Subsidizing Gasless Rentals with $100k worth of MATIC

Hey frens. As some of you might know, we have experimented with Biconomy’s gasless transaction feature before. This allowed us to enable Gotchi petting without having to pay any MATIC as gas. Several months ago Biconomy has discontinued this as a free service, and projects have to fill up their “gas tank” with MATIC themselves.

With the rapid influx of new players, there are increasing requests for small amounts of gas to pay for the first lending transaction. In the past I’ve been able to manually send some MATIC to people asking, but it’s become impossible to do so by hand.

For the smoothest user experience, I propose filling up the Biconomy gas tank and subsidizing all Gotchi Lending agreements with $100k worth of Treasury funds. Ideally these funds would be taken out of our DAI pool and converted to MATIC, so no GHST has to be sold on the market. This would allow any new player unfamiliar with the Polygon Network to come in and lend a Gotchi with no upfront cost - all they’d have to do is sign a tx.

Would love to hear your thoughts! :ghost:

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I’m a big fan of this – I’d be curious how we envision it being sustainable in the long-term. Would we eventually get to a point where we’re running through a tank of this size somewhat quickly? Seems unlikely, but I’m imagining something like Sunflower Farms is capable of causing this tank to drain fast.

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Hm yeah, I think at current numbers the tank is gonna last for a long time - as long as we only use it for lending agreements.

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Only if you fix the thing where you can rent more than one gotchi at a time. I don’t think we should be subsidizing the botter.

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This is in the works.

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Is there a way to stake enough matic where it would generate free fees and not shrink? Possibly get dual utility from this by staking matic on bridges, or against alchemica, or both, and using the emmisions as the gas fund?

Yes! Would massively improve UX during the critical onboarding phase. Might even be worth seeing if there’s appetite for DAO members to donate to an interim gas tank—while the vote goes through snapshot. I’d chuck in for that. I see a smooth as possible onboarding for newbies as being in all our interests.

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All of our DAI is sitting idle, which means it’s safe, but also not generating any yield. We could earn ~2% p.a. by just depositing it all on Aave, which would generate ~$50k p.a. This coould be enough, but goes beyond the scope of this proposal. In general, idle funds = safe while productive funds = at risk.

Sounds like a neat idea, I’d be in support of it

Good idea, i ran some numbrers on your proposed 100k$ budget:

In these early days, there are about 250 rentals/hour (~20% with a 0 GHST upfront cost), and typical tx fee to rent is about 0.01 MATIC, so we’d need 2.5 MATIC / hour.
If we 10x that rental volume (2500 / hour), it would cost ~25 MATIC per hour.
100k$ worth of MATIC = 58k MATIC = 980 days of gasless renting with current volume, or 3 months if we 10x rentals.

On the other hand, 100k$ is 1% of our DAO treasury. Sounds like a good investment to lower further the barrier to entry.

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Thank you for running the numbers!

I am for this. We should do everything we can to make onboarding easier.

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I love the idea, Moon. Scholars needing MATIC is the number one issue i’ve encountered. This will definitely help bring in more users and help streamline the process for everyone.

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Sounds like a good case for staking just enough to make that be free.

Are there any other options? If we are doing this, we should do it quickly.

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What a terrible idea.
So how do you think these players will transact their Alchemica tokens? You want to pay for this also?
They shouldn’t learn how transactions work?
Biconomy was glad to play the hero …when gas fees were really nothing. Now they start raking in with their useless service. I hope they would all be shot behind the barn, what they deserve…
I hope you can deduce my answer from somewhere here…

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I only support the idea if it’s funded by staking or can be made free somehow. My scholars are making tons of money… this only really helps absolute newbies, bots, and fools, and I agree about the lesson part. We ARE supposed to be teaching people how to crypto here, right?

Although, the MATIC staking rewards could be a win here… if we stake ALCHMATIC, and put a little of those rewards towards gasless rentals, it would be painless and also support the price of ALCH.

We conducted polls of our large group of renters, and they prefer to just get MATIC. Doing ALCHMATIC pools streamlines the process by removing a transaction. This costs us nothing and has a much larger effect than making the upfront free, as it affects four transactions.

Another option would be to set it up so if it’s wallet that has never rented before, it’s gasless, OR it could be that if they don’t have the gas, its free.

Maybe we should get this topic more attention, and have a quick poll…

Yes, give it away
yes - pay for it using staking rewards
yes - free gas if you have less than .01 matic(you cant game this)
no - kill it with fire

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I want avogotchi help

I love the idea of the borrower not needing to spend matic, but to ensure it’s sustainable long term would it be worth considering to add a small fixed fee for the gotchi owner to create a lending contract? Something like 0.02 GHST to create a lending agreement, and that GHST goes to the treasury to self-fund the subsidy. This could also dissuade people from clogging the lending directory with unfavorable terms that never get accepted by a borrower.

To be clear, I would still vote YES on the originally proposed $100K subsidy without this, but just wanted to throw the idea out there.

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Best idea yet. No need to fund it if it is prefunded by the listing.

Thjs is the sort of circular economics we should strive for.

I’ll talk to Biconomy about a potential grant in a couple of days, so I’ll put this idea on hold for now.

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