There’s been ongoing discussions about how to link the POOL drip to v4 deposits. I have an idea that relates to what was brought up by @Brendan in the “Reworking the POOL Token” thread.
As of now, POOL drip on deposits in v3 is over. So, it’s time to start thinking about how to align future POOL emissions with the protocol itself. It seems clear that smaller depositors really enjoyed the POOL emissions because they felt they were becoming part of the protocol just by using the protocol.
A simple, staking contract with a “boost” mechanic could work and would be simple to implement.
A simple POOL staking v4 contract is created which would be multi-chain.
POOL emissions are time-weighted. Longer deposits are rewarded with a POOL boost in increments. Perhaps 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year. Or something along those lines.
BOOST is visualized with a slim, animated progress bar on the v4 deposit page under the “Connect Wallet button” to add a bit of gamification. A link to “what is the POOL token?” in our docs.
A leaderboard to see which addresses are deposited for longest and are getting the most boost. POOL holders which participated in the last governance vote are highlighted.
Withdrawing the initial deposit nullifies the boost.
Longer-time players are rewarded with more governance token as time goes on (thereby aligning users with POOL). However, I am sure this could be further refined to make this alignment even stronger since it’s not quite there yet. Something is missing, I think, but not sure what.
Im absolutely loving all the discussion and ideas around tokenomics lately. Seems the community is really fired up about tackling this and thinking about it deeply.
Is this a similar idea to how BadgerFinance boost worked?
On Badger DAO, the amount of BADGER you hold gives you a boost on the emissions. So, for example, holding more BADGER, gets you more BADGER emissions for your WBTC deposits. They have a tier system and the highest tier is ‘frenzy.’
I suppose it is quite similar, but there are a few key differences.
BADGER boost does not work via staking. Instead, as long as you keep it in your wallet, you get the boost. There is no lock-up mechanism (although they are exploring it, similar to a CRV-like model). In our case, we would have a clean staking smart contract where users can deposit POOL and get emissions. We can decide whether there should be some lock mechanism.
Just as importantly, the boost mechanism I outlined here is not based on amount deposited. Instead, it is time-weighted and linked to your deposits. So, if you deposited 1000 USDC into PoolTogether for 3 months, you would get a larger POOL boost than someone who deposited just for a few days. The boosted POOL APY would thus be based on time spent deposited, not on total amount deposited (which is who badger works, more badger = more boost). I believe linking boost to time-spent-depositing aligns much better with the protocol than more POOL staked = more boost (which is too whale-centered).
I hope that answers your question! Some more things would need to be ironed out though, such as…
Do we want to create a locking mechanism?
What are the boost time-weighted tiers?
Are there other ways we can better align POOL emissions to those who are directly aligned with the long-term success of the protocol?
Thanks for the detailed response!
Yeah, I think that linking any reward incentive to time spend in staking is key here. Everybody understands that the current crop of farming rewards in defi overall have been pretty mercenary. Farmers just jump around chasing the best APRs for their capital they possibly can.