I know I’m late catching up on all of this and providing input… Could I get help clarifying the current state of things/please correct me if my understanding is wrong here?
It seems we have a few tiers of options:
- DAO somehow owns the contract address, which retains full rights (and risks) of minting/burning rETH on Ronin (which bridges have that ability)
- Admin rights are burned, CCIP manages an adjustable fee on behalf of the DAO (this minimizes risks for minting/burning rETH, but we have to trust CCIP sets fee according to our requests, starts out at flat fee structure but could be changed to something like tiered in the future)
- Admin rights are burned, the DAO opts out of charging any additional fees by requesting CCIP to set the fee to zero. (I think in this case CCIP still manages the fee so the DAO could stlil request the fee be changed in the future if we want?)
At this point I just wanted to highlight I think by far the most impactful thing in this conversation is Ronin planning to mint rETH (and help potentially generate demand for organic rETH minting with a campaign on Ronin) at a time when this is desperately needed. From that perspective I think it is critical to not delay/stall things further by indecision on the fees, or complexity of establishing a way to manage the contract address
Unfortunately I don’t think the DAO is currently set up in a way to responsibly manage the contract address, and my personal vote would be the risks outweigh the benefits (even if we did have something like the Security Council already setup which could expand it’s scope to help with something like this). It’s possible that maintaining the contract address actually kills some demand in that users become less likely to bridge if they know their funds are entirely secured by a multi-sig of DAO members/team/whatever combo we come up with. Perhaps in the future we could come up with a better solution for this type of scenario but for now I would be against option 1. I recognize this leaves us at the whims of CCIP, but Chainlink is well established/trusted from a user perspective in crypto - and I think this is a reasonable tradeoff of using an alt-L1 like Ronin vs staying more native within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Evaluating option 2 vs 3… I think either way between these two options CCIP still manages the fees so we have optionality here and are not locked in to anything (assuming this based on how you phrased the fact they would have to start out with a flat fee and could change to something more complex like tiered down the road). To this end, I would propose we start out with no fee (at least initially and for some period of time) to help evaluate organic demand without barriers/fees, and later implement something like the tiered fee structure once ready
- It could be something like “no fees for the first x months”
- This may also help incentivize activity as a trigger event to bridge before fees.
- I think you already said the only option at first is a flat fee… I would expect this is worst of all options (complex/tiered fee vs flat fee vs no fee), since it provides the least income (see Val’s example calculations (Rocket Pool Bridge Campaign - #9 by Valdorff), and hurts the smaller users the most which potentially dampens overall activity as there may then be less users overall (smaller users may avoid bridging).
- It would be nice to see organic activity first without a fee, and then see how that activity changes (if at all) once a tiered fee structure is implemented down the road. This would be useful data for the DAO to evaluate how to set fees on other chains since we will have a before and after comparison on the same chain, instead of evaluating different options on different chains and have to guess how much did the fee impact things vs the chain impact things.
- If activity looks anything like other L2’s (Val’s chart as an example below) there will be a large boost initially (mostly from Ronin minting themselves) which likely doesn’t earn the DAO that much since they will be large mints with a flat fee… and then hopefully a continuous slope upward if activity continues organically (ideal scenario would be we add a small well structured fee down the road and it doesn’t impact activity at all but also provides a new source of continuous revenue for the DAO).
- If it turns out our fee kills activity, we can always roll back / remove the fee - and ideally activity resumes back at its original pace.
Overall I like the idea of experimenting with the fees, but I also think right now we should be focusing on how to make rETH as attractive and useful as possible since that is our bottle neck… So starting out with no fee aligns better with our current goals (and ethos), but we have optionality down the road to revisit and implement something small as necessary.