Governance Council Members

Note: You will probably notice that over a month has passed since the original council post. We’d like to assure you it’s not for a lack of progress! Recruiting potential council members during the dog days of summer has proven to be challenging, particularly since we were trying to attract busy, high-caliber individuals (more on that below).


This post is a follow-up on the previous Governance Council post, Governance Council.

Fortunately, with the support from the community to launch a Governance Council, we are ready to move forward with the next stage of this discussion — selecting the initial slate of Council Members!

As a reminder, Council Members will play an important role in Orca’s governance process. To do the job well, we think it’s important that Council Members share several qualities: (i) they have deep experience in crypto and are well-familiarized with Orca, (ii) they have the bandwidth to carry out their responsibilities in a timely fashion, and (iii) they have a high-integrity reputation and character. We think these qualities are the building blocks of a capable and well-rounded Council.

As every active DAO community member knows, attracting individuals with these qualities is difficult. To make the process a bit smoother for everyone, we decided to contact industry leaders that we think can best serve the interests of Orca throughout the Council’s initial 12-month term. We think each individual possesses the desired qualities, and, — and this part is critical — has expressed enthusiasm about being an Orca Council Member. We’ve included the list of these individuals a bit further below. It is important to note that the Orca community will be able to remove and replace any Council Member at any time throughout the initial term and all subsequent terms thereafter.

In addition to the aforementioned qualities, these individuals have been recommended due to their background in various crypto-related fields (e.g DAOs, DeFi, legal) that we believe collectively form a well-founded Council equipped with the tools necessary to help drive significant and strategic decisions regarding Orca’s future.

While we stand by this initial list, we want this process to be open and guided by the community. After all, the Council will be appointed by the community to serve the best interests of Orca and its stakeholders. We think community members should be able to self-nominate to serve on the initial Council term. This forum post will therefore serve as a platform for interested members to nominate themselves.

In the previous post, we also discussed adding a Secretary role to the Council following community input (thanks @Cortina!). This post may also serve as an opportunity for community members interested in this role to nominate themselves. The Secretary will serve as a liaison between the Council and Community, attending Council meetings and sharing updates with the community as a means of improving transparency and accountability.

Nominations for both Council and Secretary can be submitted as comments below, and we ask that they include the following:

  • Brief background and professional experience
  • Experience with Orca and Crypto in general
  • Experience in Governance (e.g. participation in other protocols, roles in other DAOs)
  • Unique skills that will benefit Council decision-making
  • How will you represent the best interests of the Orca community?

All comments will be considered and should be reviewed by the community. The hope is for community members to both submit nominations and actively participate in assessing others, including the initial candidates below. Ultimately, the goal is for us to agree on the best possible slate of Council members to launch this program. Once we get a sense for it together, Reverie will propose a final slate of initial Council Members to the community before moving forward with a formal vote.

Finally, we’d like to note that the transition to community control of Orca contracts comes with many risks. Whether it be attacks or innocent mistakes, the community should be extremely cautious when handling proposals and appointing Council members. To that end, we believe that all Council members should be vetted as trusted individuals with alignment to Orca’s best interests.

We look forward to hearing feedback from the community on this initial list of Council candidates, and seeing new nominations from interested Orca community members! To keep the process moving, we think it makes sense to add some sort of artificial deadline for nominations. To that end, we’d strongly encourage all nominations to be submitted within the next couple of weeks, by Wednesday September 28th.


Initial Council Member Candidates

Dominic Tsang
Business Development, Solana Foundation
Leading Business Development for Solana through the Foundation for 4 years, with experience collaborating across multiple Solana partners and protocols. Previously worked across different crypto related protocols (Oasis Labs, Thunder Token).

Hart Lambur
Founder, UMA Protocol
Co-founded UMA, a decentralized financial contracts platform built to enable Universal Market Access. Hart studied computer science before working as an interest rate trader at Goldman Sachs through the financial crisis. In 2013 he co-founded Openfolio, a personal finance tracking platform that was acquired in 2017 by a financial planning firm. He now leads a team of financial contract and oracle design researchers at UMA.

Lakshman Sankar
0xParc & Personae Labs
Previously ecosystem development and R&D at the Ethereum Foundation working on Eth2.0/the merge and ZKP R&D. Currently building new identity primitives at Personae Labs.

Larry Sukernik
Founder, Reverie
Larry is the co-founder of Reverie, a DAO focused advisory firm working with different crypto protocols. Prior to Reverie, Larry led investments at Digital Currency Group for 3 years.

Chris Montagano
General Counsel, Orca
Business-focused attorney with broad experience advising management teams and boards on governance and other matters, including over 50 strategic transactions (such as IPOs and M&A deals) exceeding $10B in aggregate value.

Min Teo
Partner, Ethereal Partners
Min Teo is the Managing Partner, Ethereal Ventures & Advisor for ConsenSys Mesh. She Previously led venture investing at ConsenSys and established EV with Joe Lubin to partner with the best global crypto founders.

Michael “tmoc” Hwang
Engineer, Orca
Software engineer with 10+ years of industry experience. Previously worked on ad serving at Google, surgical robots at Verily Life Sciences, and trading platforms at Blackrock. Currently a core contributor at Orca where he helped design and implement the Whirlpools CLAMM smart contract.

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Thanks @cbergz

This is a great list of candidates.

I’d also like to throw my hat in the ring as either a council member or for the secretary role. The requested information is provided below.

Background/professional experience:
12 years as Co-Founder and CEO of an international education company. Navigated several funding rounds and our eventual acquisition. Managed 25 employees, program operations in 8 different countries (lived abroad in a few of them), grew to 1200ish students per year. Hosted students from 600+ universities, created dozens of partnerships with NGO’s, government entities and companies.

Full-time crypto/Web3 now.

Orca/Crypto:
Learned about Bitcoin in 2011 from Fred Wilson’s AVC.com blog and have been following developments ever since. Mostly paid attention during bull markets since I was working on startup full-time. Informally advised and helped write a white paper in 2017 for a crypto company that is still around today.

Have traded and LP’ed on ORCA since relatively early days. Started contributing in Orca discord last December after noticing some discrepancies between how Raydium and Orca were calculating/advertising APY’s for LP’s.

Governance Experience:
This would be my first formal role in a DAO. In addition to ORCA, I am most interested in education focused DAOs and follow many of those efforts closely. Would love nothing more than to see crypto/Web3 disrupt and reinvent higher education and would like to eventually work on that full-time.

Unique Skills
As a former founder and CEO, I was forced to build a lot of different skills and wore many different hats as our company grew and evolved. My main focuses were curriculum/program design and revenue generation while my co-founder led operations (though we both did everything in the early days). I am good at figuring out how to do things than don’t have an existing roadmap which is part of what excites me about crypto, DAO governance and this role. People have told me I do a good job of articulating foreign and complicated subjects in a way they can easily understand. I’ve done a fair amount of public speaking at conferences/events. I have a strong finance and accounting background.

Representing Interests of Orca Community
I will be an advocate for transparency, accessibility, and education and I believe these three values can be self reinforcing.

My discord comment history offers some examples of pushing for transparency that was beneficial to the community. Orca has been outstanding relative to other projects in their transparency and regular updates to the community (which is why I am here) but there is still room to improve. I hope we can set an example for the solana ecosystem and crypto as a whole.

Orca is well positioned to onboard new users to crypto through it’s intuitive UI and friendly branding. We should lean into this strength and also make information about the Orca token and other assets traded on the platform as accessible as possible.

Similar to Orca’s Builders Program, we should invest in a Educators Program to incentivize our community members and members of other communities to produce high quality educational content designed to reduce friction and onboard new users.

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Hi Orca Community,
I am KoWei and I want to self-nominate as Council Member or Secretary Member.

Background information:
Currently I am finishing my quantum physics PhD in National University of Singapore.
And I plan to fully commit to Crypto space in 2023.

Experience with Orca and Crypto
As a crypto believer, I fell into the rabbit hole of cryptocurrency back in 2017. In the 2017/2018 cycles, I became the cofounder of IOTA Taiwan community and I am still running this L1 community.

Then, I started to explore the DeFi protocols in 2019 and became a DEFI farmer during the crazy DeFi summer 2020. During that time, I became the main moderator of ‘Superfluid Virtual Currency Community’, one of Taiwan’s largest crypto telegram community, and I am still running the DEFI community till today.

Next, after pivoting pivoted my focus from Ethereum to Solana at the end of 2020, I cofounded and established the ‘Solana Taiwan community’ and witnessed the Solana Summer 2021. We host AMA, do Podcast and translate articles across Solana Ecosystem.

I hear Orca in 2021 April and love the design of the protocol since then. (I really like the nice stickers Orca sent out last July.) Then I help orca to coordinate the AMA with SolanaTW and be the AMA host in 2021 December. After knowing there is open position for Dolphin consultant of Orca, I contact KZ on the Orca team in April and start my Orca ambassador journey since May.

Experience in Governance
I cofound the Mango market community in 2022/01, which now has 1.2K+ members. I involve in the Mango DAO governance mainly via participating in the forum discussion, bi-weekly dev call and on-chain voting.

Other crypto experience
Crypto com ambassador 2020/09-2020/12
Matrixport ambassador 2021/01-2022/01
Furucombo ambassador 2021/08-2021/12
Bonfire ambassador 2021/12-2022/02

Unique skills
As a DEFI farmer for the past three years, I have broad understanding of the DEFI space via using the protocols and observing the product iterations. And trained as a scientist/researcher, I would try to tackle problems from first principle and filter our the noise.

How to represent the best interests of the Orca community
I believe I could help Orca to be the liquidity infrastructure of the Solana ecosystem, especially since Whirlpool unlocks the compatibility to enable a variety of products to build on top of Orca. For me, compatibility is the heart of DEFI.

About the token, I believe pure inflation is bad for the protocol since it only leads to token dumping. Besides bootstrapping, Orca should keep the emission rate low. On the other hand, I also believe that making the orca token acquire value is crucial, that’s the fundamental interest of orca token holders. Maybe we could try to adapt some mechanism for the token user to do something and acquire the protocol fee in exchange, like stAave for protocol security or veBAL for PCV to increase the depth of the AMM.

Thank you for reading and thank @cbergz for the council model proposal.

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Hi fellow Orca community members - Wes here from Room40, posting to indicate interest in joining the Orca Council.

We first want to express our support for the governance structure designed by Orca and Reverie. We believe the proposal builds on past iterations of delegated governance, enabling Orca to move quickly to unlock greater value for token holders.

Orca is a critical building block in the Solana ecosystem. We’re excited about the burgeoning token-driven economy, and our interest in Orca is consistent with our long-term belief in Solana DeFi, where Orca will play a pivotal role as the liquidity protocol of choice.

Given our conviction, Room40 has built a long-term position in $ORCA, and we look forward to partnering with everyone to advance Orca forward.

Firm & Personal Experience

Introduction to Room40

  • Room40 is a crypto-focused investment firm spanning private and public markets. Our structure allows us to be a full-service capital partner to crypto protocols across every stage of growth
  • We are a team of investors, builders, and crypto natives with experience across the lifecycle of tech companies and financial markets. In our current and prior roles, we’ve had the opportunity to back founders from pre-idea to post-public markets
  • Members of our team have been crypto investors starting as early as 2013, and we have been participants in various crypto communities since the 2017-18 cycle
  • As Room40, we’ve made 15+ investments and are increasing our activity level across both private venture and liquid token investments
  • We actively partner with protocols as users (particularly within DeFi) and capital markets specialists

About me

  • I’m a co-founder of Room40 and spend time across both our venture and liquid strategies
  • Prior to Room40, I was responsible for leading investments at a large growth-stage investment firm. My focus areas were fintech and transportation/logistics, and I had the privilege of partnering with companies such as Uber, SoFi, Grab, Kabbage, and 99 across markets globally (US, SEA, China, LatAm)
  • I started my career at a public market hedge fund as a long-short equities analyst covering tech, media, and telecom sectors

Orca Experience

  • As investors in the Solana ecosystem, we’ve tracked Orca’s progress since mid-2021 to its current position as a leading AMM on Solana
  • We evaluate DEX’s across chains as both users and investors, and benchmark performance across swap execution, ease of use, growth, market share, and capital efficiency (e.g., volume vs. TVL). In the past few months, Orca has proven to be competitive across most categories, with ample opportunity to extend its leadership
  • Individually, we have been power users of Orca in the past, developing deep familiarity with Orca’s trading and liquidity provision products in the process
  • Our venture fund has diligenced and invested in protocols that have worked with Orca to tap into its liquidity infrastructure, which we see as an attractive model for future growth
  • We’ve spent time with the Orca and Reverie team, as well as fellow investors and community members

Strategic Value
We believe the Reverie team has identified a top-tier list of candidates for the council with tremendous potential to help Orca across technical and operational fronts. If given the chance to serve on the council, I believe my experience would be additive and complementary to those of the proposed cohort.

In particular, I and Room40 plan to contribute towards:

  • Market coverage: as active market participants, we will be covering and benchmarking the competitive landscape and analogous models to Orca across chains and ecosystems, and ensure these are inputs (where relevant) to Orca’s strategy
  • Network scaling: we’ve deployed billions of dollars into networks and marketplaces in the past, and expect to port this experience into how we can scale liquidity and optimize incentives with maximum capital efficiency
  • Partner development: we expect to continue identifying and supporting new projects that can leverage Orca’s liquidity infrastructure. We will help bridge introductions and provide partner feedback on our developer offerings to keep Orca synonymous with liquidity on Solana

Mission Alignment

  • We became token holders in the open market, the same way as most members of the community. We are completely aligned with Orca’s long-term success to become the default liquidity layer on Solana
  • Our goal is to bring the full breadth of Room40’s resources to help Orca build. As noted above, we plan to do this by helping to accelerate partnerships with the next set of Orca-powered builders, supporting and investing in the Orca ecosystem, and deploying liquidity into Orca pools
  • I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to deepen our partnership with Orca, and commit to serving on the council to the best of my abilities in helping Orca build enduring value alongside our community and council members
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Couldn’t have said it better myself! Really solid group here.

I would also like to second @Cortina’s nomination for the secretary role.

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Thank you to everyone that submitted their self-nominations and comments. It’s great to see such strong candidates with high enthusiasm to serve the Orca DAO within the community! Given the quality of self-nominations, we now see an opportunity to further strengthen the Council by adding active community members.

Reverie initially reached out to candidates in the interest of electing a Council with highly qualified individuals that were sure to act in the best interest of Orca. While we stand behind these candidates, we also see tremendous value in adding active community members to this first Council term. In doing so, the Council is more aligned with the interests of the community and better equipped to address community needs. We feel strongly that rounding out this founding Council with a mixture of both industry leaders and active community members is the best path forward.

In addition to a revised Council candidate list, we have also included a Secretary candidate below to be elected tangentially.

Hart Lambur
Founder, UMA Protocol
Co-founded UMA, a decentralized financial contracts platform built to enable Universal Market Access. Hart studied computer science before working as an interest rate trader at Goldman Sachs through the financial crisis. In 2013 he co-founded Openfolio, a personal finance tracking platform that was acquired in 2017 by a financial planning firm. He now leads a team of financial contract and oracle design researchers at UMA.

Min Teo
Partner, Ethereal Partners
Min Teo is the Managing Partner, Ethereal Ventures & Advisor for ConsenSys Mesh. She Previously led venture investing at ConsenSys and established EV with Joe Lubin to partner with the best global crypto founders.

Lakshman Sankar
0xParc & Personae Labs
Previously ecosystem development and R&D at the Ethereum Foundation working on Eth2.0/the merge and ZKP R&D. Currently building new identity primitives at Personae Labs.

Larry Sukernik
Founder, Reverie
Larry is the co-founder of Reverie, which is a firm that operates and invests in protocols. Prior to Reverie, Larry led venture investments at Digital Currency Group for 3 years.

Chris Montagano
General Counsel, Orca
Business-focused attorney with broad experience advising management teams and boards on governance and other matters, including over 50 strategic transactions (such as IPOs and M&A deals) exceeding $10B in aggregate value.

Wes Tang-Wymer
Founder, Room40
Self-nomination biography above

Cortina
Orca, Community Member
Self-nomination biography above

In addition to Council members, we also want to move ahead with a recommended Secretary based on the self-nominations and Governance call. As a reminder, the Secretary will be responsible for attending Council meetings and sharing notes with the community.

Ko-wei Tseng
Orca Community Member and Dolphin Consultant
Self-nomination biography above

Given the overall support to elect a Council, Reverie will move forward with a formal on-chain proposal. The proposal will allow tokenholders to vote on the Candidate List outlined above, and if approved officially establish a Governance Council.

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Hi podmates,

For those of you who couldn’t make it to the Governance Chat #3, here’s a verbatim of the chat in written and audio forms.

Sharing these so you can get to know the council members more before casting your vote!

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Hey Wes,

I am Kyle and currently on the Climate Fund Working group. I will be helping with the treasury management for the fund and was told about Maple.finance. Could we get together to chat about how the Climate Fund and Maple could work together? My discord info is: KyleRiggen#8888

1 Like