FounderJabba Series — SalsaDAO

This is the one you’ve been waiting for.

Hello friends, first I would like to say thank you for supporting the pre-sale and successfully bootstrapping funds for the development of SpicySwap! The pre-sale is still ongoing, so you still have the chance to purchase $SPI on SalsaDAO.

If you missed the article on SpicySwap, you can find it here.

Following the success of the pre-sale, you all have earned a little bit of spicy doxx, straight from the source. Let’s get started.

Background

If you’ve seen the pace of the work that I’ve been releasing on mainnet over the past few months, you may think I’m a head-down software developer who lives deep in the code. This is true, but it’s really just one of the different hats I wear as a computer engineer at my day job. On Tezos I’ve mostly been building projects, but more of my work experience is in leading projects.

I did the “do-it-all developer” thing early in my career but transitioned into a team lead pretty quickly, and then moved up further into leading multiple teams and projects at the same time. I’ve learned over the years that I can make more impact leading these projects than just working on them.

Most of my experience was gained leading enterprise-level applications at a large financial institution. To summarize, people on the executive board and division leaders were my “customers” and my job was to create digital applications that helped them make big-time decisions. My experience also includes running high-traffic applications at enterprise scale. I’d like to add that I wasn’t just leading the technology side of these projects, this included project management work as well.

Here’s a short list of things I’ve done, on top of development work: stakeholder negotiations, project timelines/estimations, developer mentoring, interviews, even a some UI design (I swear!). It was pretty crazy, and maybe too much, but I had a good time doing it and learned a ton. This is the experience I will now be bringing to my Tezos work, and what will really take us to the moon.

So, to any potential investors: you aren’t just investing in the one who audits your favorite dApps and created a DEX in three weeks. You’re investing in the one who can also run everything at an enterprise level. That leads us to the next section, an outline for tasks coming up in the short-term.

Next Steps

The SalsaDAO ecosystem is in dire need of a back-end uplift and major optimizations. I’ve had them on the back-burner for a while and I think it’s time to take a step back and work through the details. The good thing is that the Tezos tooling ecosystem moves very fast, and I have a great new tool that is going to make things much better: DipDup. That’s a major part of the coming optimizations, the other major part is moving the infrastructure to cloud.

While the back-end enhancements are being done, I’ll be engaging with UI teams as well as reaching out to an audit team for SpicySwap. So by the time the UI designer finishes up, our infrastructure will be as smooth as the UI. I’ll also be working on redeploying the swap contracts on Granada to measure gas savings, and adding a router contract for SpicySwap. This will enable slippage control for our DEX. I also want to set up the beta-testing arbitrage game I have coming up. The farming architecture needs to be deployed as well.

Some dApp updates are also in store. In sCasino, I’ll be releasing new $GSAL exclusive games. This will be a “field-test” to get these games ready for wider use. This effort will support a major project in the sCasino road-map: the SalsaDAO Grand Unified Casino. More details on that later in the article. In the taco shop, I’ll be adding some slots that you can use $RSAL and $wTaco to play. Slots will be designed to have a much faster playing experience than the casino, with the ability to batch spins for maximum jackpot-chasing. Also, there will be more ways to search and display tacos once the back-end optimizations are done.

This is a good bit of work, and I’m targeting 6–8 weeks to get this finished. Most of the hard contract stuff is already designed, and I’ll have much more time for crypto soon. At the end of this development period we will be well-positioned to finish testing and finalize the SpicySwap UI, which will be the final piece in the puzzle. I plan to do weekly development updates on Taco Tuesdays so you all can track development as well.

$sDAO Tokenomics Note

I’m aiming to find more targeted use for $sDAO rewards, rather than just rewarding those with the most funds. One major thing I want to do is reward those who’ve been the most helpful and active in the SalsaDAO ecosystem. I lurk basically all the time so I have some people in mind, but I’ll also be leaning on community members to help me reward the most deserving of Taco Chads. More to come! Now let’s get into the juicy stuff.

SalsaDAO 2022 Roadmap and Product Ecosystem

Hopefully you enjoyed the article up to this point. The final part will outline the SalsaDAO 2022 Roadmap, showing our target product ecosystem and what features will be included. This part will build hype, but please remember things are in flux and this our target.

SpicySwap and more DeFi primitives

SpicySwap

This is our main project. FA2 token-token DEX, $SPI farming, LP investing, Flash Swaps, Price Oracle. Article

Paprika.finance (working title)

This is our planned in-house DeFi platform offering. We would work with interested projects to bootstrap DeFi services for them. The project owners would provide the tokens for rewards, users stake $PAPR to receive them. Then on the SpicySwap side, we create a farm that incentivizes their new liquidity pool by emitting new $PAP tokens.

The killer feature for this DeFi platform is that it’s DEX-affiliated; this removes a lot of human error and cross-project friction. Going further, my aim is to have an algorithmic buyback/burn system for the $PAPR token, enabled by SpicySwap’s price oracles. This means we’ll be able to mathematically prove that the buybacks are balancing the emissions, benefiting all users of our platform. This architecture will alleviate many of the classic DeFi platform fears, because the rules will be etched directly into the contract and presented to the user, up-front.

Future Lending Project

After reading through the contracts for the biggest DeFi projects on Ethereum, I went for DEX over lending first. But this is definitely in my mind as a future project to integrate into the DeFi arm of SalsaDAO.

SalsaDAO Galleries

Galleries

I’m aiming to create a decentralized NFT gallery. The gallery would contain multiple collections, and each collection which would contain multiple artworks. A collection can include NFTs from any platform in the Tezos ecosystem; this is the main feature of SalsaDAO Galleries.

For example there could be a Hicetnunc or Kalamint-based collection, but hopefully artworks from multiple Tezos-based NFT platforms will get unified into collections owned by smaller groups.

Leaderboard

These collections will exist for promotional purposes, community votes will push a collection to the top. Artworks would have links out to artists’ pages so interested users can discover more art, and artists can reach more users on whatever platform they mint on!

Collections on the leaderboard will be manageable as well, meaning a collection’s owners can promote different artists’ work dynamically while they’re on the leaderboard. Furthermore, fractionalizing these collections can enable art collective “DAO” shares that can be bought and sold on the free market. The aim here is to give artists more ways to advertise and be discovered on Tezos. We have a vibrant art community on Tezos and I’d like to create tools to support it.

SalsaDAO Treasury NFTs

I’m looking to start a SalsaDAO Treasury NFT collection as well, which will be highlighted in the Galleries. In the future, SalsaDAO holders will make decisions on art purchases, auctions, and displays!

Game Theory as a Service

This final part is very experimental, but I’m exploring “game-theory-as-a-service” to help non-DeFi projects bootstrap a project base.

In my opinion, mixing DeFi and art/games is a bit painful during a project’s initial stage, because many users will simply view the project as an investment. Skipping DeFi and using new NFTs in combination with RNG and time-based functionality can enable more complex but cheap interactions in a non-DeFi project’s new ecosystem.

The aim of “GTaaS” is to bootstrap user interest and keep it over time, and then integrate DeFi later. For example, this would be a good way to build a list of dedicated users for a new governance token airdrop. This is something I still have to think a lot about, but something like this would be a cool inclusion for the NFT side of SalsaDAO.

SalsaDAO Gaming

sCasino

As mentioned above, we will be field-testing new games with $GSAL and updating the sCasino UI and playing experience. This is all in effort for the long-term sCasino solution, called the SalsaDAO Grand Unified Casino. I really like the omni-bankroll, but the problem is that any new game would split the bankroll too deeply. So I’ll be working towards a unified experience where the omni-bankroll still exists, but the games will be dynamic.

This means I’ll be able to add new games into the sCasino and they will be immediately playable with any currency. Any bankroll, any game. I’m very excited about this. More games will lead to new cosmetics and badges for users as well. (I know I’m lagging on badges, but I need updated infrastructure to do it right.)

SalsaStrike (Working Title):

This is a game idea that I’ve been keeping under wraps for a while. Some parts of this game have actually been tested within other SalsaDAO dApps. It’s going to be a shooter mini-game where you can have head-to-head gun duels with friends, randoms, or against a hard-hitting CPU. Each match will require a bet to be put at stake.

This game is inspired by Counter-Strike and will have tactics involved, so I want to emphasize that it’s not just an RNG game. The main tactical element will be your “utility”. You’ll get to pick a piece of utility (think flash-bang or smoke grenade) that the opponent doesn’t know about until the match starts. Then when the battle starts, each side throws their utility, which applies modifiers to things like accuracy and head-shot percentage.

The base game is cool, but the best feature will be gun skins. These will be attainable by just playing, as there will be a random skin drop chance for both players after each game. Otherwise, some skins can be directly purchased. Over time new skins will be released, and we will have a deep rarity system. Furthermore, the skins will exist as FA2 NFTs, meaning you can show them off in Galleries and… trade in skin markets. Neon AK-47 when?

DAO

For the DAO, I’m really just waiting on Homebase but I may just fork and customize it. Still, I need enterprise-grade security on the SalsaDAO Treasury and the general DAO voting process, so I’ll be consulting auditors and community pillars for this one. Otherwise, $sDAO will always be the voting token going forward. Sorry about $sVote, let’s not bring that up again.

In the short-term future I’ll be requesting input from SalsaDAO holders on UI design, casino games, rewards, and collaborations. Looking forward to it!

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Well, that’s it for the projects. Those projects I listed aren’t just random ideas I came up with today. These are the projects I think are feasible to create and will generate the most value and impact for SalsaDAO over time.

Much more to come. I just want to say, I’m having a great time doing this and I’m going to strive to repay your trust. You all created this. Thank you for doing so.

All roads lead to $sDAO.

- Arri

PS: Yes I’m quitting my day job. Will confirm soon.