Sunset FRENS by October 1st

I propose that we sunset FRENS completely by October 1st. This has been discussed at length by the Aavegotchi community over DAO and hangout calls. There are multiple reasons for sunsetting frens:

  • Reduce the pressure for holding dilutional events
  • GHST has alternative staking utility with GLTR liquidity mining
    • Includes single-sided staking with wapGHST which will soon be configured with VP
  • Reallocate liquidity mining rewards to asset holders who are providing value to the ecosystem in the form of liquidity
    • Single-sided staking for FRENS provides limited benefit to the overall ecosystem
  • Allow for NFT distribution events to generate profit or positively impact token price
  • Affords more flexibility in NFT distribution to Pixelcraft and the DAO

While I believe the pros to sunsetting FRENS outweigh the cons, we should consider and prepare for the negative impacts to the ecosystem and its stakeholders.

  • GHST liquidity – Overall liquidity may decrease with loss of FRENS liquidity mining.
    • Retire the GHST-QUICK pool reward completely
    • Transition to wapGHST as the only single-sided staking reward
    • Add GLTR rewards to the GHST-WETH pool on QuickSwap (5% - in line with GHST-MATIC)
      • Reduce the GHST-alchemica and GHST-GLTR pool LM rewards by 1%
    • Plan to re-examine and monitor liquidity over the next 6 months and consider additional rewards via changes in GLTR allocations or addition of MATIC ecosystem rewards previously awarded to Aavegotchi
  • Liquidity Provider Impact
    • This proposal allows ~2 months for LPs to assess their position and consider reallocations
      • Will need coordinated marketing effort to avoid LPs feeling rugged, but we will need to accept some amount of complaints from those who realize months later that they haven’t been earning frens
  • Current raffle ticket and FRENS holders
    • Pixelcraft and the DAO will need to find a way current tickets to be used. Below are some possibilities
      • Cosmetic wearable raffle (does not need DAO approval for non-BRS wearables)
      • Decorations raffle (does not need DAO approval)
      • Installation raffle (does not need DAO approval)
      • Limited edition amGHST Portal Raffle (needs DAO approval). Best Halloween event ever?
      • Land Auction + Raffle 3 (needs DAO approval which seems unlikely)
      • BRS wearables raffle (needs DAO approval which is unlikely)
    • I am not proposing a specific GLTR value for raffle tickets. Instead, I propose a raffle-by-raffle approach to distribution. This conversation can be ongoing and allows nuance and flexibility to our NFT distributions.

Thanks all. I’m looking forward to the discussion

Dr Wagmi

10 Likes

Do you have any concerns about October 1st being too short of a time period? By the time discussion is done, votes are done, it will be less than a month. Part of the discussion up to this point was reducing them over time, even if we don’t want to do that, completely eliminating them so quickly feels almost like the opposite.

In terms of where the GHST-WETH portion comes from, I’d vote to take the 5% from the GHST-USDC pool rather than the alch/GLTR pools since it’s far more stable.

Edit: after seeing the APY broken down, I don’t have a problem with taking 1% away from the alch/gltr pools.

1 Like

Here is a chart of the various liquidity pools, my proposed weights, and the resulting APY of GLTR liquidity rewards for the respective pools.

3 Likes

I like this idea for sunsetting FRENS.
I’m not a fan of cosmetic wearables, I’m not convinced they would enhance the game without potentially confusing new players.
I would be a little bit concerned about the timeframe, but if there are raffles involved (especially a Halloween LE one )then most players will hear about the changes and should have time to reassess their LPs accordingly.

1 Like

I support this idea and believe we should move away from two staking pool rewards.

This is what I shared in the Discord and what I believe the best path forward with the remaining frens/tickets.

I think the best course of action is a decorations raffle soon + the final raffle to be for land (in the far distant future) Basically it’d look like this:

• Set a date for the decorations raffle and reveal the qty being raffled
• The date ideally lines up with the sunset date for frens
• Allow drop tickets to be converted into others
• Confirm the land raffle qty and districts before the deco raffle, but no set date. Also make it abundantly clear that just because there is a land raffle later, this does not mean we should set a date or even think about one
• The future land raffle would only be enterable with the remaining raffle tickets. There would be no way to mint more tickets with GLTR or anything else

Players then can spend their tickets freely on the deco raffle.

Frens are sunset and so all remaining tickets are then held by players who want to participate in one final raffle.

After the final land raffle, all tickets are worthless as there are no more raffles with frens Hopefully that would bring back some price support for the tickets as people could calculate the now finite ticket supply against the prices of the prize pool.

This would give players enough time to prepare and enough advance notice where nobody could cry foul when their tickets become worthless after the land raffle (likely Q4 or later)

3 Likes

I like it all except for a few minor tweaks and some possibly unfounded concerns.

  1. no need to pull from anything from the insanely high IL alch and glitter pools. Taking it from single staking and the other non verse pools is quite fine.
  2. won’t price of GHST trend towards $1 if the USDC pool is the best option for those who are risk averse?
  3. Saying the APY for the pools is a little obfuscatory when the TVL changes from moment to moment. What APY are you trying to achieve as a goal there? It might be more clear to say upfront what the goal is by ranking the pools? Like… how much liquidity are we trying to get into these pools?

Absolutely love that bit at the end about setting the price in glitter for future tickets on a per raffle basis. The raffles are enough of a gamble as is. Being forced into speculation on the price of a ticket really hurts and causes a lot of losses for people and a lot of bad feelings and blaming of others and is just generally not very good overall for the community vibe.

3 Likes

I support the proposal. A core prop to end the creation and distribution of new Frens should be presented ASAP. Possibly with voting option to terminate even sooner - Sept 1 on vote? Discussion on how to handle outstanding Frens could be further discussed and handled in a separate future vote.
Also, if LP pairs currently rewarded Frens did drop enough after termination of Frens that it caused concern, the DAO could quickly put up a vote to provide LP from the treasury as a backstop.

As already mentioned on Discord I’d like to propose also retiring the GHST-WETH and GHST-MATIC pools to consolidate all GHST liquidity into the GHST-USDC pair. In my opinion they are both the remains of old partnerships that we no longer maintain, GHST-WETH being the Dinoswap pool and GHST-MATIC the first (& only pair) on Sushi. So let’s have a look at the liquidity charts.

GHST-USDC: currently 5.5mn USD

GHST-WETH: currently 950k USD

GHST-QUICK: currently 370k USD

GHST-WMATIC: currently 965k USD

As you can see, GHST-USDC is not only by far our strongest pair (despite lower incentives), but it’s also the most stable liquidity pool for GHST. This is partly due to price fluctuations of the other coins in more volatile pairs, but more importantly people just lost interest in these LPs (past programs that ran out).

So not only are we distributing incentives for pairs that people don’t like, we’re also splitting up our liquidity among different pairs (and DEXes!), which increases price impact for GHST. Quickswap is notorious for having garbage routing, and this becomes evident when looking at the volume numbers. Despite their atrocious liquidity, a ton of trades are still being routed through these inferior liquidity pools:

To maximize GHST liquidity and minimize the price impact for people buying/selling GHST I therefore believe we should retire all “experimental” LP pairs and consolidate rewards into the GHST-USDC pool. This could either be done by funneling @stedari’s proposed GLTR %'s into GHST-USDC (by reducing alchemica %) or the simple retirement of these pools with the 5% GHST-WMATIC allocation going to GHST-USDC (now 20% in total, alchemica stays the same).

If you guys think this is a controversial change I’m happy to do a seperate SigProp, but let’s see how much opposition there is in the first place.

7 Likes

@Moon
Dr Wagmi is unavailable to do a talk on this Sunday, is there any chance you could do some education on this at the meeting on Sunday? If not, I’ll just put all the info on the board and we see what people say and run a flash poll.

PS - thank so you much for that post. SO helpful.

1 Like

Yes, sunset frens, better sooner than later. Incentivice liquidity only for GHST-USDC/Alchemica/GLTR pairs (and wapGHST). Make installations and upgrades buyable/mintable with tickets for a certain amount of time to compensate frens/ticket holders. Rates would need to be discussed.

Controversial suggestion: we don´t need raffles any more. They are a great marketing tool during bull markets but create a lot of problems during bear markets. We are here to stay for 10+ years and we will see a few cycles. So let´s focus our energy on an alternative.

I think we already got one with our bid2earn auctions. We could gamify them even more by allowing all Aavegotchi native tokens in the auctions. Maybe we restrict certain items of an auction to a certain token (e.g. bidding for humble parcels only possible with FUD). We could even randomly draw these “pairs” for example 24 hours before the auctions start.

2 Likes

I tend to agree. If we were to replace all future raffles with GLTR GBM auctions we wouldn’t have to worry about the difficulty of finding the correct GLTR->Ticket conversion rate that raffle tix purchased with GLTR will introduce.

GBMs have always been way more fun than raffles IMO. The wearables GBMs were insanely fun.

We currently have ALOT of frens and tickets remaining. So we can actually still do plenty of raffles for a couple years to slowly deplete the leftover frens. This could give us a nice slow transition into GBM only events.

2 Likes

Here is the chart referenced in my signal proposal with proposed changes and resultant estimate APYs:

2 Likes