Today we have the chance to welcome Dydymoon.lens, a very influential participant in the french speaking DeFi eco-system. In this exclusive interview, we will cover how he got into crypto, how he started interacting with multiple DAOs, how he sees the future of DAOs, which project he is active in, and many more. Read along! As usual, none of this is financial advice.
[SurferInvestor] Hi Dydymoon and big thanks for taking the time. Could you please briefly introduce yourself?
[Dydymoon.lens] Sure and thanks for having me. You can call me Dydy by the way! I studied accounting. So I am not a coder. I was having a regular 9-5 job until I joined crypto in 2018, right after the 2017 bull run correction. There is not a particular story about how I went to crypto first. A friend told me to look into the space as great things are being built. And I stayed. It took me around two years to quit my job. But I finally went down the DeFi Rabbithole when Covid hit. Never looked back since.
[SurferInvestor] Oh great – so just in time for DeFi Summer right?
[Dydymoon.lens] Not exactly when DeFi Summer started but a bit earlier. It was a fantastic time when things were quieter. It was easy to discuss with great builders. I spent all my time listening to content and learning from people such as Marc Zeller, Crypto Matrix, and Manu Redpills. At the time, they were animating a vocal on CM Discord each Monday, which moved on Twitch a few months later. That’s how I discovered Aave and started contributing to the project by following the governance and later on, by writing proposals.
[SurferInvestor] Understood, so you got most of your DeFi knowledge by hanging out with those people correct?
[Dydymoon.lens] Mostly, but not entirely. I don’t know if you remember but there was this ~200 pages .pdf from Coingecko about how DeFi works. I still recall myself reading it in one night and then asking tons of questions. I was surprised by how helpful people were on this Discord. Shootout to Pascal from Jarvis, TokenBrice, and Marc Zeller among others who helped me a lot to get along with all the DeFi concepts in 2020 before DeFi even really existed.
[SurferInvestor] Nice – did you also contribute to Jarvis Network?
[Dydymoon.lens] Yes, I connected Jarvis and Beefy teams to create auto-compounding strategies for Jarvis LP on Beefy finance and I wrote a few proposals on Jarvis DAO including some to implement Jarvis x Beefy or Interest Bearing Tokens (IBTs) on APWine.
[SurferInvestor] Sounds good! You are also one of the guys who created the famous all-rumored airdrop file correct? Where did the idea come from?
[Dydymoon.lens] Yes! In the beginning, we created this document with JeanBrasse and ManuRedPills for us to easily keep track of the new protocols and potential airdrops. Starny and Stengarl joined us quickly after to help maintain the document and the Discord where we publish doc updates and new airdrops, here is the link
We decided to make the doc public after the Ribbon airdrop unfair distribution as we felt this could be improved for other projects and it would be overall beneficial for the DeFi community to have as many people as possible having access to this document.
Sure, some of them dump, but at the end of the day, some other people hold and contribute to projects they received an airdrop from. That’s also one of the reasons why we shared this file.
[SurferInvestor] Airdrops, Contributor, NFT enthusiast; this sounds like an 80h/week job. Are there other things you manage to do?
[Dydymoon.lens] Actually there is! *Laugh* So besides contributing and being a delegate on Paladin, being a contributor of APWine DAO, and updating the airdrop file, I keep following and participating in the Aave governance through Llama, which is a contributor collective that works with DAOs on different aspects. I also try to follow other DAOs such as Paraswap, Jarvis, Luchadores, and new projects/ecosystems like Lens.
[Dydymoon.lens] I am a fan of the DAO concept. Yes, there are a lot of things to fix, but it’s getting there.
[SurferInvestor] Interesting, let’s look into DAOS for a bit. How do you feel about DAOs in general?
[Dydymoon.lens] I think we are at the beginning of what DAOs can be. I’m a huge fan of the model where the token holders can actually take the decisions for the protocol. Even if the participation is quite low in most DAOs, I think there are a lot of improvements every day: there are more and more tools to coordinate and simplify governance participation, but also the popularisation of delegates, and reward of the contributors. I am impressed each day with how DAOs progress, get better at decisions and learn from each other. The way Optimism or Gitcoin pushed people to delegate and their airdrop criteria were great examples.
[SurferInvestor] I must say after talking with you for over 90 mins, I still cannot qualify with a simple word or job title what you do. What does your standard day look like?
[Dydymoon.lens] It’s hard to qualify as I do different tasks. My main focus is governance as mentioned earlier, but I like to work on partnerships and synergies between different projects too. I’m also interacting a lot with the community through calls, forums, etc…
One important thing is that I try to avoid being full-time on one specific project otherwise I might lack time for following the space or just for technological watch. If I look into a normal day, I would say that I spend one part of it within DAOs I am active in, another part following project I like and their governance and finally, I try to stay updated with the ecosystem. For example, for the last couple of weeks, I have followed the development of Lens Protocol and people building on top of Lens, such as Lenster, TeaParty, Lenstube, Tide Protocol and Orb.
[SurferInvestor] Thanks a lot for finding time to speak with us. We wish you all the best. Both for you and the projects you are supporting! How can people reach out if they have a proposal that might interest you?
[Dydymoon.lens] No problem, it was my pleasure! People can reach out to me on Twitter, Lenster, or hit me up on Discord, especially on the Paladin and Airdrop Rumors Discord!
