About Me
(saving the best longest for last…)
Hi voters! My name is Michael (aka General Obligation) and I’ve been captivated by crypto from the moment I first learned about bitcoin in early 2013. I’ll never forget the deer in headlights look I got from the trading desk I was shadowing during a bank interview in early 2013 when I asked a long time corporate bond salesman if he had ever heard of bitcoin…safe to say he didn’t (though certainly did a couple months later when CNBC couldn’t shut their mouths about it on the trading floor tvs!)
Professionally, I have experience across the entire traditional financial “stack” - from sitting on municipal bond desks (which is where my name comes from! General Obligation is a type of muni) as well as money market desks…to middle office at hedge funds…to back office administration services for PE shops + hedge funds.
I also have light developer experience, having completed a coding bootcamp (any other app academy grads out there!?) and did some backend and scripting work (among other stuff) for a small workflow platform for residential and construction companies.
Within the cryptosphere, my first foray into DeFi was yield farming with the one that kickstarted a revolution in August 2020…YAM. I later contributed to several small cap projects, where my most significant contribution was to Komet Capital (now defunct, founders rugged), which aimed to be a decentralized hedge fund. I was brought in to author the whitepaper (see here) and design their tokenomics for two tokens they had planned, for which I devised some novel mechanisms and incentives for January 2021. I (very sadly) had to step away after about six months after the founders fired our main developer and I got the sense that they were soon going to rug (which they eventually did)
I had embodied a powerful vision (see more my impassioned writing here), and although that vision with Komet ultimately failed to launch into the DeFi galaxy, I would love for that vision to be fully animated with my election to the Premia Parliament.
After leaving Komet, and experiencing unimaginable success from crypto, I decided to pivot away entirely out of crypto and focus on giving back to my local community for a couple of years.
I helped lead a NYC based community-first sports league, which interestingly shares some unexpected parallels to Premia in terms of governance challenges and org size. Though formally “treasurer,” I again wore a number of (different) hats to help catapult the org, fueled by 70%+ YoY revenue growth, including:
- Governance + Board level strategic objectives
- Advocacy
- Community management + engagement + development
- Recruitment
- Partnership development
- Legal + compliance
- Tech
- Programming Development
Our board became much too unwieldy (over 30 members) as we scaled super quickly and I led a number of initiatives to consolidate the Board to 10 (same size as Premia Parliament coincidentally!) and roll out new committees to streamline decision-making yet also decentralize control of the org. This required careful consideration of stakeholder needs, leadership bandwidth, and future-proofing the org in the medium term to provide incentives for manageable growth, as well as mechanisms to prevent super-concentration of power within the org. I stepped down from the org in December to return to the for-profit universe in pursuit of contributing to something larger and more serious.
What I can do for Premia
I’d love to leverage my governance work with my non profit, in conjunction with insatiable hunger for creative tokenomic experiments and my finance background, to sharpen the Parliament as well as entice ecosystem stakeholders with hyper aligned performance and staking incentives. With no other active commitments, I have the capacity to dedicate a tremendous amount of effort to the Parliament.
I love doing deep dives and brainstorming (some of my ideas strike like lightning…while others fall into the wind) into all sorts of areas, though I am confident I can help bolster two key areas, Governance and Tokenomics.
Ideas for Premia
Governance
I would love to help spearhead governance advancements within the Premia ecosystem, especially since that seems to be an extant challenge for the protocol. I’d like all stakeholders to thoughtfully explore what role the Parliament should play in the Premia ecosystem. If our goal is to eventually transition to a DAO where the Parliament best represents token holders, protocol partners, and users of the platform…then maybe we should look to the public shareholder model where the election cycle looks something like Shareholders (token holders) → Board (Parliament) → Management (Senior Team) as a foundation to tweak. Though of course, our specific needs will evolve in tandem with the growth and development of the protocol and options landscape more broadly.
I believe the size of our Parliament is ideal for our team + community size at the moment. DAO management has been such a shaky endeavor in the crypto space because there is a ton of experimental governance that has been mostly a failure, and only moderately successful in the best case.
Part of this is often due to the lack of segregation between operator control and the operation itself. It’s critical that proper funnels of accountability are in place and adhered to in order to maximize governance efficacy.
Some Near and Medium Term Actionables:
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More precisely flesh out roles and responsibilities of Parliament (including Parliament itself) and timeline for DAO transition; determine whether Parliament ought to be a controlling high level board of governors…or part time employees working on various operational initiatives…or a combination of both
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Develop process for identifying and recruiting future Parliament candidates (Governance + Nominating Committee, skills matrix, etc) to ensure Parliament is composed of diversified array of strengths and skill sets to best benefit the protocol
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Develop and formalize streamlined pipelines for governance processes to prime Premia for success to once (open) interest in options starts to really flood the market
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Combine best governance practices from “real world” + emerging successes in DAOs and tailor them for Premia
- Lots of hybrid structures we can get creative and experiment with here, but some established ideas are tried and true for good reason
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Increase governing transparency / expectations without sacrificing IP / proprietary info to better engender trust + accountability from token holders to Parliament members
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(echoing Fluffy Bear) Ensure treasury is being put to sound use and all spending is planned + accounted for; can explore creating a finance or audit committee
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Execute on existing deliverables and roadmap objectives
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“FDV is just a meme” - publish clearer emission schedules and more predictable token inflation rates to websites and create a convincing case that dilution will be secured by protocol growth. We know that in the past, Premia has received some not so favorable attention because of “scary” tokenomics.
Product / Tokenomic Ideas
- Will continue to iterate and innovate on tokenomic design, but would like to piggyback off a couple ideas from a couple other candidates which had crossed my mind as well.
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As Sminem emphasized, Making staked premia more liquid. Originally I had an idea that they could be “restaked” for options liquiding mining, but realized that wouldn’t quite work since they’d be and therefore not locked.
- Future staking rewards can be used to help secure the loan
- Probably best for long term lockers (2 year+)
- E.g., if tokens are staked + locked, users can borrow USDC (?) against staked premia. If APY on staked tokens is ~40%, a user can borrow at, say, a max LTV of half the APY% (in this case 20%), at which point the loan needs to be immediately repaid back. If not paid back, then the loan value (in staked premia) is immediately repaid to the lender (but still locked) and borrower forfeits all future staking rewards (or forfeits up to a point) + additional liquidation fee. That’s the general idea. Can even toy around around with option markets on the interest rates of loans. the Mechanics and liquidation penalties can be further fine tuned, especially given volatility of premia token. Point is - i think there is an opportunity there to make stacked premia a little more liquid (though would take some testing and refinement) and would love to explore that with other Parliament members
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Fluffy Bear mentioned this earlier, but I, too, was interested in an options aggregator. Not sure what the internal roadmap currently looks like, but we can either build our own (seems potentially costly from a time and $$ perspective) or build a partnership with something like Grix who just launched their beta. Wonder if we can deploy some community to incentivize aggregators (and / or market makers?) to route trades through Premia. Or perhaps something along the lines of a “Price match” toggle to allow MMs to match cheaper prices for identical options elsewhere (within certain bounds)
I fully support many of the other great ideas mentioned by some of my fellow Parliament candidates on the operational side of things. Retail options volumes in equities are truly massive nowadays…but this wasn’t always the case. Within that, as others have highlighted, short term options account for an ever growing share of retail option flow. Short dated options are most popular even within Premia and 0dte options do seem like a compelling add-on.
While Premia’s educational content (like everything else) is truly top-tier outstanding (thanks Marty!), I wonder if this is a battle we ought to continue to fight ourselves. It might be create a trade group of sorts with some of our peers in the space to promote options education. Did options become popular on Robinhood because they had the best resources and courses on options? I’m not sure the answer to that is yes - There are some larger market + community forces at play here that we are ultimately beholden to, and the best we can ask for is to position ourselves as best we can in preparation for the inevitable massive wave of retail flow.
Coinbase and Robhinhood were successful at winning the hearts of retail, but that success was not immediate and the magic spark there was really a premier UI…and time. I think we can all agree that Premia has one of the best UIs in the entire industry. And among options protocols, it completely blows everything else out of the water.
I’m nevertheless encouraged by the TVL / volumes that are picking up momentum both within premia and among option protocols as a whole, but some polishing is needed on parts of the Parliament due to a couple things:
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Lack of VC funding - I’m generally anti-VC funded enteprises, but the reality is that they tend to naturally have a leg up particularly as they are more connected with investment funds, MMs, etc. Which, by the way, I have an extraordinary amount of respect for Premia’s strictly public $30M initial raise - after all the foundation of crypto is a self-aggregated grassroot movement that is inherently anti-vc.
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“Tainted” Tokenomics - a lot of people wrote off Premia a while back due to high FDV. May be harder to win them back / steer them away from larger players like Ribbon / Aevo without a bigger push to continue to sculpt our tokenomic + incentive ecosystem and get them to take another look.
In closing
Like many of my fellow applicants, I have been a huge Premia advocate for several years, both since day 1 and before. In fact, what initially attracted me to Premia was a token-gated group chat (rip rope) where I had the pleasure of encountering some really brilliant people (cozy, dk, froggie, lumyo). With those at the helm, I knew something really special would come about someday at Premia. The initial no-VC ~$30M raise for Premia in 2021 was something I was so proud to partake in, and I’m elated to now have the opportunity to take that participation to the next level.
I couldn’t be more excited about joining the Premia Parliament. It’s something I’ve long dreamed of and I would undoubtedly devote every volt of brain power into elevating our supreme beloved, royal class options platform to even greater heights with an incredible group of sharp, resourceful, and talented individuals. We have an incredible opportunity in front of us and I couldn’t be more excited to foster, nurture, and lay down critical governance infrastructure to deliver a truly unparalleled options trading experience to everyone.
Good luck to all candidates and thanks for considering me!
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