At time of writing, the Ribbon Multisig owns $~90K [1] worth of LDO, earned through referral rewards from Lido DAO because of the stETH options vault TVL. We have found a short-term use case for the LDO: help bootstrap the gauge bribing marketplace.
Proposal
We propose to allocate $15K worth of LDO from the treasury towards bribing the stETH pool for the upcoming gauge vote on Friday (June 3rd) 00:00 UTC. This achieves two goals:
allows for the team to conduct internal data analysis on the effectiveness of gauge bribes. A total of 3,228,221 veRBN voted on previous week’s gauge [2]. The total supply of veRBN at that block snapshot (14807865) was 6,879,345 veRBN, which means that ~53% of voting power did not vote in the previous gauge. This suggests that ~53% of voting power either a) does not have a position in any of the vaults or b) are too lazy to vote anyways. We believe that a bribe will incentivize both groups a and b to come out of the woodwork to vote.
we specifically chose LDO to use as a bribe asset because it also allows us to simulate as closely as possible the results had Lido DAO been bribing. We want to collect data from changes in voting behavior, changes to emissions distribution, and changes in stETH TVL as a result to present a strong argument to the Lido DAO why they should bribe.
Conclusion
Rather than having the LDO funds sitting idle, we suggest a use case that will be helpful in assessing the effectiveness of the bribing system as well as help onboard Lido to bribe themselves moving forward.
Voting
Since $15K is a rather trivial amount and the new epoch of gauge votes will launch tomorrow, we propose to fastrack this proposal. We will post this on the forum for a day, and subsequently voting will be open on snapshot for a day. This means the bribe will be active for 4 days before end of gauge emissions voting on Tuesday.
This vote will be a single choice vote. You may vote on the proposal by selecting “Yes, let’s do it” or “No, this is not the way”.
Hey Ken, thanks for the proposal. I’m in favour testing this out, and see no reason not to push it through for this weeks vote.
That being said, I am weary that we are favouring stETH vault LPs, but I don’t think the treasury holds another token that could be used in a similar way. So this seems like the best approach.
It’ll be interesting to see the effect on TVL post vote and hopefully it will de-risk moves by DAOs to get involved with the bribes.
I’m absolutely in favor of this proposal, and don’t think it will be too hard to convince Lido to allocate some incentives to Ribbon. However, given the outsize impact just a small incentive of 1 WETH had on the votes for the AAVE pool last round, I think $15k might be overkill. Unless that is the point, to show Lido how effective it can be.
Hi, I am supportive of conducting the test to analysis the impact. However, I am struggling to se a reason why Lido would have any incentive to spend some of their token to bribe the stETH vault. Maybe a small uptick in demand which could help the stETH/ETH peg, but that seems farfetched. They don’t get any liquidity benefit off of that, so unless they are a LP in the vault with part of their treasury,I don’t see the benefit for them. Am I missing something?
I see, but #2 is only valid if new users deposit into the stETH vault using ETH, which I assume (based on your answer) in the backend is staked on Lido in exchange for stETH, rather than being swapped in an AMM. Is that how it works in the vault logic: 1) User deposit ETH into the stETH vault >> 2) ETH is staked on Lido in exchange for stETH >> 3) stETH is used as collateral to write ETH calls?
As opposed to having a function in step 2) that check what is the best option between directly staking on Lido vs. swapping ETH for stETH on the secondary market (which should be the preferred route as long as stETH is below peg).
Ok, thanks, make sense then. And I don’t see that as an issue on the user side because you always got the option to swap on Curve first and deposit stETH directly if you wish.
Curious to see the result of this experiment.