What happens in Marrakesh doesn’t stay in Marrakesh
Background
At Alluo, our mission is to bring DeFi to everyone and to do that, we want to make earning in DeFi incredibly simple.
With that in mind, we have always felt it was important to have as diverse a team as possible, with people living across the globe, giving us different perspectives on how finance and money are working (and not working) for them.
Why we wanted to meet
Given that we have team members from South Korea all the way to Brazil, we have always felt like it was essential for us to meet in person at least a few times per year.
0xtuytuy and 0xec’s previous venture was scaled during the early phase of Covid so we were never worried about working primarily remotely but even then, we also tried to meet at least a few times a year.
As we crossed 10 contributors, we felt like now was a good time to do the first gathering :)
Why Marrakesh
Well, that is a good question, what we wanted was a place:
- Where we could bring everyone, taking into consideration that we have nearly as many passport types as team members (even most of our contributors based in the UK for instance are not British).
- Which wasn’t going to be overly expensive — the last few months in crypto have been challenging as everyone knows so we wanted to remain cost conscious (including flights, ie it’s all good and well picking a relatively inexpensive location but if everyone’s flights are going to be 1k each it’s not going to work).
Taking into account these different elements, Marrakesh emerged as an obvious place where we could be all under one roof for a reasonable price including flights.
Additionally, Morocco is the most unbanked country in the world in the percentage of the population with a bank account. What a fitting place to re-imagine what the future of Finance looks like.
The week before we arrived, we noticed that the average temperature was in excess of 40°C (104°F) which is probably why it wasn’t very expensive in the first place 😅
Sooo.. what happened
Most of the team members flew on Monday the 8th of August (08/08, if that’s not a good omen I don’t know what is), with the actual meetings taking place from Tuesday to Thursday, with people flying back on Friday and Saturday.
Here is a full list of the workshops and topics that were discussed:
Tuesday
AM
- Intros
- Session 1: Recap of the lessons learned over the last 6 months (Luna /UST anyone)
- Session 2: Banking — evolution from old TradFi to fintech to defi
PM
- Session 3: Decentralised finance — market and customers
- Breakout 1: Greenfield ideation — what is wrong with current banking and what are the use cases that can be fixed with blockchain
Wednesday
AM
- Session 4: Introduction to the blockchain, smart contracts
- Breakout 2: Create and deploy a new token from scratch
PM
- Team building activity: scavenger hunt in Marrakesh
Thursday
AM
- Session 5: What is the future: Product and Service Design Part 1
PM
- Breakout 3: Split into teams to design user journey, operational journey, and distribution of a new product
- Session 6: Product and Service Design Part 2
You may wonder why we had sessions on Defi for instance to bring Defi to everyone, we believe it is important to have contributors who come from the fintech space and haven’t been in Defi for the last 3 years. They are bringing a wealth of knowledge and experience on what good UX looks like, mix it with real Degens who care about self-governance and non-custodial and we believe you have the Dream Team.
With that in mind, we wanted to organise these sessions to make sure everyone was on the same page regarding the latest developments in each of those fields.
What happens next?
Accelerate our user research efforts
We have now partnered with https://usertesting.com to increase the scope of our user testing, given that we want to reach out to a broad community of users that isn’t necessarily aware of crypto.
Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing more of the findings from this user research in a new Discord forum channel called voice of the customer we are looking forward to hearing more ideas and contributions to the product roadmap from the community.
Continue our efforts on the on/off ramp side
We see this as the number one barrier for adoption with the current on/off ramp partners not delivering a great UX that creates trust.
The cost of bringing funds on/off-chain also continues to be high around 1–3% which is challenging in a world where it may take a few months of yield to make this fee back.
We are working with new partners to bring a 10x cheaper option with a 10x better user experience. More details to come soon.
Work more closely with other protocols and DAOs to increase our TVL in the short term
We have already started to work more closely with Superfluid and others. We will be announcing more of these partnerships in the next few weeks and months.
We believe we can surface other protocols in our mobile app to allow them to gain greater exposure to a different set of users.
For DAOs, the ability to stream yield-bearing tokens to their contributors should also be interesting as a way to realise savings — see our medium post on this topic here.
Evolve our tokenomics
Current $ALLUO token economics is redistributing value to all $ALLUO token holders without incentivising Locking or Voting. This, to some extent, increase the selling pressure on the $ALLUO token rather than incentivising people to buy it so they can get a direct benefit.
We have some thoughts on how we would like to evolve the tokenomics and redistribute more tangible to Alluo lockers, ensuring that lockers and voters get rewarded more directly versus those who are simply holding the Alluo token in their wallets.
We will discuss these with the community to get their feedback and will look to implement the changes during September if there is support for the proposed changes.
Conclusion
Overall Marrakesh was a great success, the team is more united than ever behind our mission. All the ideas that came out of the different sessions are now being “productised” we will then share this roadmap with the rest of the community and it will be posted publicly.
As always we strongly believe that building in a transparent and decentralised way is the best way forward. We are hoping that the community keeps us accountable for our progress.
We would like to close this blog by announcing our next Community Call on Thursday 1st September at 1200 GMT
