Coming from the same data you have on incentives, I am currently maintaining this set of opinions:
- incentives are currently a way to provide attention to mSOL and MNDE utility (40M MNDE is voting on them vs 25M on validator gauges). The inclusion of synthetics, options, and upcoming Hubble collateral into gauges draws attention to mSOL use in the ecosystem beyond LP and borrowing
- incentives might not buy any significant VL in one channel, but they can prevent losing TVL across the board. It’s been noted several times across different protocols that Solana DeFi is not really following the incentives rationally.
- since the unstake period got lowered to one epoch, incentives from the perspective of risk mitigation might be significantly reduced as the SC and withdrawal risk decrease(d) with time
- beyond incentivization, distributing MNDE still serves the purpose of decentralizing Marinade ownership (read: spreading it around). Reaching a loosely defined state of sufficiently decentralized could help when regulators get involved. (Everything changed when the nation-state attacked.)
I think cutting incentives by 30-50% could be an interesting experiment to find how much the incentives can get us. I’d be looking at these factors before drafting a proposal:
- selling of MNDE across the incetivized channels
- unstaked SOL available in the ecosystem
- team temperature on Marinade/MNDE decentralization (currently a KPI being tracked)