Mixie's lives matter: a plan to bring back liquidity to the MIX token

Context

In april 2021, chainguardian partnered with pancakeswap to distribute the MIX token and incentivize its liquidity with CAKE rewards. The purpose of MIX is simple: burn it to mint the Mixie NFT that can be used in the chaingardian dapp ecosystem. The minting curve is decreasing: early Mixies require more tokens to be burnt. Unfortunately, after more than a year, only 14 / 101 Mixies have been minted.

This can be explained by two factors:

  • 2 whales hold a lot of tokens and don’t use them to mint, provide liquidity or dump. While their behavior is clearly toxic for the majority of users, one could argue they are int their right to do that given they own these tokens. Also, their behavior might be explained by the second factor.
  • The liquidity is extremely low, up to the point no one except the third largest holder could buy enough MIX to mint the next NFT. It’s an issue to buy, but also to sell. We don’t know if the 2 whales want to sell at a higher price, or if they just can’t sell at the current price level because liquidity is low both sides.

Unfortunately, decentralization makes it hard to communicate with holders. But an obvious starting point would be to increase liquidity on the MIX token and observe the market behaviour in response.

Increasing liquidity

Liquidity has become very low after the end of CAKE rewards incentive. Obviously for this kind of token, scarsity is important. You won’t put your tokens in liquidity, risking high impermanent loss both side, without incentive to do so. Swap fees are not an option as volume will always remains low, especially if liquidity is low making it very hard to range trade the token.

What would a higher liquidity allows ?

  • whales could dump with less slippage
  • medium size holders could buy enough tokens to mint the next NFTs and free up slots for smaller holders
  • range traders could buy low sell high and make the market healthier

So the goal is to increase liquidity on the MIX token, and for that we need incentives. Given the risks, these incentives must be quite high in term of APR. A good target would be at least 100% apr, but more is better especially early on. So, how can we do that ?

ve(3,3) and Cone exchange

In 2022, the ve(3,3) model for exchanges have been introduced by Andre Cronje for Solidly on the Fantom chain. While the initial attempt did not work very well in terms of tokenomics, other projects have forked and improved the system with more or less success. Two notable examples are Velodrome on Optimism and Dystopia on Polygon. They both chose different ideas to iterate on the ve(3,3) concept, and launched approximately at the same time (may/june 2022 if I recall), in different contexts (Optimism almost had no DEX while Polygon already have an important ecosystem)

More recently, Cone exchange have been launched by the Dystopia team on BSC (the team is also behind Tetu).

The basic idea of ve(3,3) is the following, and I take Cone as example for clarity. The Cone token is emitted to incentivize liquidity on LP pools. It can also be locked as veCone to acquire voting power. Each week, veCone holders can vote to increase/decrease emission on the pool of their choice. This the ve model introduced by curve. An additional important mechanic is the rate of emission. The more Cone tokens are locked, the lower the rate of emission. So if very few actors are locking, the price will dump, making it easier for new actors with lower capital to buy and lock. In theory, the goal of farmers is to provide liquidoty, farm & dump, and the role of protocols is to buy, lock & vote to incentivize liquifity ln their token. Finally, actors can also bribe voters on specific pools to try to attract more votes on a single pool. When the reward token is too expensive to buy and lock, it might be more capital efficient. Can be good also to incentivize for a few weeks only.

Cone has encountered mitigated success. This can be explained by the fact BSC already have a very large ecosystem, with a strong leading DEX pancakeswap. But an immediate consequence of this is that it gives opportunity, with a small capital, to incentivize liquidity on any pair. And who needs liquidity ? Mixie of course.

The plan

I’ve decided to try to do that by risking my own capital, and as a proof of concept it can work. I think a few weeks are enough to know if it works or not. I’ve managed to get MIX whitelisted on the exchange, and I’ve informed the Cone team of what I want to do.

I’ve created the pool, provided a bit of liquidity, bought approx 2% of the total veCone supply, and voted for the pool to get a high APR.

Now I’m farming Cone that I plan to use for several things:

  • repay myself of the capital injected
  • lock more to incentivize more
  • buyback MIX to increase the token price (might attract whales to sell, or even very small holders having dusts)
  • bribe the pool for more vote (with boughback MIX, or farmed CONE)

Based on the market behavior, I’ll choose different actions. For example, if the operation work I’ll be diluted quite fast so I’ll increase my LP position to earn enough CONE and lock more to try to keep the APR high enough.

I hope to observe the following behaviors:

  • as liquidity remains low on cone, apr will be high. It motivates new entrants to buy the token, which increase the price, and increase the liquidity at this level as they pair.
  • it motivates holders to put their coins in liquidity, offering others the opportunity to buy for minting, or sell for exiting.
  • it will create trading activity on pcs and cone, allowing people to notice the existence of the operation and offering more incentive to be an LP.

I think MIX have healthy tokenomics as long as liquidity is incentivized. Some toxic actors might still play the game of buying the token and not minting, but it will then increase the price, making other holders more “rich”, so they can dump at a good price on the money the whales would have usedd to to buy the token.

Initial state

The vote snapshot was at 2022-10-27 00:00:00 UTC. Trading activity already occured in the following hours, probably from Cone users noticing the high APR. Approximately half of PCS liquidity has been moved to Cone and the price increased a bit (there was pumps and dumps).

As of 2022-10-27 07:45:00 UTC, the APR is between 642% and 2568%

Cone implements a boosting system (similar to Curve), by default you have the x1 APR (642%) but you can increase to x4 (2568%) by buying and locking Cone. Note that my APR is 1096% with ~1M votes.

Right now the total available liquidity on MIX is 6394 tokens, splitted as follow:
PCS MIX-WBNB pool: 2126 tokens
PCS MIX-BUSD pool: 1502 tokens
Cone MIX-WBNB pool: 2766 tokens

I’ll try to keep the incentivizing running on my own for several weeks and keep you inform on a weekly basis here.

How the DAO can help

If the DAO has some funds to allocate to this, then they can buy and lock Cone to vote, or bribe the pool if they do not want a long term position on Cone (bribing can be done with MIX, BNB or CONE). Note that even a 500$ bribe can attract a lot of vote since Cone mcap is very low (64k). The DAO can also approach Cone team for partnership, they often accept to match bribes or votes for partnership. Could also lead to a partnership on Dystopia (Polygon side). Finally, the DAO can also do the necessary communication of social networks to advertize of the operation.

About risks: like any defi op, there are smart contract risks, rug risks, etc. So do your own research about Cone and only put your token in LP if you accept these risks.

As a disclaimer, I’m not affiliated with Cone exchange. I’m only a user of their products, and holder of their token. I don’t particularly believe this exchange will succeed, neither fail, but I recognize it offers the necessary tools to incentivize liquidity on a trustless and market efficient way. So let’s try to use them to free Mixie, and maybe more if that leads to partnerships, new users for cone exchange, and yields for farmers.

What if that does not work ? Well for now only my capital is at risk, so as long as I’m farming CONE I should be able to repay myself, or increase my voting position on this protocol.

Week 1 Summary & Week 2 Plans

Liquidity

At 2022-05-11, the LPs compositions are:

The number of MIX tokens in pools increased from 6394 to 8252, +29.07%.

My personal amount in pool has decreased from 2530 to 2315 and I’ve managed to buy more in wallet, so my total holdings increased. It means the additional tokens in pools are from new liquidity providers / sellers which is great.

Trading Activity

I had to push it a bit by buying MIX from pools to increase the price, but arbitrage bots + traders showed up and we saw new price action on MIX.

Price increased from ~0.05 $ to ~0.16 $ then retraced. It’s now at 0.088 $. Since BNB is pumping hard recently arbitrage bots are applying sell pressure to MIX/BNB.

One noticeable transaction I saw is the last dump of list list: Mix (MIX) Token Tracker | BscScan
The holder had its 1693.538017718777462229 MIX untouched since May-18-2021 and dumped them for 116 BUSD when the price was 0.1121.

As liquidity increase and price goes up I expect more holders to give up on their bags, which would be great for people that want to buy & mint Mixie.

On the explorer analytics we can observe the increase in transfers activity:

Incentives

W1 incentives was in (642%, 2568%) APR range and the pool was the 10th on the list in terms of incentive.

For W2 I managed to acquire ~3.3M veCONE to vote on the pool, it’s now the 4th of the list giving it more visibility and more rewards.

To be more specific, the pool captured 502,625.32241737 CONE from a total of 6,991,565.52295832 emitted to all pools, that’s 7.19% of emissions.

At current CONE price (0.0005882$) it’s 295$ rewards for a 733$ TVL pool. It gives a 40% weekly APR and a 2090% yiearly APR, not bad.

The APR range is now (1957%, 4898%):

It’s almost impossible to reach max APR though because I’m a large liquidity provider with a high number of votes. I “only” get 2251% APR and the max is obtained at 33M CONE locked, which is absurd (that’s 33% of the total CONE supply).
IMHO they should drop this boosting system like Velodrome did (another ve(3,3) DEX on Optimism chain). It’s misleading and unfair for liquidity providers that just want to farm with no long term position on the DEX.

I still own 58% of the pool so I capture most of the emitted CONE, will be close to 300K this week. This is great at the early stage because not dumping these CONEs is quite important to keep the APR high in the next weeks.
I expect other farmers to dump their CONEs for more MIX/WBNB, which will both increase price of MIX and increase liquidity at current level.

Plans

Right now I’m compounding the earned CONE to CONE/UnCONE (~800% APR), allowing me to acquire more CONE without dumping the tokens (UnCONE is basically a liquid wrapper of locked CONE, owned by the Unknown protocol).

Before next vote snapshot I will probably extract the CONE part to relock and vote with more power, then next week repair new rewards with the UnCONE part to farm more. This loop seems to work well as long as CONE/UnCONE APR remains high too.

If CONE is hard dumped by other farmers I plan to increase my stack and bring the pool to the top 3.

I also plan to dump a small amount of CONE to sustain MIX price if required (as arb bots dump it when BNB pumps).

Ideas

As told above, not dumping CONE early in the incentivizing process is important to sustain the APR of the pool for several weeks or months. That’s the role of large voters like me, external farmers are expected to dump for compounding.

As more CONE are locked, the emissions are reduced and less can be dumped which consolidate current CONE price and avoid APR reduction.

An idea I have is to create and incentivize a MIX/CONE pool. It would allow farmers to only dump half rewards for compounding and increase trading activity by arb bots between MIX/BNB and MIX/CONE (which is profitable for swap fees that I earn as main voter).

I’m waiting to acquire more voting power though because I don’t want to allocate to many votes to it, MIX/BNB should remain the main pool and MIX/CONE a secondary one.
Or maybe I’ll create it and bribe it with MIX and CONE to attract external votes.

Week 2 Summary & Week 3 Plans

Liquidity

At 2022-13-11, the LPs compositions are:

The number of MIX tokens in pools increased from 8252 to 10797, +30.83%.

This week the increase is mainly from me, I’ve chose to farm the Cone MIX/BNB pool more aggressively while liquidity remains shy to come, in order to secure more locked Cone and future incentives.

Trading Activity

I have’nt monitor much MIX trading activity since the week price action of all assets was mainly driven by the FTX affair. Price of MIX increased by 18.22% vs USD, and ~30% vs BNB though.

Incentives

Unfortunately CONE took a big hit on its price, lowering the APR to the range (707%, 1766%). This is also because of me increasing the pool liquidity value from 738$ to 1344$.

I’ve increase the CONE voting power of the pool from ~3.3M veCONE to ~4.3M veCONE. The pool captured 657,401.60 from a total of 6,940,173.13 (9.47% of emissions). I’m currently getting 70% of our share, that will be relocked next week to capture more future emissions and reduce overall CONE emission rate.

At current CONE price our share of emission is worth 165$ for the week. Not a lot but as long as the goal is not to dump it, what’s matter is the absolute amount of CONE.

Plans

While we never know, I think CONE will probably find a bottom soon. Emissions each week are approximately 7M token, approximately 1745$ for all pools. At this price I suspect small farmers will stop dumping because it doesn’t cover gas costs.

The MIX pool and another pool, KZE, are acquiring a large share of emissions and we are not dumping. We still acquire voting power and hope to be able to ride an uptrend short term if the whole market stabilize or recover a bit. If it happens it should increase APR of the MIX pool.

Thena, a new ve33 DEX is deploying this month and managed to secure many partnerships with a dozen other well known protocols. I plan to create and incentivize a MIX pool on this DEX to catch the eyes of new users on MIX. If you wonder what’s the difference between Thena and Cone, basically Thena implemented the Velodrome model (no APR boost system) and chose to increase swap fees. We’ll see how it works.

Week 3 Summary & Week 4 Plans

Liquidity

2022-11-20 LPs:

The number of MIX tokens in pools increased from 10797 to 11297, +4.63%.

Trading Activity

Price of MIX remained stable, between 0.09$ and 0.1$, despite the hard crypto crash. Not much trading activity this week though, we need the whole market to stabilize.

Incentives

CONE price is still falling but slower than previous weeks. I managed to buy & lock more, so MIX/BNB pool is now 3rd of the list one Cone exchange.
I’m still the main LP provider, so I earn ~67% of rewards and relock them.

This week a total of 6,655,043.76 CONE has been emitted to the market and the MIX pool captured 757,069.56 CONE, that’s 11.38%, 157$ at current price for a TVL of ~1366$.

Plans

Nothing really change for now, the goal remains to accumulate & lock CONE to ensure more future rewards for the pool.
I will create the MIX/CONE pool this week in order to prepare the field to sell small amounts of CONE to buyback MIX and compound in a second pool. As long as I’m a bit alone playing this liquidity game, it will offer me a way of capturing more CONE without dumping and only at the cost of a few votes. If other farmers join in the pool, they’ll have to buy MIX and create trading activity. More pools = more arbitrage opportunities = more trading activity on the token = increase chances people nothing they can farm with MIX.
Also helps increase CONE liquidity which is important in any farming system.

I will be with you brother if you move to Thena. I do not see Cone ending well due to lack of participants on the demand side (protocols). Thena may do better I hope and just from the list of higher quality names involved.

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