Degens for Hire: Based.Money Is Launching Moonbase, a Place for DeFi Projects to Find Community

BASED has a new method for aligning decentralized finance (DeFi) projects with each other. At its core is a smart contract called Moonbase, CoinDesk has learned. 

Based.Money is a project of the Ghouls, a loose consortium of crypto developers, artists, designers and meme makers. Friday night, the outfit will release its newest project since BASED, the rebasing game dropped this summer during the boom of Weird DeFi. 

Based.Money is a game that riffs on Ampleforth’s rebasing mechanic, where it makes a daily readjustment in the supply of BASED tokens, adjusting the amount in everyone’s wallet. It’s a game of optimizing for the right time to get in and get out. 

But Moonbase is a bit more serious. As the project’s pseudonymous proximal leader, Based Money God, told CoinDesk over Jitsi:

"What we're all about is creating a fair launch movement. An ecosystem of projects that are self-sustaining and don't require traditional venture capital or institutional investment in order to succeed. We want to create a collaborative space of builders in which we all benefit.

Read more: How DeFi ‘Degens’ Are Gaming Ethereum’s Money Legos

Fair launches are a way to get lots of people involved in a new DeFi project without relying on traditional seed capital. Yearn.Finance is often credited for popularizing the term after announcing a governance token and a way for liquidity providers (LPs) to earn them without setting tokens aside for anyone else, even the creator. 

“Most of these DeFi projects aren’t inherently decentralized. They are inherently skewed or biased because VCs back them,” Based Money God said. “When these projects raise, the VC allocations have a disproportionate amount of tokens.” 

A new alliance

Moonbase creates a way that new projects can offer tribute to the BASED community such that they have an incentive to back, promote and support the new project for at least a year. It could almost be called community mining. 

“You can see the power of our community because our memes are dope and our messaging is cool,” Based Money God said. “Moonbase, the intent, socially, is trying to help these projects and bootstrap community and aligning themselves to Based.” 

It might also be thought of hiring the Based community, in a way. Some crypto projects hire PR firms; some will hire the memesters of the Moonbase. 

Read more: Yearn, YAM and the Rise of Crypto’s ‘Weird DeFi’ Moment

So how does it work? 

DeFi projects that want to get degenerate will mint a new smart contract called a Rover. Each Rover will be distinct for each project. The core idea of a Rover is that any assets that go in it will go through a yearlong unlocking period (so if 365 DAI went in, the last DAI would unlock at the end of a year).

As the underlying assets get unlocked, they will get swapped for BASED and be sent to the Moonbase, rewarding everyone participating there proportionally.

Basically, Moonbase is another smart contract where anyone can put in BASED and get back mbBASED, which represents a proportional share of BASED in the contract (like Compound’s cTokens).

That means mbBASED holders will want any assets in Rovers to grow in value. However, the alignment is meant to go further. 

A project can put anything they want in a Rover with any logic they want. They could throw 1,000 ETH into a Rover and send the Moonbase a message that just said “Please help,” but that’s not actually how the Ghouls foresee it working. 

Instead, they expect projects will create special liquidity vaults for mbBASED that will have their own formulas for earning liquidity mining rewards, and earnings for that pool wouldn’t go to the depositor but to the Rover. 

Read more: Uniswap’s Distribution Is Built on Something That Can’t Be Forked: Actual Users

So, imagine a decentralized exchange called RDEX that launched this way. It could set up an mbBASED-DAI pool where half the mining rewards (RBT, say?) go to the depositor (for the DAI) and half the rewards go to REDEX Rover. 

“It’s like a tribute to Based God,” Based Money God said. 

By setting it up this way, the project has an incentive to try to really grab the attention of Moonbase depositors, because no rewards go to the Rover if no one deposits. This is why they are called Rovers. 

“The Rover is bringing things back to the moonbase,” Based Money God said.

The Moonbase has an incentive to drive value to RBT, because eventually that RBT will turn into more BASED for the Moonbase.

Finally, anyone can set up a Rover. It’s permissionless. But obviously, there’s a need to get the attention of the Moonbase. 

So, there will be a page on Snapshot where projects can submit what they are doing and the community will vote on one question or another: “Is it BASED?”

The vote has no impact on the smart contract. On a technical level, it does nothing, but it might be the most important step. 

Said Based Money God:

"If you want that social validation, if you want to really take advantage of the social advantages of our community, you need to present to our community. There needs to be a ceremony."

Watch the Twitter account because Moonbase opens tonight. Actual DeFi projects will launch Rovers over the weekend and the smart contract that makes it easy for others to do the same will follow. 

“We are writing out a manifesto,” Based Money God said. “BASED is whatever the community decides is based.”