Welcome, OHMies! Today’s AMA will have Spartacus team as our guests, an Olympus fork on the Fantom chain that has established itself as one of the main reserve currencies of the ecosystem. Recently, they’ve announced some partnerships, new incentives and strategies for the protocol so we thought it would be a great idea to have them around.
Below you’ll find a transcript that summarizes both questions and answers from the event:
Q: Could you introduce us to Spartacus? What is it about and what makes it unique?
Spartacus: The Spartacus team has been in the crypto space long enough to know that community is what matters no matter you are a Defi 1.0 project or Defi 2.0 project. We had a rough idea before we started Spartacus where we are heading to, that is to build out a full range of Defi 2.0 infrastruture on top of Spartacus. A lot of people look at ohm fork as a high APY yield machine, we looked at it in a different way:
- It solved liquidity issue of predatory farming of pool 2 in Defi 1.0
- It accumulates a treasury, which can earn yields to buy back SPA
- Because of point #1, it can serve as a growth engine to bootstrap so many other things
Sparatacadabra builds synergy with Spartacus, potentially in so many ways:
- Unleash the locked liquidity of sSPA. Right now, you can participate yield farming on Spooky with wsSPA-FTM, but what’s even more exciting is that, with wsSPA as collateral, Sparatacadabra allows you to borrow Lamba, a stable coin that you can swap into any other assets, such as more SPA. Unlocking wsSPA liquidity improves your capital efficiency
- If you go full degen you can take a leverage position on collateral, borrow more lambda and bond into SPA and stake, so call the (9. 9). taking on a leverage position is high risk and please DYOR before doing this!
- you can bond into SPA with Lambda/Charm-USDC LP or so many other things such as wFTM, yvTokens, crvLP tokens, gOhm, wMemo, etc.
As you can see we are basically solving the capital efficiency problem. i honestly believe this is our core mission and this will be our differentiator in the long run. There is so much to do or improve on what we have.
To add on that, we are strong believer of community. And we set out to do things a little differently than most other projects. We are firm believers of no bs fair launch. This will be the case for all our future projects. fair for all.
Q: You recently partnered with Rubic. How do you think it’ll benefit Spartacus in the long run?
Spartacus: Rubic approached us and we see it as an immediate win-win. Rubic allows anyone to trade SPA across chain, and it handles all the bridging issue for user. In the long term it really opens it up to a much broader community base.
Q: Speaking of community, I noticed you guys seem to emphasize social media and specially Youtube to market the project. Do you believe targeting different social media could be a key to your long term success?
Arcus Sigma: Our initial effort has been more focused on Youtube specifically for the launch of Spartacadabra, many investors are new to the concept of capital efficiency in locked liquidity, such as the so-called 9,9 strategy that Spartacadabra is enabling us to deliver to the ecosystem. As such, we felt Yotube would be the preferred medium to educate our investors on how to take advantage and participate in this product launch.
All channels where our community is present are important to us. Discord has been another important medium for us, where we rapidly grew over 17k members, Twitter is another channel where our marketing team will be doubling efforts and counting on the community to do so. Crypto Twitter is the defacto standard for social crypto and where the news travel faster, we have plans to launch community contests both to reward our active contributors and as well as to have a bigger reach on this platform.
Overall, personally, I like to build relationships with influencers that truly believe in what we are doing and want to support us and our vision on Defi, so far I believe we have been successful in that and it showed in the huge success of the liquidity bootstrap event for Spartacadabra. Many of our youtube partners are already doing follow up videos on Spartacus.finance, and will be covering the launch of Spartacababra as well. We understand very well the importance of continued communication and education to our existing and new investors, to drive and propel the project forward, and plan to do so in all the platforms that matter for crypto and DeFi.
Q: What are some of your goals before the end of the year?
Spartacus: There is a lot of work to do but to make it simple:
- Full roll out of Spartacadabra
- Implementation of Spartacus treasury strategies
- Overall improvement on Spartacus UIUX (calculator and others)
- Bonds and treasury strategy towards a better integration into OHM and TIME
- Building synergy between Spartacus and Spartacadabra
- Build community. Build team. Enable people and community
Q: Yesterday the market crashed. What are your strategies in case we find ourselves in a bear market in the near future?
Spartacus: On the market cycle (bear vs bull): we have been through the cycles several times. My honest answer is, it doesn’t matter. The technology is already here and we are like in early internet age or early mobile internet age. Lots of interesting things including the defi infrastructures are going to be built in the next couple years. The cycle doesn’t matter. We will just BUIDL. (in fact its much easier to focus on doing actual work in a bear market).
Q: You just mentioned an integration into OHM and TIME. How will that work?
Spartacus: There was a tweet from Zeus earlier which basically says owning assets of each other creates positive economic externalities. To me, it works like a leverage, for Spartacus treasury to own gOhm or wMemo, allowing Olympus or Wonderland community to own shares of Spartacus via bonding into SPA. This adds value to our treasury as well as to theirs.
Also, if we accept MIM bonds it will also drive more lending on Abracadabra protocols and generate more fees for them. Our treasury grows => fees on Abra. A similar synergy between Spartacus and Spartacadabra.
Community Questions:
Q: How are going to diversified the Treasure so it can have a steady flow?
Spartacus: Treasury investment is a must.
- I think it bears the name “Treasury” for a reason. It’s supposed to be ever-growing like a national treasury or social security fund. at this point we are more inclined to stick with risk-free assets and earn stable yields. Our understanding is that treasury should not take on speculative trades.
- Treasury allocation should be strategic. On the high level we will try to integrate into the OHM or TIME ecosystem and we would like to diversify into gOhm, wMemo, MIM etc.
- On the implementation side, we will prepare contracts for treasury allocations, for the safety reason of course. you can’t just withdraw treasury assets to a hot wallet and yield farm from there. It needs to be done in a safe and secure way. This is on our priority list once the Spartacadabra is fully launched.
Q: is Spartacus and Spartacadabra the same team?
Spartacus: Yes. We announced the plan for Spartacadabra when we first started Spartacus.
Q: Tell us about yourself, your previous development experience and your general involvement in Crypto before Spartacus.
Spartacus: We are engineers, builders. We are entrepreneurs who have built startups on multiple areas on social media and even hardwares. We have been through the ICO boom in 2017 (similar to Zeus), the 2020 Defi summer and the recent NFT summer.
We launched projects earlier, mostly on yield farming and aggregator projects. The more we are in the space the more we understand how important the community is and what fair launch means. We are not against VC though. It’s just we believe bootstrapping from community is a better way.
Q: Does the SPA team have any other use cases for the protocol in mind ? Have you considered adding a zap feature? What do you guys think about releasing/replenish LAMADA the same way you released charm with a LBP/adding a maximum amount borrowed. This would disincentive bots
Spartacus: There are tons around treasury strategy. The earnings of the treasury can do a lot of things, without eating into the treasury principles, for example it can also be used to sponsor a whole new launch pad to grow Spartacus ecosystem.
Zap is part of UIUX improvement plans and yes its under considersation. On Lambda, I think it would be hard to battle bots in general. We will make it as fair as possible. To ensure that the system does not go over the collateral red line, there will be limits on how much you can borrow in the initial launch phase. This is for the safety for all of us.
Q: Are you planning on expanding the dev team?
Spartacus: Yes, we are. It’s not easy to find experienced Solidity devs as you know its probably the hottest job on earth right now. But if you are interested in joining, willing to work hard and want to build something cool, please DM me your resume. We need front end dev with reactjs, web3js, ethersjs, and Solidity devs experienced in general Defi protocols.
Q: Enhancing treasury value is key for SPA intrinsic value and price. And currently only a few bond options are available on treasury. How will Spartacadabra enable treaasury value and growth? What other strategies do you have in mind?
Spartacus: Bond strategies will consider two main factors: strategic partnerships and diversifications. on growth, we will continue to build in these two areas:
- Product. we will continue to improve on products UIUX and the underlying economic policy to drive growth. we will also focus on building the synergy between spa and charm. as mentioned earlier, solving the inefficiency creates value for users
- Marketing. We need to let the world know more about us and the unique strengths of the Spartacus ecosystem. We have been building a marketing team/army as @Arcus_Sigma mentioned earlier. we are going all out in media outlets as well as on social media and building long term relationship with them.
Q: What inspired you to choose the Spartacus name ? Was there ever an alternative ?
Spartacus: Spartacus is the Thracian rebellion against the established Rome. Its a great metaphor as what DeFi is doing now to TradFi.
Q: What would be future of SPA look like? Do you have a quick short, medium and long-term road map to share? And from this, what contribution do you plan to make for FTM ecosystem, and crypto at a larger scale?
Spartacus: We have fully delivered our short and medium term goal so far, with the launch of spartacadabra. Solving capital efficiency is a challenging goal to us and we get so excited every time thinking about it.
On FTM ecosystem: We are early. We love fantom network. There are so many things to build here. Andre Cronje is here and we expect a lot of teams are already and will come here. We can contribute in:
- Collab with major projects on FTM and drive synergy with them. So far we work very closely with Spooky and yield farming and future plan. We recently worked with Beethoven X team on our LBP and received a lot of help from them and we are in conv for more future collab. So many other great projects on FTM now including Spiritswap who we are also actively engaged with
- We will keep building on Fantom. This is where we started. Going multi-chain is our goal as well. And we will share more plans on across chain soon.
Q: Are you planning to communicate better to the community? If so, will you do snapshots on some suggestions?
Spartacus: We will, and excuse us for not being to fully engaging with all discord discussion due to the recent launch of Spartacadabra.
On suggestions we sometimes do take a strong stance on what we believe. Sometimes we were not able to get back to community intime and its something we should improve. Near term I am thinking to enable our community and mod team to take on more responsibilites on this. We can not do this alone. We have to do this as a team.
Q: Do you have a plan in the works to go multi-chain? If so, what other EVM integrations are you looking into?
Spartacus: Yes. we will have community inputs on this as well. When we started, we wanted to launch on Polygon. Then our community voted for Fantom and here we are.
Q: Can the developers lock their $SPA for a period to give confidence to investors that we won’t get rugged?
Spartacus: Remember we did a fair launch? There is no SPA allocation for dev team. There is no shady stealth launch. No front run on the liqudity pool. No bs. We are 100% transparent. Future dev and marketing fund will come from the spartacus DAO which curerntly holds 15% SPA.
Q: Can we discuss dilution for stakers given high APYs? This matters is always on the table but I haven’t found clear and straight forward answers on how value can be preserved for stakers.
Spartacus: For the whole last week we have been focusing on discussions around dilution from bonders. It’s an interesting perspective now you are coming from high APY. High APY is a relative term. Right now, we honestly believe what we need now is more bonding, probably not at this price and this close to backing.
The system has been skewd to lacking of bonding due to the policy change last week. Intense discussion in our suggestion channel. We have been manually adjusting bcv so curb bonds, with the assumption that curbing bonds will reduce dilution from bonders. What we are seeing now is, like you mentioned, as well as combined with the current macro conditions, a retreat in price. Right now, its more staking rather than bonding + staking we believe the way to get out of this, like we mentioned eariler, is to drive growth via product and marketing, to grow our community. with proper policy setup, we are confident that we will be back to bonding + staking.
Q: Why does your github repo have less commits?
Spartacus: All contract codes are verified on chain. We will open source our front end as well and we will have community participating improving our app in general.
Q: Daniele Sesta announced today that Wonderland’s treasury “bought the dip”. Will Spartacus implement trading strategies too?
Spartacus: I think we will be able to afford such a strategy when our treasury is 10x bigger. Right now, we would focus on preserve the treasury with a more risk-free strategy.
Q: Whats SPA teams favorite OHM fork?
Spartacus: Spartacus of course.
Q: If you can put SPA in 1 sentence for the new investor, what will it be?
Spartacus: The ONLY fair launched OHM fork with over $100M treasury balance.
Q: Devs when lambo?
Spartacus: Lambda first then lambo ser.
Q: When SPA NFTs?
Spartacus: Talented designers out there, please DM me.
Q: What is the total marketing budget that been prepared to educate people? And apart from Youtube, what other platform that you think we can build the awareness of SPA?
Arcus Sigma: I find this question interesting due to the results we just had with our first DAO approved campaign. Our marketing budget is voted by the DAO, and we keep track of all expenses so that we can report them back. So far we have only requested the approval of 150 000 DAI specifically for the launch of Spartacadabra. This has generated an astonishing $6.27M! In the total raised funds from the LBE, meaning, the total amount raised by $CHARM. This makes me really proud of having the opportunity to spearhead our marketing initiatives. I was hired by the team specifically to do this and our investors can expect the delivery of these type of returns from our marketing team in the future, both for new product launches and for the education and spread of DeFi.
Q: Olympus Dao Forks vary widely due to Bond Variables and Treasury growth philosophy. What should the Spartacus staker expect in regards to platform rewards rate, bond policy and Liquidity vs risk free rate treasury growth, and will there be allocator strategies once the treasury reaches a value milestone?
Spartacus: Treasury strategies are coming. on bond variables and treasury growth. I think we have experienced multiple phases:
- First week. Initial phase where bonding > staking. Overal growth in all metrics with some dilution from bonders
- Second week with bonding < staking. Slow growth. First dip. We put in efforts on marketing and addressing community concerns with multisig
- Third week with bonding > staking. Back to growth again
- Fine tuning params with temporary price appreciation with no bonding
I think we had some really good learnings here and we will be sharing our thoughts more very soon.
Q: Will Spartacus decide to implement a multichain integration, adopting other networks market caps to incentivise stakers from other platforms?
Spartacus: Yes, multi-chain is coming too.
Q: When I check spartacus dashboard I cannot unnotice that for a price of 142 we hava backing of 117 saying the showing most of the fund is actually in trasury and the premium is low, how will this affect our holding positions as compared to other Olympus forks?
Spartacus: It means SPA is super undervalued. We still are standing on an APY with 200+ days runway. For stakers, the price doesnt change your APY if you stake for the long term.
Q: Are you going to be doxxed sooner or later?
Spartacus: Later. We are not against being doxed at all. The deeper reason is that we want our community to trust the code not us. We are proving ourselves with a track record of 100% transparency, delivery of products and fully community based.
The whole point of decentralized finance is the elimination of human factor, letting the code run by itself. We are not there yet but that is the ultimate goal of this whole #OccupyDefi movement.
Q: Why have the community only got to “meet” 1/4 Dev (Spartacus) there is alot of rumours going around, why are the other dev not brought to light to the community to calm everyone down and bring more trust?
Spartacus: We will introduce our devs soon. Probably not all of them at once but we will gradually reveal their Discord ID and Twitter handle.
Q: Has Spartacus considered partnering with layer zero to allow cross chain bridging with more security and less fees and expand our reach to other Blockchains?
Spartacus: Yes, if you are bridge project teams please contact me via DM.
Q: How do you guys plan to migrate more investors to the FTM side and educate all that new investors about the good and bad things about Defi 2.0, is so new that lots of us investors dont know about it till we bump whit a project like this one ?
Spartacus: Good question. Honestly i don’t have a good answer to this one. I urge our community members to lean in, help spread the word about Defi 2.0 and about Spartacus.
Q: Zeus talked a lot about the death spiral of having constant bonds on discount. This lead to a lot of fud in the community. What measures and concepts do you think about to prevent that happening to SPA?
Spartacus: I don’t believe he called bond discount a death spiral. He did warn about the potential tax it would bring. It’s really hard to compare OHM with SPA, not to mention Wonderland by Daniele. Each project has its own characteristics. the core question here is the balance of bonding vs staking. Spartacus will carve out a path of our own.
Q: “Team’s number #1 priority is adding a reputable 3rd party to the multisig”: any progress on this?
Spartacus: We do have a list of names we want to get to. We understand that our community is looking forward to this as much as we do. We previously listed some criteria:
- Someone with pulic credibility
- Someone with a significant stake in SPA
- Someone to bring in stratetic partnerships or advisory
We want to aim high here. We have a great opportunity to bring in some really prominent figures in here.
Q: Excepting the questions about SPA, how is the team? Are you guys staying healty and not overworking yourlself?
Spartacus: Thank you for asking! wW are definitely overworked but super excited at the same time. Can’t stop. Won’t stop.
Arcus Sigma: It’s tiring, but very satisfying when you do something you love, believe and are passionate about! Best job in the world!
Q: Long term value: What are the targets/levers for increasing runway, eventually stabilizing APY for 3,3 while reducing pricing swings (MC will eventually reduce whale action, but anything else?)?
Spartacus: We are at 200+ days. I don’t think we need to specifically target runway at this point. We need to bring back growth.
Q: You manage a 100 million dollar finance instrument. Back in the days this was only possible for corporations. Do you ever feel stressed about that responsibility?
Spartacus: This is the power of Defi. We are definitely thrilled. Ultimately, the treasury is community governed.
Q: Are the votes for CHARM currently via Snapshot? I have seen a whale with 1.1b CHARM vote for vote #1 and just dumped their tokens, clearly community voted otherwise but this one whale had too much power over governance, how will you deal according to this?
Spartacus: It’s on snapshot with Charm holders right now. This is how it works for now. Any other ideas are welcome but this is still a better way.
Q: Any plans to flesh out the docs a bit more?
Spartacus: Yeah, in about a week.
Q: What is your opinion on the community’s talk about inconsistencies in Spartacus ancient history and Greek branding?
Spartacus: We are here to build and have fun. There is part history, part myth, part tech and also there is magic like charm and Spartacadabra. We are not pursuing one historic context. Instead, consider us building across multiple parallel universes, the Metaverse.
Q: What are your thoughts on this (low price premium) and how does SPA plan to reach the price-to-backing it deserves (which is likely at least that of wonderland)?
Spartacus: We need to get back to growth. I think I just answered in a previous question. We will be focusing on product and marketing, and execution of both.
Our socials:
