Hi, this is Andrey from Zircon. Wanted to pitch in to the discussion, also because we’ve been mentioned by name.
Overall I think this grant is definitely better than before: shorter duration grants, limits to max grants, removing the first-come-first-serve system.
As for voting system, I’m definitely not a fan of leaving conviction voting in. While it sounds like a nice idea in theory, in practice it makes the voting that much more plutocratic, since only the largest of whales have the luxury of locking large amounts of GLMR (which might be say 10% of their stake).
It’d be great to introduce a Gitcoin-like quadratic funding model, though unfortunately given the stakes involved, there is a 100% guarantee that it will be defrauded through sybil attacks (even if we KYC voters, this still would be gamed). So 1 GLMR = 1 vote seems like the least bad option.
As for our own take: as @turrizt correctly mentioned, we never said we were foregoing the Moonbeam deployment, but rather waiting until the playing field would become more level. As you may know there is not a single DeFi token on Moonriver with more than 1 million market cap, which makes it very difficult to compete with millions of GLMR being injected every month into a competing DEX.
I expressed a similar concern around the time of the first grant discussion: Stella and Moonwell taking the entire 6 month allocation would send a very bad signal to other builders, and I believe we’re not actually the first to react to this signal.
We’ve also had our own experience through a 15K MOVR grant destined for liquidity mining. Our goal with it was to bootstrap the platform and our token, and take it from there. In that we were successful.
Our experience actually taught us two things:
- Each pair needs a “breakthrough liquidity” amount. Basically, for a median trade size, there needs to be enough liquidity so that the price impact would be at least comparable to the fee. Anything below this threshold means the platform is unable to attract organic taker flow. Any liquidity above this threshold is effectively unnecessary and incentivizing it is wasteful.
- Starting out with some hard value to distribute to early users makes things much easier for projects.
Our grant was excellent for bootstrapping, but not enough for breakthrough liquidity (the entire grant sum was roughly one month of Solarbeam’s continuous rewards). In fact beyond the first month, the MOVR grant would’ve served much better as a rainy day fund for the project, rather than distributed to mercenary farmers. Still, despite being relatively small, the grant was crucial for setting ourselves up and iterating on the product.
I think previous grants suffered from a goal-execution mismatch. They were designed as “common good” grants to create some baseline layer of liquidity (which is a useful goal, especially post-Nomad). Since a breakthrough liquidity level was necessary, the grants were very large.
But:
- They were given to single teams in a particular niche, resulting in preferential treatment and creating an artificial moat against other, potentially more competitive or innovative projects
- They were never pulled to see what would happen. For example on Moonriver, fee revenue makes up around 30-40% of the total APR for the MOVR/USDC pair on Solarbeam. Even we use it because it’s an acceptable level of liquidity for MOVR, meaning that all decentralized taker flow is already going to Solarbeam. It will only increase if demand for MOVR as a whole increases, which is however hindered by the inflation from MOVR rewards — a catch 22.
- The details of how they were applied was wasteful. For example, liquidity incentives to lending platforms do not work in the same way as DEXs. Recursive supply → borrow generates zero economic value or liquidity, it merely pads the TVL stats. If that is the goal, it makes much more sense to pump rewards for a StableSwap/Pulsar-style pool of stablecoins, which at least lets people switch between token wrappers. While for lending platforms, incentivizing just the supply side actually creates usable liquidity.
So, to give some concrete suggestions for a new way to do grants:
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Common Good liquidity should ideally be split between different platforms. Even better would be to create a common good DEX/app for it, managed by GLMR holders or something similar.
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Grants to individual teams should be given on a bursty, iterative basis. For example, I think it’d make sense to give Stella a 1-2 months burst of rewards to bootstrap their Pulsar pools. If the liquidity is gone after pulling them, we’d know that there’s no pmf and no point in incentivizing it further. Then the same can be done with us, BeamSwap or whoever else can justify this.
Bursts of rewards also generate extra attention and bring more eyeballs. I.e. it’s far more valuable to be at the top of the Defillama yields page for a month, than be on page 10 for 3 months.
To modify the current proposal for this it’s sufficient to:
- Create a separate track for common good liquidity. Basically create “tender offers” for common goods, placing restrictions to how many of them can be obtained by individual teams. Recirculate the grants between teams based on results/circumstances/time passing.
- Cap the team grant periods at 2 months at most
- Cap the team grant max amount to something that would leave enough liquidity for 5-6 such grants. 500k GLMR maybe?
- Make the process continuous, no need to vote for all grants at once
The purpose of my proposal is to reintroduce consistency between the goal of the grant program and its execution: common good liquidity is covered through shared tenders, and teams have access to a sufficient bootstrapping stash.
I’ll finish with a frank comment. Some people think that the previous grant proposal was a nefarious plot to centralize the ecosystem. I think it’s more likely that Moonwell/Stella asked their Moonbeam-focused VCs to vote for it, and the VCs agreed with the spirit of the proposal (restart liquidity post Nomad) but didn’t care nearly enough to go into the details of the proposal or the other builder’s outcry (trust me, literally only the Stella and Moonwell teams were in favor of the proposal as it stood).
Voter apathy is a thing, and I think that a little “technocracy” in the grants process wouldn’t hurt. The devil here is certainly in the details.