Marinade should include a perma-lock (or 5 years lock-up) for $mnde tokens, meaning the greater the time-lock of $mnde–> the greater the voting power & greater token emissions someone receives.
This aligns protocol power with long-term Marinade stakers (presumably long-term believers) of Marinade protocol – giving a greater say to those who are guaranteed not sell tokens over a longer period of time.
This should dry up the token supply and ostensibly drive up the price of $mnde.
In conclusion, not only will this proposal combat the high FDV, high token emissions meme that is so pervasive in the Solana ecosystem, but it should also align Marinade governance power and rewards with long-term believers of Marinade.
It would be amazing if there were some statistics/data on this too. For example, if you know only 1,000 Octopus remain, and 500 were in a long term stake it would dramatically impact price.
I like the general idea, and as a token holder it does encourage me to lock up my stake. While I appreciate and respect Marinade’s focus on helping people keep their stake liquid, I do think there’s value in long-term alignment.
However, a concern is that players with deeper pockets can not only afford to get more of a token but to risk it on a longer-term lock. This means that multi-year vote lock multipliers can skew decision-making to those with deeper pockets.
Is this a concern for anyone else?
My current thinking on it is that it should have a voting power increase but on with some tapering, but I’ve yet to build a model. It might be enough to initially try 6-month and 1-year locks with a fixed multiplier, and see what sort of behavior we get from voters.
Idea here behind a lock-up is to push people to use the main utility of the $MNDE token, which is governance power and allocate $SOL into some specific chosen validator.
The game theory here is : you can lock your $MNDE for a longer time and get a bigger share/voice on which validator should get more allocation.
People and projects managing their own validator are going to buy a lot of $MNDE tokens then locking them for the longest period available to help the validator they want.
It’ll create a new war between each validator runner to allocate as much as possible on their own node. Keep in mind the biggest nodes currently have like 5-10m SOL staked into them. These nodes TVL are as big as Marinade as a whole.
There are many big VC funds staking on their own validator with deep pockets, they plan on multiples years, or decades … If you offer them to allocate some more yield on their own validators against one other token, they might start to fight for this power.
I rather choose a permanent lock-up, I want to reduce the possible supply in circulation which lead to increase the token price and counter inflation.
It is widely known that when Saber governance went live, Race Capital locked their entire SBR allocation for the 5 year max. As a result, Race and the Saber core team likely control a significant share of the protocol’s voting power.
I know Marinade doesn’t have any VCs involved at this time, and I don’t take issue with either party above, but is this really where we want this governance process to go? Personally, I would prefer to see more smaller groups have more power.
The Marinade DAO needs active governors invested in Marinade’s future. To motivate people to lock their MNDE and begin governing, tokens locked in governance could be distributed additional tokens from the DAO allocation. These incentives should illuminate the path towards engaging in active governance as a right thing to do for MNDE holders.
The Chefs team plans to put a proposal to enable this distribution with a starting rate of 100,000 MNDE per week (5.2 million MNDE per year) to an open vote for the MNDE holders shortly after the governance launch.
Thanks to on-chain governance, this rate could be adjusted by the DAO, just as the bi-weekly liquidity mining incentives that will include any roadmap boosts.
I think the idea that the wealthy can afford to lock $mnde long-term is silly.
Because if people can’t afford to think long-term, then they shouldn’t be voting in the first place. 2) Poor people don’t have to lock-up all thier tokens; for example, they could lock-up a quarter of thier tokens for 5 years (max lock-up period).
Also, short lock-up times incentivizes mercenary capital, because you can come in to vote and then quickly get out. If you want smaller groups to hold more power than you should propose something that gives extra voting power to smaller wallets.
Whales will be involved in every project. They are part of the ecosystem. I think we should make decisions according to the users in the middle who are probably the majority. What moves help them the most? They are the grassroots investors who are more active in the community, and who benefit more from MNDE doing well.
Fully agreed. My concern is that whales also have the resources to lock up MNDE for longer than grassroots investors, which would further multiply their decision-making power over the smaller fishes. That’s why I think we may want to consider some vote weight tapering.
Speaking of grass-roots investors, I’ve been kicking around an idea on if the limited-edition NFTs could have a voting multiplier - that way early supporters get to have more of a say in the protocol.
It’s not yet fully formed to create its own topic, and it’s related to what we are discussing, so how do you folks feel about that?
I don’t think the double vote could be a fair solution, vote power’s rules should be the same for everyone.
Maybe a good incentive for early investors could be double rewards instead.
An NFT voting multiplier would attract attention and gamify something (Solana staking) that is rather bland to non Defi Degens. Free branding and more attention → mSOL TVL growth and higher mSOL retention. All of this without spending money, without needing to emit $mnde.
Other use cases for the limited NFTs:
Breeding (really a fan of embracing the NFT gamification).
Every 2 weeks-to-2 months, a baby octopus NFT is emitted to wallets holding limited edition Octopus NFTs, periodically reminding people to check in on the project, keeping them engaged.
The more Octopus NFT’s you have the greater chance of minting a rare. You could then “breed” a baby octopus, perhaps with a baby shark, which could form a super cool mutant Octo-shark. Why? Because it’s fun, it could bring people together, form community and perhaps win something (like $mnde rewards)
Would like to hear from a dev @keisuki@griffin about how technically complicated this is, specifically the NFT voting multiplier, and how much energy this would take to build.
I think the most unfair thing about this is that a voting multiplier would benefit those who were early, who minted before anyone was really paying attention to the project… more or less it’s an airdrop to early governance folks. That doesn’t personally bother me.
Agree with @Massimiliano in that double voting power is probably a bit too much, but maybe something like a 1.25x multiplier (or even less) could make things interesting and increase secondary market demand for the limited edition Marinade NFTs.
Double MNDE rewards on the limited editions for a period of time could also produce a similar effect IMO.
Long term rewards for limited edition NFTs are good.
Other thought I really like:
Give the NFTs a 2x $mnde multiplier and simultaneously introduce 2% royalty fees which funnels into the DAO treasury. Given the DAO revenue is ~$1M, I think this would be nice way to add cashflow.
Longer lockups = more voting power and higher emissions
This is the most promising idea to explore for several reasons
there is a want to align incentives over the long term
and allow aligned participants to steer the project more compared to short-term oriented actors
in fact, one of the early concepts of Marinade Chef NFT was designed around 4 years (Curve model) or at least 300 days (still within a fiscal year to unlock when planning for a year)
Team went with the 30 days lockup to reduce holders’ risk as governance processes and are just setting up and settling down.
300d lockup resurfaced again within the context of Ecosystem Token Exchange and would be probably connected to higher voting power and emissions (if these get voted in). The simple approach would be linear, so 10x voting power and emissions which is the most readable. Maybe there can be some diminishing return, but that’s really hard to model.
Longer lockups, while technically possible, don’t look as promising at this point. Marinade has started only a year ago. Asking for a several years lockup might make sense over ossified protocols that have clearly won their markets, but not high growth and high learning projects. Even from a governance angle, it makes sense to optimize for rapid learning over risk-averse multi-year alignment.
My personal addition is that it wouldn’t be fair to ask for such commitment from investors right now - it’s really hard to foresee a future of Solana, blockchain, and maybe even the World in 4-5 years. And, when not perceived as fair, the participation and locking would respectively be lower. But again, please take this as an expert’s intuition.
But I agree with @Chief_Standing_Wolf that if 300d NFT happens, there needs to be a conversion for 30d NFT owners to equal the playing field. Early governors should not suffer the cost of progress.
Limited edition power
I lean against empowering limited edition for several reasons:
speaking from the Marinade tokenomics perspective, the team feels strongly against high APYs and ponzinomic for the sake of short-term attention. This feels like an experiment with an unclear hypothesis.
this does not create a new value, it simply borrows it from the future potential, entrenching what is. Retention is better done by utility manifested and value created, instead of incentives. I think Marinade still has some time to evaluate whether it was successful in creating and capturing the liquid staking market. Paying for retention now feels premature.
limited edition was communicated as purely aesthetic with the point, that governance participation should be equal. Where locking a token for longer is a meaningful decision communicating alignment, Governooor having to mint a regular edition (or paying a premium on the secondary market) because speculators minted out all the limited NFTs sooner, does not feel inclusive, egalitarian, and simple. I believe the aesthetic approach to limited ed will win premium over the long term simply because it is not trying to be anything else. Why would we need to steer the market here?
I think this is a really interesting argument. My feeling is when art + utility are combined in an NFT, the NFT tends towards the value of the utility and disregards the value of the art. Which leads me to something I proposed earlier, some non-monetary benefits for the L.E. NFTs :
Other use cases for the limited NFTs:
Breeding (really a fan of embracing the NFT gamification).
Every 2 weeks-to-2 months, a baby octopus NFT is emitted to wallets holding limited edition Octopus NFTs, periodically reminding people to check in on the project, keeping them engaged.
The more Octopus NFT’s you have the greater chance of minting a rare. You could then “breed” a baby octopus, perhaps with a baby shark, which could form a super cool mutant Octo-shark. Why? Because it’s fun, it could bring people together, form community and perhaps win something (like $mnde rewards)
Let’s separate a problem/opportunity from a solution first, so we can understand if they are a good match.
1) If we want to remind people what’s happening in Marinade
they will be probably better in following Twitter or joining discord
alternatively they can start reading the bi-weekly Kitchen Stories on Medium and subscribe for notification - we might need to promote that more
2) If the problem is notifying NFT holders about a new proposal and generally reminding them about Marinade/governance (which I think is a valid problem!), I think we have a wider solution space:
We can ask them to input an email when minting and when visiting the governance to get the reminders
We can start using services like https://www.dialect.to/ to send messages directly to their wallets
3) If we the opportunity is to create fun
Then perhaps self-contained breeding is perhaps not being ambitious enough. We should be asking what opportunity do we see on the market, how can it be approached using game or play thinking and if there are ways how to connect it to Marinade OKRs.
I am happy to write down my idea about NFT kitchen, where using ecosystem protocols would allow you to collect NFT ingredients and cook various utility recipes from them (discount, access, whitelists…). Think Zelda BoTW cooking with Marinade But I don’t think it can help reaching roadmap OKRs for 2022 so I am not pushing it.
But I don’t think it can help reaching roadmap OKRs for 2022 so I am not pushing it.