Thanks for this thread! I’m a long Sovryn supporter and I’m still going along 100% with its mission. I also like the idea of raising Sovryn to a whole new booster platform for sovereignty. But here’s a big BUT.
I was kind of shocked when listening to the October community call. It feels like “no foundation”, “no stable roots”, “nothing substantial one can build a community let alone a business on”. Why?
Sovryn started as a revolutionary Bitcoin DeFi platform on the L2 that was ready for it at the time - Rootstock. @yago said himself that financial sovereignty is the basis for all other sovereignty aspects of life. Now, we keep on saying we are market leader on Rootstock, on BOB etc. But what does market leader there mean? It means to be a leader on L2s that very few people are interested in. Why is this the case? Because they are not (yet) 100% suited for efficient DeFi services. That is why BitcoinOS came into play. Here’s the possibility to build a revolutionary network layer where Bitcoin DeFi is possible exactly in the efficient, non-custodial, private way that’s worthy of being called sovereign finance. Once BOS is live, it was our hope that Sovryn will become what it always wanted to be - the best and most sovereign finance platform for a new Bitcoin age.
And then, what do we have to hear at the October community call? It’s boring to compete with a couple of other projects who are intending to do the same? That we gotta think further about all the other beautiful things now up for discussion in the “what’s Sovryn for you” thread?
What?
Yes, these topics are super important and a direction we can help carry human consciousness towards. BUT!
But on which basis?
Firstly, I want to say thank you for the tireless work of the Sovryn developers and their support on Discord, Telegram etc. It’s amazing! And I wish you had more financial and man-power support for what you are doing. Please keep that appreciation in mind when continuing to read.
DeFi on Bitcoin is still revolutionary after three years of Sovryn’s existence! Sovryn, @yago … we are many years ahead of everybody else. Not even the maxi Bitcoiners have understood why they need DeFi on Bitcoin. They are getting it slowly only now, while former hero Michael Saylor talks patronizingly about that privacy and self-custody are only for paranoid crypto anarchists. And in this unfolding environment that Sovryn helped prepare the ground for, we don’t want to continue building out our half-baked DeFi applications on Rootstock, BOB and maybe, maybe BOS?? Now is the time to make these apps, or at least one app on one of the chosen L2s so convincingly perfect for self-sovereign finance, that we as Sovryn community can go out there with a fully convinced open heart and say to family, friends and colleagues “Man, you gotta use Sovryn. It’s so good!” The problem is, we can’t say that right now. Sovryn DeFi is half-baked and not useable even by those who I see as target group.
Of course Rootstock, BOB, BOS want Sovryn to commit to building a well-functioning DeFi platform on their L2. Because they, and we the community too, finally want a functioning sovereign finance application! This is what we signed up for first and foremost. This is why we are staking and contributing in the way we can! And we haven’t reached that goal yet. Here some examples for why not:
- Traders don’t use Sovryn because the trading environment is not working reliably. Charts aren’t properly presented. It’s still “alpha” and not integrated in the latest Sovryn Dapp. Functionality is unreliable and clonky-looking. There are no proper statistics and analysis tools. If I show it to my trader friends, they have a quick look and tell me: “What? This is unusable for what I want. Have you seen where I’m trading? Before it doesn’t look remotely like that, I can’t be interested in Sovryn”.
- Many people now ask for borrowing against Bitcoin. Only custodial services out there. I show them Sovryn, there’s Zero and regular borrowing. They look at Zero’s collateral ratio of 1100%. They laugh at me and ask what else? Regular borrowing. At the time of writing a DLLR borrowing interest rate of 120% for DLLR. They laugh even harder. I start explaining why this is the case, but they already left.
- The UX got better, yes. But we are building a platform where people are supposed to do their life financing on. It should scream “We know self-custody is scary. But we got you. Sovryn is safe and fool-proof to use.” It doesn’t do that. Or do people have fun trading their runes on Sovryn because it looks so cool? No.
- Sovryn is not active on and doesn’t promote the one promising global platform that stands in for sovereign communication – Nostr?
- And these are just my interest areas … the list goes on.
Sovryn is like a script running in a keyboard terminal. The developer is presenting it as the market leader on an OS that only 10,000 people use globally, because it has virtually no competition and uses the easiest command words. I thought we were building the perfect GUI for selected L2s now, especially for BOS. I thought we make Sovryn what it was meant to be – the operating system for sovereign finance globally! Instead, it’s boring to compete with other DeFi projects and we move on? Hang on a minute.
There’s so much still to do, so much to be done to finally fulfil Sovryn’s mission on the finance level. The world needs it now. Not 3 years ago, now. Now is the time. Sovryn needs to be the strong basis, the foundation for Sovryn finance. If it is successful in that, it will be able to convincingly take on all the other topics @yago mentioned. There’s no basis for that. There’s nothing 100% convincing to show for just yet.
@yago is again many years ahead of the world in terms of envisioning a world on Bitcoin. I love that! And I may be ready to support that vision, too. But what Sovryn needs now, is to build out what it started with ahead of everybody else. It’s time for proper execution first and foremost. Whereas the forward thinking can go on in the background already.
My suggestion is, to use the existing resources for building out and promote the BEST sovereign finance platform on the best L2 as the basis for everything else that’s still to come. This is what I staked for. This is also where I have a personal use case and financial incentive. Thinking about alternative schooling doesn’t meet my financial incentive. Not before the Sovryn financial platform has been built out. Properly. If we don’t have that foundation, there’s no compelling reason to continue to stake?
This is serious. The Sovryn community is strong, yes, because the cause unites us. All other crypto projects would have already fallen apart under these conditions (DMANs and alike). But without a proper foundation, it will dwindle faster than @yago wants to imagine. The October community call turned Sovryn into a weak-founded discussion platform and donation-funded group for ideas of a free future world. I don’t see that ending well.
Yes, Sovryn can’t be everything at once. But it was meant to be DeFi on Bitcoin. If it turns into a sovereignty booster platform, then it needs a very different incentive structure. All this has to be crystal clearly put. I’m listening, because I may not see the full picture just yet. But these are my urgent thoughts as a staker.