I can’t help but notice that the only people discussing new ideas for BNT are community members. Where are all the foundation paid contributors, why are they so silent? It really seems like they are communicating internally and only bother to inform the DAO when an idea is ready for vote. At this point, it seems like the DAO is only needed to confirm the decisions they make behind closed doors. DAO members have no possibillity to bring new ideas to the table as they will just get ignored by the contributors, as seen in the various threads about BNT which are getting completly and shamelessly ignored.
We had a lot community members brainstorming new ideas here in the past but they got discouraged by the lack of interaction from the contributors, the people who actually can make the ideas a reality. Also, long time community members are getting banned in the Telegram simply for asking questions Mark and other contributors don’t want to answer. If I join a Telegram and I see an admin banning guys for asking legitimate questions it is always a giant red flag for me, I wouldn’t be surprised if potential new community members thought the same and left before even reading more about Bancor. The Bancor brand hasn’t exactly the best reputation in crypto atm and banning concerned LP’s in the Telegram just makes this worse.
So I ask you: Please bring transparency back. Please start discussing ideas with the community again. Please stop banning LP’s for asking questions. Also, and it is sad that I even have to say that, please don’t delete my thread and ban me from gov for voicing my concerns please.
It became clear recently that the main reason for the silence is that many contributors are simply scared to go to jail for talking about BNT. If you are a contributor and you are too scared to discuss BNT because of your fear to go to jail for talking about it, then please consider stepping down and making room for people who aren’t scared to talk about BNT because of random SEC complaint that doesn’t even mention BNT. You can’t work for a crypto project if you refuse to talk about the projects underlying token in public. Team members of all crypto projects are talking about their tokens but for some reason Bancor contributors are too scared to even brainstorm ideas with the community due to some fear to go to jail for that. We can’t continue this way. Our funds are on the line and while I understand your personal fears they really shouldn’t stop us from improving BNT. It has been 1.5 years without a usecase for BNT.
I encourage all community members, if active or dorment, to voice their opinions on this, please help me to make Bancor great again.
I dont agree that there is silence from contributors. In fact, on the thread I assume you are referring to there are many contributors who took part:
This could not be further from the truth. I would even venture to say that @alphavalion has been leading the protocol’s governance for a while now.
Each of these 5 steps were later posted as proposals, voted on and implemented.
You can see the conversations where at times we agree and at times we do not agree. In my opinion, this is how DAOs should work.
Following @alphavalion’s proposal, it is the governance token.
There seems to be a misunderstanding here. Actually, more than one.
I, personally, am happy to discuss the use case and the token.
I committed in one of the telegram chats to always comment, provide thoughts or feedback if asked. I stand by this. The exception (which I pointed out in the telegram) are proposals or other things that are clearly directed towards price action. You’re right that BNT was not named in the recent cases. But I argue that the project is better of with that being the case. Avoiding some of the mistakes that got others into trouble should be a goal for everyone involved.
So yes, let’s make Bancor great.
Yes, I am happy to help develop the product and ideas.
No, if there is a proposal clearly directed towards price action or similar mechanisms that appear all over SEC cases- I will not be an active participant, and we are all better off not being mentioned in those cases.
The biggest problem is that core team wallets who owns 2M of vBNT just blocking every vote on snapshot.
Bancor still have a huge surplus. And a lot of liqudity providers are harmed.
But Bancor’s team just dont care. They still have about 4 million $ in treasury. But they didn’t even trying to use them to cover people’s losses on Bancor.
In situation when core team just blocks any proposals from community it is looks like a scam. Feels like they are just waiting for a good moment for bankrun. Or just hoping that next bullrun will push price of BNT to the level where it will be enough to cover previous losses.
My opinion: Bancor team is scaming us. And instead of generating new proposals that will be blocked by core team wallet we should to think more about running legal process. Bancor’s team are from Israel. Can we bring them to justice?
Not complete silence but very low activity/ interaction compared to 2 years ago. For example the last time a contributor replied in that thread was over like 1.5 years ago, all newer comments and ideas got 100% ignored by the various contributors.
“Could not be further from the truth”, really? I don’t want to call out anyone but just check out the activity from the contributors on this forum. Yeah some like Glenn and alpha are active but a lot others are not. I would say you painting it like contributors are super active couldn’t be further from the truth.
But BNT always was the gov token, just with extra steps. Before you had to stake BNT in order to receive Voting rights in form of VBNT, now you stake BNT to get voting rights directly. That is not really a new usecase and neither a very attractive one.
Sorry I forgot to answer to the rest of your post.
Please clear up that misunderstanding then because from Telegram Chat is really seemed that talking about usecases is prohibited for contributors, which makes it great to hear that you are still open to talk about this stuff. Honestly, I thought no contributor would be ready to talk about BNT features again after reading what Mark was saying about that in Telegram and watching how silent the contributors in the gov forum are when it comes to usecases and features. Mark was saying that he and others “can’t talk about this” when asked about features for BNT, because of his worries about the SEC. So where did I understand something wrong?
The issue with this is that any proposal could be seen as directed towards price action, effectivly shutting all proposals that are aiming to improve BNT down. Even what we are doing now with the POL sell could be seen as such, simply burning BNT could be seen as such too. My point is we really shouldn’t let the SEC dictate what he can talk about and what we can’t. They had a similiar lawsuit like the one you are worried about with Ripple and lost as you surely know.
If contributors refuse to improve the BNT token because of worries that it could be seen as “directed towards price action” by the SEC, it means the contributor aren’t doing everything they can for BNT but rather everything so they won’t risk jail. If the fear of the SEC is limiting you from doing your job and improving BNT, a job in crypto might not the right job for you. The SEC may become an issue in the future, but the deficit is a real issue for 1.5years now and concerns the LP community more than the personal SEC worries from contributors. I totally get if you don’t want to risk to get in jail for us but it can’t mean we are just sitting on our hands now until the SEC complaint gets settled. This is not directed to you personally btw, I just want all contributors and leadership to think about this.
And if you really can’t talk about improving BNT okay fine, but then please just DO something.
Ah sorry, missed your point there. It is good to see community members are still able to push proposals but alpha always seemed close to the team so I thought he was a contributor by now.