I guess short term speculators or users who don’t buy Gnosis vision could lock for a shorter period of time or just “rage quit” and sell GNO any time. Any future reward is already priced in GNO due to the uncertainties you mentioned.
Removing users with doubts is exactly the goal of locking GNO. We need investors focused in the long game, willing to continue betting for GNO even during bear markets.
Being forced to be long an asset has also an interest effect on the investor’s psychology, I experienced this as a 4 years’veCRV holder. Even during moments of doubts, you are incentivised to be bullish and support the project because basically you don’t have a choice.
Hey guys, Fernando from Balancer here. Really enjoying the discussion!
Interestingly our community came to the same conclusion: that a mechanism for long-term staking/locking that boosts vote power and liquidity mining incentives is highly desired. It ensures the alignment of incentives of token holders: the longer you lock your tokens, the longer you’ll be exposed to the consequences of your votes.
The idea is to do the same as AAVE and stake/lock 80/20 BAL/ETH BPTs instead of pure BAL. This avoids drying up BAL liquidity and instead ensures a lot of liquidity. There are other teams considering this same approach to, which is based on this article by Joel Monegro. Those who don’t want to be exposed to ETH could still use BAL to vote, but they would not have a boost as those who lock up BPTs would.
We also discussed having a way for stakers/lockers to withdraw their tokens earlier, but we decided for simplicity that this should not be possible. As @claberus mentioned, if you are not sure you want to be in for the long-run you can just choose a shorter lockup duration.
One thing though that we were considering is to have some global option for everyone to withdraw their tokens if something major happens, like a system upgrade or migration where tokens would need to be liquid. That would be voted by governance and would only happen in extreme cases.
The Balancer Labs team is looking into coding this in solidity since we don’t want to mix Curve’s vyper with our solidity based code. So we’d probably be coding this from scratch.
Curious if you would like to get involved and send us some features you’d like to see in this. We want to keep this as simple as possible though.
Great idea for the token for GP. Speaking as a GNO holder, cowswap user and poap holder.
Brief thoughts-
-Not against a lock-up of GNO per se, in fact I see the advantages in it for sure, but one years sounds like a lot (but not out of the realm of credulity) and 4 years is simply too long without any “get out” mechanism. That kind of defeats the object of the lock up though, doesn’t it? Perhaps some kind of time-weighted staking system that in effect compounds your access given the length of time staked. Have no idea what the feasibility of such a system would be though.
To prevent unnecessary pumping of GNO to get the GP drops, just ensure the snapshot is taken before the announcement.
-Good to distribute among early users, but I don’t think it’s necessary to give the poap holders any specific consideration over other early users (not to any large degree anyway). The reward for testers already came in the form of the poap and the subsidized fees, no? Again, snapshot before announcement makes more sense.
Can’t see any reason to give priority to Eth users over xDai users.
Further to the above about early users, set a minimum trade limit on trades that qualify for any drop (a nominal amount, say $40-50 or something) to avoid distribution going to a ton of wallets from single owners that made $2 USDC to DAI trades.
To me, the biggest benefit is being able to participate in governance and with this broaden the possible base for future developments, as long as there is a broad distribution.
A Native token also is an easier barrier for entry for those that are newer to using cowswap. I think this will elevate the status of the platform as a whole!
