Mostly unrelated to my post but I want to highlight something I noticed was a concern of various people and now also seems to be missed by many, that being the early redemption starting after three months and linearly increasing from there. That should help smooth out the redemption curve and also satisfy the early concerns voiced of a large unlock concentrated at the end.
I have two issues not related to the early redemption(I just want to make sure people see that), the first is relatively minor and essentially the same issue I’ve had since the 22% early redemption was suggested and I’ll start with that.
Now that a snapshot has been confirmed making the concerns I mentioned before about how much better an unlimited exit 22% could be for some bigger holders relative to the amount of liquidity available to them on chain. I’d like to at least suggest this now to get it on the record despite still generally wanting to keep this as simple as possible for the first phase and just make this project a reality and build out from there.
The 50% offer with its limit as stated is probably fine as a start and since it has already been presented I’m absolutely on board with offering it as part of the first phase as is. But ideally, with the unique advantage of the peg being off so much and liquidity being so low, there may be people willing to accept some mutually beneficial offers where much larger amounts are burned at much lower rates.
Just as a toy example to illustrate the logic and then go from there, if someone with 10m in prehack value was willing to accept an exit of 1%, being $100k in ONE, of course it would be hugely beneficial to burn that much for so little.
Understanding that the 1% is not going to happen, but going from there with that logic to ranges that may happen and a strategy that is a bit more dynamic. If the exit offer via the contract was on a curve that was not probably not linear and heavily weighted to allowing accounts in the snapshot only to redeem large amounts at very low percentages and perhaps close to unlimited amounts with no snapshot at extremely low percentages. All the way up to the $1k 50% option(of course would depend on the amount of liquid ONE we have available for the early exit) it would potentially be a good way to increase effectiveness.
The best way I can see this is time based where you increment the changes slowly and raise the price offered over time and also adjust the curve and its variables according to liquid ONE supply vs the demand, but that again is more complicated. One issue though with the static pricing, even with the $1k 50% plan is that even though that should generate demand, people who meet their cap but still want to exit will sell their assets on the market at whatever price they are willing to settle for creating downward pressure on the peg. This is a worse outcome than us buying and burning them, for example.
I’ll just note here that generally even just a limited buyback and burn contract loaded with ONE with some restrictions and restraints can end up fairly efficient here and allow people their exit liquidity while putting positive pressure on the peg. It would be a totally different approach though and works great far off peg but can’t be the only strategy, as we do need to incentivize people to buy and burn in exchange for rONE.
If a static curve is the easier way, governance would have to propose reasonable curves inline with the overall strategy and amount of liquid ONE available for exits. This is one example of the ‘governance being too good’, or ‘too dangerous or lucrative’ I’ve mentioned in the other thread since in theory if unbounded a whale could easily abuse the vote in their favor. But some reasonable constraints and with the proposal system it should be fine unless I’m missing something.
Potential benefits:
-Extremely efficient and cost effective to a point that is hard to understate and lessens the total monetary burden of the repeg
-Potentially offsets future governance risk from whales if they choose to exit early in this way
-Potentially offsets future sell pressure of ONE in cases where rONE is redeemed for ONE at a higher price, while only offering limited amounts of liquid ONE
-Does not deplete existing on chain liquidity for 1assets. Which is low enough currently that a single whale could choose to evaporate all of it if they desired, or if they became a forced seller for whatever reason
Potential negatives:
-Feeling under compensated for their loss
-If the restoration effect is successful, particularly due to multiple strategies being used that weren’t necessarily known at the time of their choice to exit, some users might feel they were misinformed and did not have the proper information at the time to make an informed decision
-Low uptake
Options to mitigate potential negatives:
-Users who choose to exercise their right to exit should be a primary focus of the growth and retention strategy of rONE
-Attempt to reengage and maintain a communication channel with them
-As the growth strategy expands consider special incentives for users who chose this option(airdrops, whitelisting, NFTs, cross promotion with partner projects among other options)
-If uptake is low and liquid ONE is in high supply and there is flexibility with being able to either modify the curve or redeploy the contract, and the liquid ONE isn’t ‘all in’ on a single strategy but deployed as needed then voting on a new curve to increase incentives could be possible while also being part of a conservative but dynamic incremental approach
The last mitigation there brings me to my second point which I believe is much more important than whether or not this specific idea gets implemented, that is that the resources need to be managed safely primarily of course, but also not fully committed or dependent too early to strategies that will likely need to evolve over time. As the way I see it the repeg is likely to have different phases requiring different approaches and I will expand on in a later post with a hypothetical scenario and partnership dependent on rONE and other assets and the flexibility to use them effectively for growth.
All of the plan so far is pretty conservative, and that’s fine especially at the start but ultimately the way I see things is growth has to be pursued in parallel to the other goals at the very least. It’s not much different to how I see Harmony and ONE itself, which could substitute for rONE here of course. But the situation is such that we use rONE as a tool to invest what is meant to be a small part of future value of ONE to increase the total amount of overall value by applying it strategically in ways that maximize growth.
So we use it to incentivize growth now, and as we grow the value increases, giving us more resources to continue strategically deploy them to further growth and also meet our defi and repegging objectives. This is the basic flywheel that works.
But as it is now, governance and funding seems to be entirely dependent on generating the funding through the asset burning and minting of rONE. That’s a fine way to do it and could end up doing a lot of the work and possibly all of it, but if it’s the only way to mint rONE and the only flexibility is 2.5%/2.5% as it’s minted then the worst case scenario could be a too conservative approach that doesn’t incentivize enough minting of rONE. And I’m all for the conservative approach and trying to spend as little as possible to hit our goals, thus ideas like the curve to maximize efficiency in those areas. But I think we need to have something like a separate buffer of rONE that gets minted when the contract is deployed to some safe place like the treasury.
If it’s a one time shot with deploying the rONE contract then a fairly large amount as insurance that would specifically be meant for incentives for other initiatives in pursuit of of both growth and the repeg would make sense. ONE itself from the treasury too also should be used in a very limited manner when it makes sense to do so(like it does now for this early exit), and perhaps there can be discussions about the team doing ONE/rONE swaps at times when that liquid ONE is going to add its own value to the repeg but give the team the treasury replenishment in the long term as well.
The rONE(like any extra rONE) can be burned when not used, and burn events are a great marketing opportunity as well. Could be any method of minting it somewhere that just gives the option to pursue reasonable uses of it if necessary, can be a multisig with the team plus rONE members plus validators plus whoever, it has to be safe and that’s why my default was the treasury but this part is not particularly important to me as long as it’s safe. Even a function in the contract that burns ONE and mints rONE could actually be good idea as crazy as that may sound, but the way I’m picturing it here is if hard fork minted ONE can just be sent there to mint/burn ONE into rONE to apply it to the repeg as additional incentives if needed, that could be useful rather than never having that option again(this is more extreme but options are important).
The cases when we’d need to leverage it should be obvious enough if they come up in pursuit of the repeg, but we’re also exclusively focusing so far on this very early stage part of the plan without talking too much so far about longer term strategies(intentionally so far, at least in my case since I just want to get this going but also has to be dynamic enough to really be able to incentivize growth).
Engagement is low now and we need to change that. Some users will leave, but it will be worthwhile to retain them and incentivize that. Users on other chains who don’t use Harmony will need to be introduced to it and what we’re building. And we have a tool that will allow us to minimize market pressure now but still offer unique incentives to pursue growth and our goals. The worst case I can think of is just that everyone is thinking in bear market fear based terms and we’re so skeptical and thinking of previous bad experiences that we don’t really get a chance to use such a unique situation and asset to its potential. If the issues are accountability and large amounts that do not get effectively used, then these are the problems that we need to solve. Transparency, quantifiable metrics, incremental goals are a requirement from my point of view. But the key is to combine that with a way to allow flexibility and not limit the potential by only relying on a linear set of conditional goals where if one fails the potential is locked when pivoting may be necessary.