Open letter to the Tokemak community | Nov 11 2021
gm mechs,
My name is Erik Voorhees, founder of ShapeShift.
I’m here with a humble pitch to enlist your votes for FOX, the official token of the ShapeShift DAO.
We are very grateful for Tokemak’s decision to include FOX in the CORE2 event, and now it’s up to us to earn your votes. I watched the first CORE event with enthusiasm, as I discovered it while learning about Tokemak just a couple months ago.
You guys have built a crypto liquidity engine, and this is near and dear to my heart. When ShapeShift was launched in 2014, it too was a liquidity engine, albeit much more primitive. ShapeShift enabled the easy, frictionless trade of digital assets. In that model, ShapeShift the company was the liquidity provider and market-maker; we were the counterparty to each trade.
Years later crypto finance technology has advanced at an incredible pace. Defi is demonstrating—not with theories or essays, but with code and execution—that the great majority of financial functions can operate objectively and openly, with no middlemen, gatekeepers, borders, or cultural or institutional bias.
This is a beautiful thing, and Tokemak is right on the cutting edge of it.
You have built a liquidity engine upon clever token economics and game theory, you’ve wrapped it in an awesome future-mech brand, and you’ve cultivated a robust community of champions.
Tokemak’s liquidity engine will provide an important service in defi, because it enables market participants to express — both via TOKE as well as their own project tokens — where they wish to see liquidity applied across the universe of crypto assets. Liquidity is the lifeblood of financial markets. Tokemak brilliantly gives people a way to channel that lifeblood, and all on equal ground, with transparent, objective rules. This helps provide market signal among the noise.
It’s fucking cool, and this is why we’re thrilled to be included in the CORE2 event.
So why should you vote for FOX?
ShapeShift is in the middle of transforming ourselves into a DAO, and dissolving our corporate structure. I wrote about this in July.
In DAO form, ShapeShift embarks on building the world’s best crypto interface: one that is open-source, self-custody, multi-chain, and borderless. We add no fees to our users, and we impose no KYC. We believe the world needs this, and with our eight-year brand history, strong capital base, and our transformation into a DAO, we’re well positioned to make it happen. We’re here for the long-term, as we have always been.
ShapeShift is now operated and governed by the global community of over 30,000 holders of the FOX token. Though I was CEO of ShapeShift the company, I am merely one of many informal leaders within ShapeShift the DAO.
We’ve been collaborating with the best cutting-edge defi-focused DAOs. Recently we partnered with Olympus DAO for a FOX bond, and with Rari for two FOX-backed lending pools. Last week we launched a FOX pool on Thorchain. Today, Ichi has helped us launch a FOX-backed stablecoin.
With your help, Tokemak and ShapeShift can become mutual collaborators as well. We want a token reactor to help incentivize liquidity in FOX.
But I’m not here just to ask for your support. I’m here to offer my own.
First, I’ve added 100,000 FOX (~$60,000) to Votemak. Anyone who votes for FOX in CORE2 earns a piece of this bounty. UPDATE Nov 16: FOX currently has the highest bounty 1.2m FOX (~$800,000)
Second, I’ll match up to 250,000 additional FOX in Votemak. Every day I’ll see what’s been added by other FOX community members, and I’ll match it 1:1.
Third, I’ve bought $1m in TOKE, paired it with ETH, and am LP’ing in Sushi. What a weird sentence.
Fourth, if FOX ends in the top 5 for CORE2, I’ll use my TOKE position to establish a liquidity pool for TOKE in Thorchain. This would open TOKE up to cross-chain DEX trades with native Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and soon Luna and Cosmos. BTW Thorchain is amazing, and you should vote for RUNE if you’re not going to vote for FOX.
Fifth, if FOX ends in the top 5, I will post a bounty of $50,000 for any devs to integrate Tokemak’s reactors into ShapeShift’s new open-source V2 web interface. With such an integration, ShapeShift users could pour their liquidity into Tokemak reactors. They have currently over $3 billion in assets.
Ultimately, we recognize the CORE2 candidates include some absolutely fantastic projects. This is going to be an intense competition, and we’re honored to be participating among these inspirational defi projects for the next set of token reactors.
ShapeShift is here to build the open interface through which the world interacts with digital finance. We know a token reactor would be helpful toward this goal.
That’s why I’m here asking for your vote for FOX. Thank you for your time, your consideration, and for building this sci-fi liquidity engine.
In liberty,
-Erik Voorhees