DAO leadership granted to me by the DAO is coming to its end. The “Clean up phase” is practically done, so next up for the DAO is to discuss the organization set up for the next 12 months as we move into the second chapter of the revival saga, and I will be sharing my suggestions with the DAO for that within a few days! If you are not already participating in the epic DAO revival story, join us and guide SaberDAO into a new era — Visit @the_saber_dao
