Switching Convex Incentives

Hey everyone,

I am writing this post to think through the overall strategy we should adopt on Curve/Convex.

Context

agEUR has become one of the main assets on Curve thanks to the bribes placed on Convex and to the incentives placed on the different Curve pools.

So far, we’ve mostly been involved on two pools:

  • 3EUR (agEUR-EURs-EURt): €103.5m
  • agEUR-ibEUR: €18m

Volume is bigger on the 3EUR pool obviously but agEUR-ibEUR has a bigger volume if you normalize it by its liquidity.
There are two main reasons why volume matters for Curve pools:

  • a big volume makes fees for veCRV holders which in turn incentivizes them to vote for the pools to direct CRV inflation
  • it also creates a natural APR for holding agEUR, thus increasing TVL in the protocol

We started bribing the 3EUR pool back in December: since then, we’ve helped grow the pool a lot, which does not only include agEUR. As such, we have favored some of our “competitors” like EURs and EURt.
They both grew quite substantially thanks to us, you can check Sébastien’s Dune Analytics Dashboard, the incentives on the Curve pool are boosting their volume and created them some use cases.

While stablecoins can be a positive sum game, we may end up for Euro stablecoins like in DeFi in general in a situation where the first arrived will be the first and only served. What I mean is that I believe that the first Euro stablecoin reaching significant momentum will be the one ultimately dominating the market.

On top of that, all the incentives we have given for EURs and EURt have basically been given for free, meaning we have never received any incentive from these projects (which is to some extent understandable as they don’t have any token).

On the other hand, the partnership with Iron Bank has worked quite well so far: the pool receives rKP3R incentives and Andre Cronje has even voted with its full CVX power on the pool in the last vote.

Proposal

What I propose here is to start switching the incentives from the 3EUR pool to the ibEUR-agEUR pool.

The ANGLE tokens given for bribes are voted every week by veANGLE holders for bribes. These ANGLE are then automatically given to a multisig which then handles bribe placement.

So people voting for bribes are hence voting for an amount of ANGLE tokens then given on Votium. As such, we could easily split the total bribe allocation between the 3EUR and the agEUR/ibEUR pool, or even put it all in the agEUR/ibEUR pool.

This would allow us to stop supporting highly competitive assets and at the same time reinforce the collaboration with a project that supported us and which is less present in the Euro stablecoin space.

If, how and when to do this should be discussed here and with the community. Many people have skin in the game in the 3EUR pool, or are voting for bribes because they know that these bribes will be going to the 3EUR pool, and it’s going to be natural for them to be against this proposal which I get.

To mitigate switching costs, we could also opt for an option where we slowly shift the bribe balance from the 3EUR to the ibEUR/agEUR. We could also rely on bi-weekly Snapshot votes to caliber how much should be given to the 3EUR and how much to the ibEUR/agEUR.

Perspectives

With CurveV2 pools now available, we could also think of the bribe gauge as a way to incentivize all the pools we will eventually have with other assets. At this point the bribe strategy could be rethought!

Anyway, let us know your thoughts on this, let’s remember that we’re in an industry where we’re trying to grow agEUR (and hence protocol revenue for veANGLE holders) and that we’re in it with competitors.

The integrations strategy (Aave, Compound, other projects and chains) is a way to boostrap demand for agEUR. In some situations, there are some DeFi moves we could make that can help us in that regard. I think that if we want to think long-term, slowly moving away from the 3EUR is one of these moves!

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I support this proposal. I think migrating the bribes from 3eur to agEUR/ibEUR over a 4 week period would be a good amount of time to do the shift. The fact that we can benefit more from the higher capital efficiency as well as the rKP3R rewards make it a yes for me.

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Currently bribes are placed every two weeks. So we could imagine doing the upcoming bribe normally (like 100% for the 3EUR), and then 50%/50% in two weeks and in four weeks 100% for ibEUR/agEUR.

Or other solution mentioned in the post, we could decide to rely on a Snapshot vote where depending on the voting power bribes are placed in one pool or in another

I suppose in long term we are going to non-EUR stablecoins, right? Besides something like ibCHR, ibJPY…, with ETH…(BTC) as collateral, the Angle mechanism is also competitive for USD stablecoin, which is a much bigger market. And I’d like to see something similar to FPI from Frax.

Yes for sure! Should have made that clearer! With the new minting module we’ll be launching other stablecoins than €. The USD market is indeed big but there are some big regulatory issues we want to avoid here, so better stick to non-USD stablecoins. True that something similar to FPI from FRAX could definitely make sense, and we have this in mind (for after May I guess)

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Proposing to open this to Snapshot vote next week.
Three main choices:

  1. In two weeks, split the bribe amount 50/50 between ibEUR/agEUR and 3EUR, and in 4 weeks only bribe ibEUR/agEUR
  2. Decide the split between the different pools using a biweekly Snapshot vote: like every two weeks we should have a Snapshot vote, and bribes would be placed depending on where voting power has been allocated. Like if 30% of the voting power is for 3EUR, then 30% of the bribe should be placed on this gauge
  3. Amend and restate