Extend LM on the BAT pool

Proposal to Extend LM Rewards on BAT pool.

This proposal is expected to appear on Snapshot for voting on Monday July 12th.

  • The Liquidity Mining program was a proven success with adding over $10,000,000 of liquidity to the BAT pool. We saw several large whales join the Bancor Protocol due to this proposal.

  • The program also allowed Bancor’s BAT pool to have the deepest liquidity pool for BAT compared to all DEX. See below for a recent snapshot comparison. Current depth on BNT is $15,000,000+.

  • By adding the LM rewards, we also saw fees increase significantly. More volume has moved to the BNT protocol.

Justification

It is clear that the LM reward program on BAT was a success. We grew liquidity and fees increased, as this program is intended to do.

The reasoning to extend LM on BAT is to retain this liquidity. If we do not extend LM, there are higher yielding platforms for the BAT holders to move their funds to. We will lose a significant amount of the liquidity we gained and fees will go down.

Vote FOR to extend LM on BAT for an additional 12 weeks.
Vote AGAINST to not re-new LM on BAT.

3 Likes

We should make an effort to retain the liquidity. I think we can pretty handily afford holding this one up until V3 launches, given that volume is still low; we may consider lowering the fee, though, precisely because volume is low, and we need to draw traffic to make the LM button mean something here. That can be a separate proposal, however.

2 Likes

There is 25 days remaining of LM rewards on this pool. We should probably wait till it’s closer to the expiry time to vote in this renewal (July 19th).

2 Likes

I’m fine with this, just want to make sure vote takes place before rewards expire

3 Likes

Does anyone know how much was generated in fees in this pool since the LM started?

LM is expensive - we should make sure there is a strong case.

3 Likes

I don’t have the total amount of fees generated, but it has significantly increased since LM started. See chart included.

These past weeks have low volume across the entire market anyways. When volume picks up, Bancor will receive a large share of BAT volume, if LM is renewed.

2 Likes

It would be helpful to know if the fees cover the LM, come close, or not by a long shot.

2 Likes

LM rewards are an incentive program, and are expensive. I would like to consider activating LM rewards on other pools that do not already have such deep liquidity, like ICHI or FARM. IL insurance is a significant draw card for LPs. It is not clear that ending LM rewards will lead to migration of LPs as they cannot get IL insurance in Uni or Suchi. MKR pool remains a deep pool even though LM rewards have ended.

2 Likes

Have to agree with @Sjwill on this one. The BAT pool still has a lot of space for BAT tokens, suggesting that LM rewards are not a good motivator for BAT token holders. It is not clear what the purpose is of increasing the LM program at this stage. I would be more interested in activating LM on new pools, than extending this one.

image

1 Like

I agree with this, the rates on BNT is also quite high which means BNT Stakers don’t necessarily want to stake in the BAT pool even if the APRs are high.

1 Like

At the moment, we have the deepest pool and Uniswap V2 is far behind (2nd highest depth, not much on V3):

image

We are the largest (16.5M) by ~3x as much as the 2nd biggest (6M) pool on Uniswap V2.

The total fees for this pool and others that have had LM rewards since the week of 6/7 (about 30 days worth):

symbol total_fees
UNI $12,799.78
REN $18,146.65
MKR $24,157.10
GRT $26,147.46
YFI $26,656.51
OCEAN $29,045.70
ALPHA $32,508.82
BAT $42,856.52
AAVE $47,956.39
ROOK $58,372.42
wNXM $60,635.06
SNX $65,840.81
WOO $149,225.81
ENJ $170,779.83
MATIC $180,324.01

puts it in the middle of the pack. Its volume and fees picked up on the week of 5/3 when we enable LM rewards (around 5/6):

I think this pool should be capable of more volume but I think that the current fee .5% is holding us back (we have competitors). A quick test for this, when swapping from BNT to BAT, I am seeing that any amount above 40 BNT ($130) does not go through Bancor. 1inch essentially is using the USDT pool (and others) to swap the BNT and then sending it to some other location:

we don’t come into the picture again until the order is roughly ~75K at 10%:

Without us in the picture, most of this appears to be routed to some PMM (private market makers)

It might be worth considering dropping fees as part of a separate proposal to at least be competitive with Uniswap.

3 Likes

Appreciate everyone’s feedback. Thank you Glenn for the additional details. I think the fee adjustment would help. Still concerned that liquidity leaves the pool if LM is not extended. Based on the fees, it appears BAT LM is justified. Higher fees than ALPHA and that got re-extended.

3 Likes

Good candidate to adjust the fee. Want to try 0.1% for a little while? If we are the deepest liquidity source, could be a good opportunity to really test the effect of the fee. We can build into the proposal that if the APY is harmed after 2 weeks, that the fee should be raised until we find the clutch point.

6 Likes

Liquidity mining costs 20,000 BNT per week. We should consider if LM on the BAT pools is the best use of $70,000 per week (at current prices)

3 Likes

@glenn @mbr are you thinking of doing this before or after LM vote?

1 Like

There is no proposal yet. We can go live with the LM vote first. The order that these things occur is probably not a big issue.

1 Like

Fees will probably not go down all that much but APRs will rebalance to sustainable amounts. The BAT Pool has had it’s run, there would have to be some really extraneous circumstances like collaboration for me to vote for this. Should we loose 70% of our depth we would still be the biggest pool so I don’t see a decrease in liquidity as hurting our fees too much.

3 Likes

I vote no - unless there is some deeper integration planned.

1 Like