vBNT in the new paradigm
The reasons for vBNT to exist have slowly eroded over the development of the project:
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Since V3, liquidity levels inside the protocol have been controllable by a DAO vote, and TKN capacity is unlimited by virtue of the separation between on- and off-curve token balances. Therefore, finding BNT reservoirs to open space has not been an issue since the release of the V3 update. By extension, creating a BNT sink while preserving liquidity levels is largely an irrelevant consideration.
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With Carbon aiming to be the flagship offering of Bancor, and the ratification of the emergency actions taken in June of last year, abuse of governance for whitelisting status and rewards are similarly irrelevant.
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Therefore, the safeguards and precautions surrounding the requirements for staked BNT (aka “skin in the game”) can be relaxed without exposing governance procedures to the threats it once faced. Of course, there will always be a need for short lock-up periods to participate in governance - for reasons I choose not to elaborate on here. The good news is that the existing process will service this need equally well with BNT as the governance token.
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The burning of BNT directly, rather than indirectly via vBNT, is not just tenable - but in many ways simpler to implement, document, and communicate. The deprecated draft of the Carbon proposal sought to make burning BNT standard across all three protocols - and was one of the instigating influences behind the creation of the present thread.