Minotaur’s Response to the Wonderland Fiasco
Greetings! Today, we are checking in to give Minotaur’s perspective on the “Wonderland Fiasco” that is currently unfolding in the world of DeFi. For those who don’t know, we forked our DAO’s code from Wonderland Money, and we also use some of the same foundational principles, such as the central DAO structure and the concept of acting as a decentralized VC.
However, it is now apparent that “0xSifu,” the “CFO of Frog Nation,” is actually a notorious criminal named Michael Patryn aka Omar Dhanani, who among other financial crimes was one of the principals in QuadrigaCX, a Canadian centralized exchange that “lost” 9 figures in customer funds. He has evidently been transferring money out of the Wonderland treasury, sometimes for shady purposes and sometimes directly to his own account. The CEO of Wonderland, Daniele S, knew about Dhanani’s past crimes but employed Dhanani as CFO anyway and kept it under wraps.
Unfortunately, when something like this happens in a large organization such as Wonderland, it puts a stain on all of DeFi, all anonymous creators, and especially those of us who use the DAO structure. Unfortunately, the code of Olympus DAO and all of its forks until now have given the admin wallet the full ability to conduct unlimited treasury withdrawals. As we have seen with Wonderland, even putting the treasury behind a multisignature wallet is no guarantee against malfeasance.
Because community trust has been violated by a previously trusted name, even though our project has not had any treasury withdrawals yet, the Minotaur Money team feels that we should reassure our community of several basic principles, and announce some new policy as well.
First off, the Minotaur Money team hereby promises that we will always take some kind of community vote for at least 24 hours before initiating any treasury withdrawal. Furthermore, we promise to abide by the results of such votes.
Second, we reassure the community that we will not use any treasury funds, which the community has voted into any reinvestment arrangement and therefore already withdrawn from the treasury, to enrich ourselves. This reassurance applies to the use of funds after they have been withdrawn from the treasury.
Third, we promise to keep the community informed of the on-chain destination of any such treasury funds which the community has voted into a reinvestment arrangement, so that they can be monitored to ensure proper use of funds.
Fourth, although we remain an anonymous team, we can now reveal our previous projects and our track record for honest dealings. We have released several past projects under the banner of Sugandese Tokens, including the PolyWantsACracker, Stadium Arcadium, Darkside Finance, and Stone Temple Binance yield farms and our Over-the-Counter (OTC) trading, Lootcrate, and Slot Machine Dapps. Those previous projects’ tokens do not exactly have mooning charts, but that tends to be the case with yield farms, and we have always run an honest, level playing field with no rug pulls. You can try out our Dapps on Polygon or BSC if you want to try out a lootcrate, slot machine, or OTC trade. Our contracts have always had large amounts of custom code, but we have never had a contract exploited!
We can also now reveal that the team has devised a new type of DAO system that we think will not be susceptible to the issues we see affecting Wonderland. The situation calls for fundamental solutions to the central problems with DAOs, namely admin control over the treasury and token supply inflation. That new system is called MiniPanther.
MiniPanther is a DAO that is bound by the code to allow supply expansion for 14 days. After that, no more supply expansion is possible from any source. We feel that this time limitation will allow participants to experience the high APR they get from DAO single staking without breaking the system. In addition, the treasury withdrawal function is disabled. This means that the administrators have no direct access to treasury funds. Instead, 80% of the non-LP treasury goes into buybacks within 24 hours of the end of supply expansion, and 20% is sent to the admin wallet. Randomly timed and sized buybacks are handled by a special admin function. After 24 hours, a publicly callable function becomes available that completes all remaining buybacks.
We hope that the idea of 14-day layered Ohm forks catches on! If we have reasonable assurance that this idea is viable, it may be possible for Minotaur Money to get more involved with the concept in the future. However, any such involvement would also involve a community vote with conflict-of-interest advisories given. We will also provide financial reports in all cases where multiple businesses become intertwined. We do not want to do anything that could even remotely be considered improper after what has happened with Wonderland.
Minotaur’s plan remains to build up a big treasury, which will then be transparently and verifiably invested to make profits for the DAO. We realize that the community now desires additional assurance about where funds are at all times, and we will provide it. My preferred answer to “What shall we do with the treasury?” is “Whatever makes us the most money.” Although our options are somewhat limited by our treasury size, we could eventually make either VC-type investments or farming investments, or both. We feel that steady growth can propel us, powered by increased adoption of people flowing onto Cronos Network.
The news for Minotaur has not slowed down, as we have several catalysts coming up soon. We are going to release a calculator page for Minotaur that shows your stakes and APR on both Minotaur and MMF in one convenient screen. We will also be increasing desktop compatibility with the CDC DeFi Wallet browser extension. We will also be releasing a set of Minotaur NFTs for our community to show their spirit and identify each other in public cyberspace!
We are also looking forward to many more medium- and long-term developments for Minotaur, such as the release of an additional p2e NFT game that is now in development. We will not be releasing any long-term DAOs other than Minotaur Money, so Minotaur will receive all of our DAO development strategies, a full compliment of ancillary projects, and our best reinvestment strategies. We also hope to expand our staff and significantly increase the rate of releases!
Thank you for reading about Minotaur’s plans! We will have more to share with you shortly. Many cheers!
