Votingautomaton.eth

Very interested in seeing this one pan out.

1 Like

Proposal: Onboard Vitadao (VITA) with 100,000 BNT Trading Liquidity

VitaDAO is attempting to address the lack of early-stage research funding in novel biopharmaceuticals. It is among a very small collection of cryptocurrency projects that have a focus on something other than the axiomatic financial primitives. The VITA token is earned by contributing to ongoing work, submitting new intellectual property, or funding the research directly. It is a super-interesting use case, and is targeting one of the highest revenue-generating industries in existence. More importantly, the pain-point they have identified is legitimate; discovery-phase funding has been in decline for decades, and as a result, new drug developments have practically stalled. This is one of the potentially civilization-disrupting obstacles the global community is facing in the near future, and is of a similar scale to the effects of climate change. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee the project will be a success - but its motivation is sound.

The VITA token is fixed-supply, standard ERC-20, with no administrator permissions. The token is reasonably well-distributed, with one caveat. One address received 15% of the VitaDAO token supply in an apparent auction in June of 2020. The recipient had 3.3M VitaDAO tokens at that time (then worth approx. $11M), and still has most of it, despite trading the token regularly. I have reached out to the team to ask about it - an active whale with 15% of the token supply is potentially problematic. Not a blocker, necessarily, but worth inquiring about.

Apart from this one curiosity, the project looks green across the board. The customary Tweet from the VitaDAO main Twitter handle has been confirmed. The Voting Automaton will vote FOR whitelisting, after clarification on the token auction is obtained. I suspect this is part of the funding mechanism of the project, and is unlikely to be much cause for concern.

1 Like

Proposal to increase the trading liquidity limit in the ENS-BNT pool to 200K BNT
Proposal to increase the trading liquidity limit in the PSP-BNT pool to 300K BNT
Proposal: Increase Trading Liquidity Limit to 250K BNT on the IDLE-BNT Pool

Both the ENS and PSP pools were created only shortly after these tokens first appeared. Their popularity and strength has been maintained, and the market is certainly coming to settle into “normal” volatility by crypto standards. It is an opportune time to increase the trading liquidity on both tokens. The Voting Automaton will vote FOR the proposed increase in both cases.

The IDLE pool is is also an excellent candidate. The IDLE team have tweeted about the benefits of single-sided staking, and the opportunity to provide protected liquidity on Bancor should this proposal pass. The Automaton will vote FOR the proposed increase in funding.

Proposal: Change the fee in the BAT pool from 0.2% to 0.5%
Proposal: Change the fee in the AMP pool from 0.5% to 1%
Proposal: Change the fee in the PSP pool from 0.2% to 0.5%
Proposal: Change the fee in the LINK pool from 0.2% to 0.5%
Proposal: Stablecoin pools fee experiment and analysis

As per the new paradigm, the Voting Automaton is voting for all proposed fee changes, until sufficient data is available to inform a new policy. Therefore, the Automaton is voting FOR all five of these proposals.

1 Like

Proposal: Activate Proof of Attendance Protocol for all future Snapshot proposals
Proposal: Add HAL plugin to Snapshot

The Automaton is pro-community governance, and will support any and all proposals that are thematically aligned with increased engagement, without sacrificing integrity or security. The POAP introduction is low-overhead, inclusive, and does not interfere with the evaluation of proposals’ on their own merits. Therefore, there are no identifiable issues to allowing it.

The HAL plugin is similarly easy to approve. This will allow for automated notifications to be built in to the Snapshot process, and ought to help support our ambitions for a more involved community government.

The Automaton will vote FOR both proposals.

1 Like

Proposal: Whitelist DAO Maker (DAO) with 100,000 BNT Trading Liquidity

DAO Maker is an excellent project. Its focus is on the “start-up” phase of tokenized projects, which has been a stubborn issue since the ICO era. The project aims to further decentralize the venture capital and reduce the financial risk for both investors and the token project. It is a healthy influence in crypto, and the industry is better for the service it provides.

Importantly, there is room for further collaboration between DAO Maker and Bancor in the future, as fledgling token projects progress out of their incubator phase and start to establish liquidity alongside their peers. Think of Maker DAO as the “training wheels” of establishing a token, where the first holders get access to it, and distribution can begin in a healthy, quasi-limited fashion. Then, when it is ready, Bancor could become the next stage of its market development. You don’t have to squint very hard to see how this could become a natural graduation into whitelist status, especially with the additional features (such as external IL protection) offered by Bancor3.

The customary Tweet from the team has been confirmed from their main Twitter handle. therefore, the automaton will vote FOR the whitelist status of DAO Maker.

1 Like

Proposal: Onboard Vitadao (VITA) with 100,000 BNT Trading Liquidity

As a follow-up to the transaction highlighted on the previous post, the participant looks to have paid 1347 ETH for a minimum of 1,531,702 VitaDAO tokens, and received 3,367,500 at the auction conclusion. There was no price for the VitaDAO token prior to this auction, and the valuation dropped 60% shortly after establishing an initial price. This looks like a typical presale. Thanks to @DarkKnight for illuminating these details.

The team has confirmed that the wallet belongs to a highly motivated supporter of the project. It’s not a big issue - the token has established liquidity on Balancer, both as a 50/50 pool and an 80/20 pool, and also on Uniswap V3. Even if this user had nefarious intent, the damage they could inflict is massively tempered against the available liquidity. The 80/20 pool on Balancer has $1.7M in liquidity, but due to the skew in the curve, can absorb a disproportionate quantity of selling pressure on the VitaDAO side. Price manipulation tactics are still a risk with such a whale present, but their on-chain activity does not reflect any such desire. If anything, they are guilty only over being highly enthusiastic. Fingers crossed they are interested in providing liquidity on Bancor.

The Automaton will vote FOR the whitelisting of VitaDAO.

1 Like

Urgent: Temporarily Disable Deposits for $TRIBE and Permanently Disable Deposits for $RGT

The automaton will vote FOR the discontinuation of $RGT deposits permanently, and $TRIBE deposits temporarily, pending the completion of the token merger.

1 Like

Extend LM rewards in the Stablepools (USDC, USDT, DAI) for 6 weeks

The Automaton LM logic has not changed:

if PriorLM == False and StrategicPool == True:
FOR
Elif PriorLM == True and TKN == 'LINK', 'WBTC', 'ETH', 'USDC', 'DAI', 'USDT':
FOR
Else:
AGAINST

Therefore, the Automaton will vote FOR the proposed extension on stables.

1 Like

Proposal: Onboard New RocketPool (RPL) token with 1M BNT trading liquidity

This is a simple migration. The Rocket Pool team is in contact with the Bancor core contributors, and will help to inform the LPs of how to migrate to the new token contract. This is a non-issue; there is no rush to migrate, and it exposes no security threats to the Bancor ecosystem. The Automaton will vote FOR whitelisting the new RPL token.

1 Like

Proposal: Incentivize users to migrate to V3 by matching token side LM rewards with up to 50,000 BNT per pool

As per the Automaton’s established, conservative voting behavior regarding liquidity mining:

if PriorLM == False and StrategicPool == True:
FOR
Elif PriorLM == True and TKN == 'LINK', 'WBTC', 'ETH', 'USDC', 'DAI', 'USDT':
FOR
Else:
AGAINST

This proposal is quite generic; there is no list of eligible TKN provided, nor is there a maximum BNT emissions schedule. This and other ambiguous details, including the dates (and no description of why they were chosen), the 50,000 BNT limits (and why this number is non-negotiable), what “matching” token side LM means (e.g. denominated in USD? when and how is this calculated? is it dynamically adjusted?), make the proposal seem half-baked. This is a complex proposal, and requires a great deal more detail than what was provided.

The automaton will vote AGAINST the automatic provision of BNT rewards to any token.

Proposal: Increase trading liquidity on CEL-BNT pool to 1M BNT 5

The comments raised by @CoinAnole are mostly aligned with the Automaton’s risk aversion regarding the CEL token, specifically. Celsius is amidst uncertain times - three of their executives were recently arrested, and they were greatly affected by the security breach at BadgerDAO. For clarity - there is absolutely no reason to suspect that Celsius and its current team members are anything less than world-class. The Celsius product is terrific, and I have great respect for the team. There is little doubt that their continued presence in DeFi will be a strong positive for the industry. All of that said, is this the best moment to be increasing the trading liquidity for the CEL token? Certainly not.

The Automaton will vote AGAINST increasing the CEL pool as the short-term risk seems too great. However, long-term, CEL is less concerning. An increase in trading liquidity should be discussed again in the future.

Proposal: Onboard SHIBGF with 30K BNT Trading Liquidity 2

The Shiba Girlfriend team have been supportive on Twitter (see: here, here, here, here). Sentiment is overwhelmingly positive(see: here, here, here, here, here, here, among many others).

SHIBGF is a meme token; it has no concrete financial or economic purpose, but rather draws it value from societal and cultural sources. Which is not to say that the token has no purpose; some meme coins truly are without meaning, but Shiba Girlfriend represents female empowerment in STEM fields, with a strong emphasis on programming. The project provides financial support to women’s programs around the world, apparently with funds obtained from the Shiba Girlfriend project. Therefore, the token does have an interesting use case a type of crowd-sourced philanthropy. It is possible that the template could provide a generic solution for other charities to follow.

SHIBGF is difficult to manage from a whitelisting perspective. Tokens belonging to this category have a history of increasing in value parabolically, or exponentially compared with the rest of the market; 1000× value appreciation is not unheard of. As such, meme coins are a catastrophic IL risk to the Bancor protocol. However, some of the features of Bancor3 make these risks more tenable. Importantly, SHIBGF is the first proposal to formally acknowledge the external IL protection in a proposal, and seek to utilize it. Further, the team is providing their own incentives on the pool: SHIBGF liquidity providers will receive auto-compounding rewards in the form of SHIBGF. Therefore, from both an incentives and IL cost perspective, supporting the asset is made considerably easier for the BancorDAO.

Importantly, the requested BNT funding (30,000) is very reasonable, and well-suited to the market capitalization of the SHIBGF project. The token distribution is excellent.

The Automaton will vote FOR the whitelist status of SHIBGF, to begin with the release of Bancor3.

1 Like

Proposal: Onboard Cartesi (CTSI) with 50K BNT trading liquidity limit

The obligatory Tweet has been confirmed. Receptions has been positive.

Cartesi is an operating system that incorporates standard programming environments such as Linux onto blockchains. The idea is to allow for smart contracts to be created with the support of existing repositories, such as the vast catalogue of tools used in C and C++. This could make it easier to develop Dapps, although it is not clear to me the precise manner in which the Linux VM communicates with the Ethereum VM. It is a compelling idea nonetheless, and I am simply going to assume the project has an implementation that addresses possible security risks and other oversights that are deeply smart contract-dependent. Cartesi claims to be blockchain agnostic, which is critical for the type of product it is developing. The value proposition for the project is beyond question.

The CTSI token is a utility token, and is used in a PoS consensus mechanism on its own network side-chain. As a side note, the node runners are apparently randomly selected, which is a potential weakness in the system, but not a big concern for whitelisting the token. CTSI is also paid by network users to write data to the blockchain, and also plays a roll in the Descartes Rollup system - a modified optimistic rollup implementation with an interactive dispute resolution (still in alpha). The Cartesi announcements channel on Telegram is fairly high quality, and the level of transparency there is admirable.

The CTSI token poses no apparent security issues; it is a standard erc20, and the normal locking and staking contracts aside, the token appears fairly well distributed. Audits have been completed by Certik and Slowmist. Exchange liquidity exists for CTSI on Binance and Coinbase, Kraken, Huobi, KuCoin, Gate.io, as well as some DeFI protocols, including Uniswap v3. The requested BNT funding is reasonable (50K).

The Automaton will vote FOR the whitelisting of CTSI.

1 Like

Proposal: Onboard Sheesha with 50K BNT Trading Liquidity Limit

The Sheesha Twitter account has done an excellent job promoting the proposal(see: here, here, here). They even went to the effort of creating instructional tweets on governance participation (see: here, here, here). Absolutely exemplary.

Sheesha is a mutual fund. The SHEESHA token is part of a rewards and staking mechanism. It’s not entirely clear how the performance of the fund is connected with the SHEESHA token; the lite paper discusses diversified portfolios and other things, but never addresses how the SHEESHA token is involved. This is potentially an issue, albeit a small one (relative to crypto norms). The token itself seems harmless, and the requested funding is relatively small.

The Automaton will vote FOR whitelisting SHEESHA; however, the pool should probably remain small. The Automaton is unlikely to support a proposal to increase the available trading liquidity until the role of SHEESHA in the fund is better established.

1 Like

Proposal to activate LM rewards on the SFI-BNT pool in exchange for SFI buybacks

This proposal is among a family of similar proposals, such as those affecting $FARM, $eRSDL, $APW, and $MKR (although the proposal for MakerDAO was deprecated before a vote). The strategy has legs - the $FARM pool on Bancor now commands ~90% of the total liquidity on Ethereum.

The Saffron.Finance counterpart to this proposal can be viewed on their own discourse page; the proposal has not yet appeared on their snapshot governance page. The saffron.finance Twitter account publicized the proposal, to a positive reception.

It should be noted that the pool depth, at present, is a little lackluster. However, this is an unconvincing reason to deny an incentives campaign, as the desired outcome is to improve liquidity. Further, the wording of the proposal is critical:

This is an exchange - liquidity incentives for being the target of SFI buy-backs. Therefore this proposal is contingent on saffron.finance governance agreeing to orchestrate the buyback this way. The Automaton will vote FOR this proposal, but will not vote to renew the incentives, consistent with its prior established behavior.

Proposal: Increase INDEX trade fees to 0.5% on Bancor3 only

The effect of fees on the health and sustainability of the system is the focus of an active investigation. However, the present proposal asks only to increase the fee to 0.5% following the release of version 3. The Automaton will vote FOR the fee increase.

Proposal: Increase the trading liquidity limit in the ENS-BNT pool to 200K BNT

Increasing the single-sided capacity at this stage is sensible. The ENS token has had a little time to settle down, following its mass distribution via an airdrop at the end of last year. The proposal seeks to increase the BNT funding from 50k to 200k, or 4×. This is on the extreme side, but the total funding limit is commensurate with the size and popularity of ENS. Moreover, a community member has asked if the ENS treasury would consider establishing an LP position on Bancor:

This is an interesting possibility, but likely unnecessary. If the pool is to increase its capacity again in the near future, establishing a dialogue with the ENS community either on their own governance pages or through any other means, ought to be made a high priority.

The automaton will vote FOR the increase in BNT funding for the ENS pool.

Proposal: Change the fee in the OCEAN pool from 0.2% to 0.5%

The discussion on the OCEAN fee change is interesting.

These types of analyses are helpful for determining the likely effect of trade routing, and the $OCEAN token is a fairly compelling one to examine further. The current status of the fee optimization experiments suggest that trade routing is a secondary priority; however, we have primarily examined tokens for which Bancor has established a commanding lead in relative liquidity share. Something like $OCEAN is slightly better distributed, and could behave differently. In any case, it is worth determining.

The automaton will vote FOR the proposed fee change on $OCEAN.

1 Like

Proposal to whitelist AST with 50,000 BNT trading liquidity limit

Airswap is building infrastructure to connect traditional markets with DeFi, and the $AST token is a governance token. There are no apparent concerns with the security of the erc20 contract; however, the distribution is very concerning.

About 66% of the token supply is in a state of quasi lock-up. In this case, lock-up refers only to the fact that these funds cannot be used without a DAO decision; the core contributors cannot do anything with these funds without consent of the community. This is not nearly as good as it sounds. For example, the AirswapDAO could volunteer a large proportion of these tokens as a bribe to the curve ecosystem, or similar, which is akin to dumping them on secondary markets. Luckily, the proposed BNT funding is fairly small, 50K, and would have little or no observable effect on the protocol’s health even if such an event occurred.

The Airswap Twitter account has acknowledged the proposal.

Close attention should be paid to $AST, and how its DAO decides to use the 66% of the token supply that is currently allocated to nothing. The Automaton will vote FOR this proposal, but increasing the pool further should be carefully managed. For example, it may be worth opening a dialogue re: the external liquidity incentives and external IL protection offered on Bancor3. If the AirswapDAO could contribute even a tiny fraction of this token supply for such purposes, the distribution would be improved, and in the case of applying them to external IL protection, the risk to growing the pool significantly larger is reduced.

Proposal: Change the fee in the ZCN pool from 0.2% to 0.5%

As mentioned above, the current fee changes being explored by the BancorDAO have yielded very positive results when the fee is increased, mostly negative results when the fee is decreased. The proposed change from 0.2% to 0.5% is reasonable. The Automaton will vote FOR a 0.5% trading fee on the ZCN pool.

Proposal: Increase Trading Liquidity to 300K BNT on DDX (DerivaDAO) Pool and Set Pool Fees at 1%

The $DDX token was only recently added to the Bancor whitelist. The results on Snapshot were unanimous; 100% in favor of the whitelist, and 45.7% quorum.

The $DDX token has a fairly good distribution profile, and maintains a 10-year incentives plan for exchange liquidity rewards for token holders. Therefore, the distribution is expected to continuously improve with time. this is an important consideration, as the asking amount, 300k BNT, is high for its market metrics:

The proposed fee change to 1% is reasonable given the current climate.

The automaton will vote FOR the increase; however, a dialogue should be opened with regards to establishing Deriva’s own incentives on V3, and external IL protection, given the size of this pool.

Proposal: increase the trading liquidity limit in the TRAC pool to 1M BNT
Proposal Addendum: Incentivize users to migrate to V3 by matching token side LM rewards with up to 50,000 BNT per pool
Proposal: Change stablepool fees USDT/USDC/DAI to 1.0%, 1.0% and 1.5%, respectively
Proposal: Whitelist PHTR token with 100k BNT co-investment

The Automaton is voting FOR all of these (sorry for the delayed post). PHTR has done a terrific job promoting the proposal and their pool on Twitter (see here, here, here, here, here, here).

1 Like