Hey everyone,
This is a post about bribes on Votium and how we can better improve our strategy here.
Context
There is a gauge in Angle GaugeController called Convex Bribes where ANGLE tokens are allocated to a protocol’s multisig for these to be invested on Convex bribes on Votium.
While Convex bribes happen every two weeks, ANGLE rewards accrue every week to the multisig.
We, at the Core Team, take care of then placing the bribes on Votium based on the amounts received on the week at which the bribe must placed.
For the exact accounting of how much was placed compared to how much was received, you can take a look at this Excel spreadsheet
As you can see on the document, so far, and given the recent ANGLE price actions, slightly less tokens have been placed on bribes than what was has been received by the multisig.
We have conducted some analyses recently on the cost of veCRV votes and more precisely how much it costs to have one veCRV vote for a given week. You can take a look for instance at this Dune Dashboard.
Conclusion is that: Convex costs 9 cts/veCRV vote, while bribe.crv.finance costs 2 to 4 cts/veCRV vote.
The voting power you have access with Convex/Votium bribes is far smaller than what you can get with other alternatives. It seems that Votium has lost the multiplier effect it had in the beginning. Another issue with Votium is that tokens tend to be automatically dumped whih significantly affects ANGLE price action.
While Convex bribes have had a pretty good impact in the early days of agEUR, it is no longer the best way to get veCRV to vote for our gauges, and we would be better off switching to another alternative.
Proposal
Beyond bribe.crv.finance, there is also currently an OTC market for buying veCRV votes. Some veCRV whales prefer not to use bribe.crv.finance to “sell” their votes.
There are a lot of other alternative bribing systems like Pitch.money or Warden from Paladin which is not already live.
What we propose here is to stop bribing, but to keep the gauge for Convex bribes and use it more generally for Curve incentives. ANGLE rewards going to this gauge could then be distributed to ANGLE and agEUR related gauges on bribe.crv.finance, an alternative or through OTC deals with veCRV voters if it’s more advantageous.
All of these movements will be done transparently so that everyone can follow where voted ANGLE rewards are going.
On the Protocol Controlled CVX
On a side, but related note, the protocol has accumulated a fair amount (~18k) of CVX tokens, notably thanks to what was done with Olympus Pro. These are locked so far for a period of 4 months and we won’t be able to touch it in this period.
Once the lock finishes, there are different strategies which will be possible with that:
- keep it like that as vlCVX
- swap it to CRV and lock it to veCRV
- swap it to CRV and get sdCRV tokens (from Stake DAO’s locker): this could enable us to get a multiplier effect on our votes. Not all sdCRV holders are voting and we could hence take advantage of unused sdCRV votes + of our boosted votes with the veSDT the protocol controls to increase our influence and maximize the efficiency of these tokens.
We’ll soon re-open the discussion on the protocol controlled vlCVX to find what could be the best strategy.
As for the rest, please let us know your thoughts on this! If we do things carefully and optimize for where rewards are distributed, it’s very possible that a same amount of ANGLE tokens leads to 4x more CRV and CVX rewards with a decreased sell pressure on the ANGLE tokens.