Mean DAO was founded on Sept 17th, 2021, by a small group of friends, software entrepreneurs, and cryptocurrency investors. We came together with the idea to launch a community-owned protocol DAO that could power building the products and infrastructure to become financial equalizers to people and businesses worldwide. We are firm believers in the future of DAOs for shared ownership and the value created when an ecosystem collaborates to build vs. compete.
Back then, our small team of five had been working tirelessly to bring MeanFi to life, with less than 20 people helping us with feedback in devnet and testnet. We didn’t even have our RPC infrastructure and used the public Solana RPC! 👀 OMG! 🤦
But our message of simple DeFi banking for everyone powered by payment streaming real-time finance resonated with so many people that it took only a few days after launch for our new protocol to go ballistic. Now, a year later, after many mistakes, learnings, surviving the bulls and the bears, the rug-pulls and liquidations of Terra and 3AC, the dramatic monetary policy changes, the many product releases, partnerships, and crypto markets rollercoasters, we are very ready to take on the next 12 months.

Product Highlights

We did a lot of planning and had a busy and ambitious roadmap. We won most of our essential battles and underestimated the efforts of others. Most importantly, we learned much during this year’s building product marathon. Here’s a summary of what we planned for and what we did:

Some of the more notable things in the last 12 months on the product side are that we launched the payment streaming infrastructure primitive and built an additional layer of products, like our on-chain dollar cost average scheduler, payroll, and the token vesting program. We also shipped a full-on DEX, a liquidity aggregator, the MEAN staking program, and the SuperSafe multisig.
We were lucky enough to have the support of excellent partners and integrators powering our liquidity and protocols, like Serum, Raydium, Orca, Solrise, Grape, Marinade, Jupiter, Socean, Credix, Phantom, Solflare, Triton, Alameda, Coinbase, Ledger and Brave and many more.
We also made substantial engineering improvements to our infrastructure with a fully automated DevOps pipeline implementation, double-audited smart contracts by Certik and Sec3, and several rounds of RPC disaster recovery architecture and rollouts. All to ensure the safety of our products and the reliability and uptime in mainnet.

Business & Ecosystem Highlights

On the business side, things moved a little slower than we would’ve liked, and we are still learning our way around when it comes to establishing good growth practices around community and distribution channels.
Even with those challenges, in the last year, we raised a private round of $3.5M, launched the MEAN governance token, did a massive airdrop, emitted 43% of the token supply, got MEAN listed in Gate, MEXC, BitMart, AAX centralized markets as well as the leading AMMs in Solana: Orca, and Raydium. Numerous versions and revisions of our DAO documentation and tutorials in more than six languages were made public. Our current social communities have over 100k followers and community members across Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium. The mods and ambassadors of Mean DAO launched countless activities, events, collaborations, and shows like the “Building Web3”.
Between product integrations and business partnerships, the overall ecosystem is too large to mention everyone, but we have some friends 😍

We also received some love from media publishers, and we got featured in top publications like Forbes, Bloomberg, EFE, CoinDesk, and Refresh.
Did we mention we also had time to sneak in our on-chain governance portal launch? Yes, we are live in our forum, and the governance portal is open for business.
The results of these efforts have not been in vain. As of Sept 2022, we have 150k+ unique wallets in our app, 50k+ payments streaming, $32M TVL, 194 SuperSafe multisigs, and a little over $4 billion in transaction volume. Not too shabby for a 1-year-old baby :)

What’s next?

Although we are all swimming in a bear market at the moment, it is with great pride we look back at these accomplishments and look forward to a supercharged with possibilities for keeping our mission alive.
Those with a keen eye would have noticed that we’ve made a couple of strategy shifts (or, instead, extra clarity) on our roadmap.

Payment streaming infra

The first “adjustment” is a move to grow our payment streaming infrastructure primitive through DAO ecosystem incentives, so other developers/teams build on top of us instead of having the core team making many of those dapps. This means:

1. We are focusing on Payment Streaming as a primitive protocol (ala Serum) and supporting the builders around it. We plan on having a Grants Ecosystem Program for developers and bug bounties as part of the on-chain governance.

2. We are opening up the MeanFi dapp to bring additional DeFi banking and more accessible lending and borrowing opportunities directly on the app. Building in the open with the community means more collaborations, integrations, and faster release cycles.

Institutional self-custody infra

We are reinforcing our focus on institutional self-custody through multisigs, emphasizing user experience (UX), developer experience (DX), and TradFi bridging (on/off ramps).
We want to make the SuperSafe the equivalent of the Web3 App Store and, in many ways, a “Self-Custody Layer-Zero” that supports multi-chain self-custody workflows. We are having many convos on the DAO about how to deliver on this promise, operationally speaking. We will likely we’ll see some proposals regarding this direction pretty soon.

A protocol-first approach

“We solve problem X, with Y solution, in chain Z” is the wrong way to think about DeFi products. We prefer “we solve problem X with Y solution.” The second option means the chain becomes a low-level implementation detail that doesn’t limit how the solution solves the problem. For example, no one has ever heard Mark Zuckerberg say, “we solve global connectivity with the Facebook social media platform, in PHP”… that last part is extra, and nobody cares. One move to make this protocol-first approach is to start measuring the KPIs that matter for the business across chains instead of vanity metrics like TVL.
Lots have happened since we first launched in Solana, and since the beginning, we’ve known all too well the future is multichain. Knowing it and being prepared for it are two very different things, and now we are getting prepared for it and shifting our architecture to have a protocol-first approach rather than a chain-first approach. We are doing a lot of work under the hood to power up the next generation of DeFi services on Mean products. We are adjusting our roadmap to sync with the market, and development needs to execute in this direction.

Wrap up

Mean Finance is a protocol powering the future of real-time finance anchored by the pillars of DeFi with top privacy, security, and usability. Our mission is to establish our products and infrastructure as the ultimate financial equalizers for people and organizations worldwide.
Go check out our dapp at https://app.meanfi.com and be part of the DeFi revolution. We had an incredible first year! Time to raise our glasses and cheers to the next one! LFG! 🔥🔥🔥