First, I would like to congratulate and thank each one of the vault runners who contributed to the first month of successful launch of our bitcoin bridge, which already has bridged over 100 BTC.
As you guys are aware, we initially had the btc bridge vault incentives (paid in ONE, beyond the bridge fee) to be matching the staking APR (up to 10%) as described in Length of Participation - Harmony. We are in the process of revising it to make it more attractive to increase the participation as well as increase the amount of collateral deposited by the vaults. We only have around 8 vaults with more than 100K ONE collateral and we need to encourage the vaults to put in more (10x at least by 20+ vaults). Here are our revisions and we welcome any further suggestions from the community.
increase the ONE reward to 15% for 1 year committment, 10% for 6 months, 5% for 3 months
distribute the internal vault earning (currently there are two, adding up to 0.5 BTC accured as fee over the past month) to external vaults based on their % contribution to overall collateral.
Further, we are also thinking long term to fully hand over the bitcoin bridge to the community (via DAO: Bitcoin Bridge DAO) to be sustainable. As vault runners are the prime contributors to bridge, please express your interest to be a governor of bitcoin bridge DAO by posting (to Bitcoin Bridge DAO) some of the details like name, affiliation, contribution to harmony ecosystem (as validator, product, service partner or any other means), creative ideas, etc. We welcome any suggestions. Let’s get the ball rolling.
If one day a vault wants to retire, is there any mechanism for the vault operator to shift/transfer the btc to another vault.
Can we also have an option for the vault operatiors to opt out of using their vault. This will add another level of security for vault operators who cannot add more collateral incase they are away for some time.
I’d like to sign up for the 12 month option. I’m one of the top 8 vaults already. I’ll add more as my validator grows and I can transfer self stake.
At the moment there is no clarity as to how or when the rewards are distributed.
Will there be a place to initiate a reward claim like regular staking rewards on the staking dashboard?
Will we have to wait the full year to claim all rewards at 15%? or do we lock in for a year and claim periodically?
Perhaps consider auto-compounding rewards into the vaults to increase capacity?
Another thing to consider is allowing BTC or 1BTC to be used as collateral.
There was an idea about opening up delegations to vault runners, this should help increase capacity and would make it more attractive to vault runners if we can take a cut of fees, and to community members who’d like to be involved but don’t want to run a vault. But it’s going to be hard to undelegate when our vaults are regularly at full capacity due to the one way traffic we are experiencing. Not sure how that get’s solved as the goal is to draw value in from Bitcoin.
yes, the reward claim will be periodic and won’t be a long wait for the length of participation. we are in the process of adding the features like ability to restake the rewards and also delegation. agree that, delegation will surely help with increased participation and collateral amount. thanks.
Since this is a discussion for a DAO rather than a formal proposal, moving this to the Ideas category. Please continue working through this ideation phase for the DAO.
@Sam or @frwrdslosh can chime in as we get closer to what this DAO should be responsible for
Will the previous time that the vaults participate also count to the commitment period? I’m one of the vault operator (not big enough yet but I can add more), but I will be hesitant to lock more ONE unless I’m sure that the incentive is well designed and I’m also “compensated” for my past time keeping my vaults online.
Similar to @chubby, I also wonder whether the incentives will be paid retroactively. I’m also a small vault operator and I’m periodically adding more collateral according to my means.
I love the ideas that have been put forward above. Regarding the implementation of delegations, will you also add the possibility of naming our vault for marketing purposes?
While I strongly agree with the idea of being compensate retroactively. I strongly disagree with the idea of “naming” the vault especially for marketing purposes. If this happen we can bring an old known problem present at the validator scheme to the bridge vault as well. All vaulters need to have BTC bridged and need the BTC to be redeemed back to increase the collateral ratio. Otherwise its a moneypit. Where you just throw in your collateral and never gets anything back, If theres no redeem. Bringing any marketing to it will just reduce the number of available vaults and will eliminate the fair competition that already has some sort of randomness.
I strongly disagree with the idea of “naming” the vault
Unfortunately the vault doesn’t operate flawlessly and having named vaults could give the bridge user and Harmony a contact when something goes wrong.
I’m well aware of the concerns that you brought up and I certainly would like to avoid them. I agree that the random selection of vaults when bridging is fair and should be kept as it is; random and without aliases.
For the delegation part, though, naming our vaults might be a good idea:
It would allow us to promote our vaults more easily (I mean delegating, not bridging).
It would give the Harmony Team a means to contact us.
It would improve the user experience by allowing users to directly contact the vault runner in case there’s an issue.
Naming our vaults is not incompatible with a semi-random delegation allocation, if that’s what you propose.
I can think of a few other other ways naming our vaults could potentially help the BTC Bridge, but at this point it would be speculation, given that we don’t know yet the details and conditions under which “delegation” will be implemented (random, semi-random, incentives, sustainability of those incentives in the long run, risks, etc).
@DKValidator@Rutilant_Hub . I don´t need to stress enough the problem that having the SAME delegating structure that we have as the validator structure. We are WELL aware of all the problems. We have a chance of doing something different here. And you guys want to repeat the same mistakes. All those “claims” for naming, in my opinion are void, since the issues are faced by the vault operators. If the user has an issue, there´s the bridge support that they can address with the hash and so on. Even the vault operators solve those issues via discord, or via bridge support.
You can´t expect a different result, if you keep doing the SAME thing, over and over again.
I don’t know what you think the issue is here and you seem to be assuming everyone is thinking the same thing you are.
So I’ll lay out where my head is…
Personally, I’m quite happy with being one of many named validators that can attract delegations from the community and ideally new stakers through our actions and participation. I think this encourages us to do more to promote Harmony and grow the network. Even if it is hard work and incredibly time consuming…
The original point I was making is; if there is a problem with my vault (and I’ve had a couple of issues), then I feel it is very advantageous for the user to be able to contact me directly… In case there is something I can do about it.
If/when vault delegation is enabled, I think it’s reasonable to be rewarded for the effort I make of promoting delegation to the bridge and increasing it’s collateral by taking a share of the rewards for the stake I’ve attracted.
In my opinion the problems with the current delegation structure boil down to:
The staking dashboard design promotes delegation to larger validators.
The staking dashboard design promotes delegation to highest APR… which is currently the validators signing empty blocks and/or targeting the lower bound.
Extremely large single entities (Kucoin, Binance) have too much power.
There is no bootstrap for new validators making it very difficult (but not impossible) to get elected.
I’m happy to consider other points of view when explained.