Earlier today I was selected as the IMC treasurer today, so you’ll be hearing from me roughly every 2 weeks to provide our forward-looking budget and retrospective report on each rewards period.
The budget should be 1 week before the rewards period. We missed the mark here due to being new and not well organized. We’ll aim not to spend any money for one week from this post to keep the spirit of the idea intact.
9/1-9/29 period budget
We’re slated to receive 5255.5 RPL this rewards period from the pDAO.
Additionally @thomasg has very generously offered to match our premerge incentives and then provide ramping down his contribution. In total, this will be 5255.5 RPL (matching a full reward period!). 4175.5 of Thomas’ RPL will go into the 9/1-9/29 budget (bringing us up to 9431 RPL), with the remaining 1080 RPL becoming available in the next period.
9/1-9/29 period plan
3500 RPL for bribes via hidden hand for rETH/WETH on mainnet balancer; rewards go live 9/8
200 RPL for bribes via hidden hand for rETH/WETH on optimism BeethovenX/balancer; rewards go live 9/14
3500 RPL for bribes via hidden hand for rETH/WETH on mainnet balancer; rewards go live 9/22
200 RPL for bribes via hidden hand for rETH/WETH on optimism BeethovenX/balancer; rewards go live 9/28
400 RPL for concentrated liquidity trial
We haven’t pinned this down, but would like to try something
Mav is talking to Arrakis. IMC doesn’t have details, but that might be an option if they can support incentives.
Range is actively being discussed, -2% to +2% or -1.5% to +1.5% have had the most traction so far (percent from the burn/mint rate).
The IMC is not yet sure how to execute on this trial in a way that we’re confident about. We will not spend funds unless we become confident, so they may roll over.
1631 RPL for co-incentive programs with other tokens
Eg, if TokenX was incentivizing TokenX/WETH, they’d move some of their incentives to TokenX/rETH
We’d match 10% of those incentives
We’re thinking 100-200 RPL per protocol, though we might go higher if the opportunity makes sense
They’ll get more bang for their buck by pairing with rETH, and we’re sweetening the pot even more by co-incentivizing
If we have left over, carry forward
Other notes
The budget laid out above is meant to represent our best current belief about what we’re likely to do. It’s not written in stone. As we go, we’ll be looking at the results we get and learning more about possible opportunities.
Optimism grant incentives are expected to come online later this period; these won’t be managed by the IMC, but we’ll coordinate as makes sense.
Thomas has also offered to provide the equivalent value in ETH instead of RPL. I went with RPL above, but we haven’t yet made a decision on this.
This is such an exciting development. Huge thanks to @Valdorff for posting this, thank you to the IMC and everyone who has been involved in forming it (including voters!), and a very big and very special thank you to @thomasg for the boost.
Balancer Labs is wrapping up development on a new weighted pool factory which will enable rETH/token weighted pools where Balancer can earn the protocol fee on yield. These pools would be eligible for our core pool program, meaning protocol fees we earn (swap fee + yield fee) would be used as bribes on the pool that earned them. I think we’ll see several projects interested in pairing against rETH if they can secure additional incentives from you all. Exciting times ahead!
If you have any particular names that you think would be interested, please share! We’d like to do some outreach here and it’s a good opportunity for both parties. Win-win.
Happy to answer any questions about our previous proposal here. I think doing some kind of trial on Uniswap V3 via Terminal would be a great opportunity to validate the concept without making any long term commitment. (I know there’s been some interest in incentivizing liquidity on L2s in the past - we’re live on Optimism and Arbitrum as well.)
We’re about to launch the LM program for $OP on Optimism (likely next week), which we think will bring a lot more attention to the platform and indirectly benefit a rETH program as well.
We’re about to put in our first bribes on Hidden Hand’s AURA market, and we’ve been looking into the details of how they work.
High level, bribes are placed into a bribe vault. There’s a mapping between a proposal hash and a vote index in a snapshot vote for aurafinance.
Based on bribes, folks realign their votes cuz greed - yay marketplace.
Aura’s vebal is used to vote on balancer.
There are a couple of yellow flags:
There are human steps involved to get from our incentives to balancer
The incentives in the bribe vault are protected by a 2 of 5 multisig
Both of these provide paths to loss due to negligence or corruption.
Nonetheless, we plan to move forward:
Our incentives are in 2-week chunks, we aren’t putting in a year’s worth here
The ROI has been >2x, so if we succeed once and then lose the next set we’re likely doing better than break-even vs direct incentives (though that would be painful)
Hidden Hand has some track record handling a fair amount of money
We’re proposing to put in about $87k. Based on the 2 above, that roughly looks like it’d be less than 50% of what’s been in the bribe vault regularly since mid-July (the vault is currently holding $400k, and around $200k is AURA)
Finally, loss or theft would heavily damage AURA, so incentives are aligned
