Thread by @BillyBobBaghold

$METIS Mega Thread 1/n

I aped into $METIS around a month upon a recommendation from someone I trust. Since then I did more research and the more I have read, the more impressed I became. So I have increased my position size significantly in the last few weeks on dips

I will go into why I think it could become the dominant L2, its impressive tech, partnerships, team, connections to Vitalik Buterin, why Rollups are fundamental to ETH scaling and more.

Despite its potential, @metisdao is still relatively unknown and has a tiny MC relative to its peers and potential. Hopefully this thread will serve as a good intro to the protocol and why I am so bullish.

$METIS is an $ETH layer two implementation of optimistic roll-ups. While other Ethereum scaling L2s sacrifice decentralization for scalability $METIS is the only 1 fully committed to both.

Broadly speaking, optimistic rollup tech offloads smart contract execution and data storage responsibilities to a layer above networks like Ethereum.

I say LIKE ETH because although $METIS only supports ETH currently, there are plans to potentially build on top of other chains such as $CASPER after it is released.

Many people think rollups are just temporary until eth 2.0 is rolled out completely, while in reality the rollups are eth 2.0 - sharding actually requires rollups to be implemented, as Vitalik explain in this screenshot from an ETH forum

So rollups have a very bright future and the dominant rollup may well be the base layer for $ETH for the next decade or more. Thus the value proposition of the dominant L2 (I believe $METIS has a great chance) is insane. h/t to @plebonacci for educating me on these.

Key for adoption early on is that the $METIS Metis Virtual Machine is EVM-equivalent, allowing developers and users to deploy and interact with applications in a similar way to $ETH.

So it’s relatively easy for developers to port over existing apps and code from ETH and other EVM compatible chains - and several are coming (more later).

METIS originally planned to be fully EVM compatible, but it learnt that doing so made it much more difficult for devs to build on it. As a result, METIS has settled on EVM equivalence. Optimism is also likely to implement equivalence, but O’s plans sacrifice decentralisation.

However the $METIS implementation does not sacrifice - see the road map below on how it will decentralise following the mainnet release, including using multiple sequencers, peer nodes, “rangers” and multiple VMs to build extra layers of decentralization and security.

A key milestone IMO is Q1 2022 which will shorten the time for withdrawals from L2 - L1 from one week (like Optimism) to just a few hours and eventually a few minutes. This will make it far more user-friendly, particularly for defi applications where bridging between is key.

Once all stages above are complete, the $METIS L2 infrastructure will be in a different league from all other L2s or ETH scaling solutions in terms of decentralization. One more tech point to note is unlike all other L2 solutions, Metis uses multiple and parallel sequencers.

This means that the Metis network can never get clogged and is infinitely scalable!
It's basically only limited by the number of transactions that can be put into the ETH L1 layer itself. This is cutting edge tech in a new industry, so the METIS team must be pretty impressive...

$METIS had its beginning over a coffee between @ElenaCryptoChic (a senior software development lead) and @Natalia_Ameline (also a senior software engineer), who both first went on to found CryptoChicks, one of the largest blockchain advocacy and education non-profits in the world

Elena and Natalia then met Kevin Liu (with a background in finance and crypto) and Yuan Su (another senior software dev) and decided to form Metis with the mission to accelerate the adoption of blockchain and open, fair, and decentralized business on Web 3.0.

Elena is now CEO and Natalia is a tech researcher. Oh and as well as being a software engineer, Natalia is also @vitalik’s mother (!) and Elena is a friend of the family and has known Vitalik since he was a child.

Vitalik isn’t directly involved in $METIS, but it seems METIS implements many ideas that Vitalik advocates for. For example, look at this from chat from an ETH research forum - Pavel is a METIS engineer who asks a question about NFT transferability.

Vitalik responds the next day and METIS just happened to go on to implement Vitalik’s solution. Coincidence? Or is Vitalik more involved in the background? I know what I believe.

Token Allocation and metrics

Metis has a circulating supply of c. 1.5m and total supply of 10m. Its price has been bouncing around $100 for the last few days but dumped yesterday after a token unlock where early investors took some profit (I bought the dip heavily).

The team believes they are only initiators, not controllers. This philosophy is clear when you consider the entire $METIS team, founders included, owns just 7% of the total supply and early investors less than 20%.

The vast majority of tokens are reserved for the community and half of the total supply has been reserved for community distributions over the next 10 years. An example of this is the staking rewards that will be offered once Andromeda is released this week.

Staking APYs* will start at 29,000%. This will of course go down as more people stake, but I look forward to being one of them!

*Note the APR will be much lower given APYs assume compounding

[MAXXED OUT TWITTER SO MORE TO BE ADDED NOW]

But I also want to save some of my METIS to interact with the many dapps that are being built on METIS, several of which will be released shortly after Andromeda and I imagine will implement liquidity mining incentives for $METIS and other token holders.

https://twitter.com/MetisDAO/status/1457347352252067848

The already impressive METIS ecosystem will get another early boost from its hackathon that is ongoing and its $100m ecosystem fund it has just announced.

$MATIC (which could be considered a more centralised and less technologically impressive competitor of $METIS) held its hackathon in December last year when its MC was $90m .

This together with the release of a similar incentive plan caused its MC to rocket to $15b by May. It’s MC is now $12b 108x larger than $METIS

Then just check out the photo below of $METIS’s hackathon partners. @binance listing anyone?

If you weren’t already convinced that $METIS is such a good play right now, how about this - I’ve already mentioned its MC hovers around $110m, but it has just announced a $100m ecosystem fund! Clearly the investors in the eco fund think the METIS eco will rocket.

The $100M fund is an example of a $METIS “decentralized autonomous company” (DAC). DACs are central to the $METIS vision, which is to make web 3 and blockchain collaboration accessible to everyone.

DACs will go far beyond the simple voting and governance functions of DAOs to also tackle management and incentives of autonomous and decentralized communities.

The $METIS visions for DACs would not be possible without three things: (i) cheap data storage infra (ii) toolkits to easily build without coding and (iii) a reputation system. For (i) Metis will launch IPFS technology in Q1 2022 enabling cheap on-chain data storage and txs

To achieve (ii) Metis will introduce no-code middleware enabling anyone (a) to migrate onto Layer 2 in a few clicks and (b) spin up DACs and dapps with smart contract templates, APIs and modules. More on DACs: metisdao.medium.com/daos-the-opera…

(iii) by staking in a DAC, stakers will earn or lose reputation points, unlike owners of DAO governance tokens, whose actions cannot be easily tracked. DACs can choose to reward or punish those with good or bad reputations.

DACs sound amazing right? $METIS mainnet will offer a framework to easily deploy a DAC, mint the DAC’s token, and start onboarding participants and orchestrating the day-to-day operations of the community.

Like all blockchain projects, $METIS faces risks. I’ve broken down a few below and what I believe mitigates them.

1. L2 competitors such as $MATIC Optimism, Arbitrum Zksync (not yet released) could become the dominant L2. But given the tech and team $METIS has, my money is on $METIS. My only reservation is it will be interesting to see how zero knowledge solutions are received.

2. Attracting developers: as I have often said, there is a war going on for blockchain dev talent. All chains and companies are fighting. There are just not enough devs with all the required skills in the nascent blockchain industry to go around.

But I don’t think METIS will struggle to attract talent - it’s list of partners is already impressive, the hackathon will bring more devs, it’s EVM equivalent making it easy for dapps to be ported over, and the $100m fund is massive relative to its current market cap.

3. Then there are the risks facing crypto; volatility, the end of the bull , and potential regulation. While the SEC is investigating $UNI, no tokens similar to $METIS have been and the US in general has sounded much more positive towards crypto than it has in the past.

Too many Americans own crypto assets for the US to regulate crypto out of existence, but I do think some form of regulation is inevitable.

IMO these risks are outweighed by the massive upside of $METIS. It does everything that current L2s can do at a market cap less than 1% of $MATIC’s. It’s tech and team is first class and it has the economic firepower to gain dev mind share and adoption.

Plus it has the chance to become the dominant rollup and be the base transactional layer for years to come. Metis’s potential is massive.

References and further reading

messari.io/asset/metis/pr…
metisdao.medium.com/metis-weekly-a…
metisdao.medium.com/metis-to-launc…
thedefiant.io/metis-latest-o…
metisdao.medium.com/decentralizati…
hackernoon.com/turn-an-intern…

CT Accounts to follow for more $METIS info

@MetisDAO
@StarlordCrypto
@plebonacci
@DecentraLarz
@Crypto_Puppy_
@MORPHEUS_CRYPT0
@defipicks
@AstrologyCrypto
@cryptofrog202
@cryptofrog202

I would have missed people too (sorry) - who have I missed?

And forgot one of the biggest - @VikingXBT

Thanks ser