[Treasury] - Request for $4,000 to incentivize MIX liquidity on Thena over a period of 3 months

Proposals
1

Authors: c2ba, Dzaius

Summary

  • This proposal requests $4,000 from the CGDAO Treasury to be allocated over 3 months to incentivize the MIX/BNB pool on Thena exchange.

  • The primary goal is to bring back MIX liquidity to the market so Mixie NFTs can be minted again.

  • A secondary goal is to evaluate if Thena is sustainable as a ve(3,3) DEX and could be used by the CGG DAO to incentivize CGG liquidity on BNB chain, and farm protocol owned liquidity to get an additional revenue source.

  • The allocation will be done to target specific liquidity pool size week after week, by trying to reach specific APRs for the pool. A spreadsheet is linked forecasting the program. It will be updated each week with realized numbers.

Motivation

In April 2021, ChainGuardian (CG) partnered with PancakeSwap (PCS) 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 CG ecosystem. The minting curve is decreasing: early Mixies require more tokens to be burnt.

After PCS stopped rewards for the MIX/BNB pool, liquidity drained out and most MIX tokens are now held in wallets. Due to the decreasing minting curve, it’s now impossible for a medium holder to buy enough MIX tokens to mint a new Mixie. Large holders could mint but they probably wait for a better price and higher liquidity to sell their MIX to the market. According to the Mixie token tracker Mixie (MIXIE) Token Tracker | BscScan only 15 Mixies have been minted. The last one was 34 days ago, and the one before that 241 days ago.

A reason for the lack of liquidity is the absence of farming incentives. MIX is a low volume token, so swap fees are not enough to motivate liquidity providers to enter the market, or holders to become liquidity providers.

The goal of this proposal is to allocate some DAO funds to incentivizing liquidity through voters rewards on a new DEX called Thena.

Specifications

Thena has recently been released on the BNB chain and implements a model called ve(3,3) allowing decentralized incentives.

In this model, large actors (projects, protocols, whales) buy and lock THE token of the DEX, the governance token of Thena, so they can vote on pools to direct future emissions toward them. Farmers are then incentivized to provide more liquidity to pools having a high number of votes.

Another way of getting more votes for a given pool is through voters rewards: you put rewards for voters on a specific pool. It allows incentivizing liquidity without having to buy and lock THE.

I already managed to get MIX whitelisted on Thena, created the pool and started voting myself. It already shows good signs as new buyers provided liquidity to profit from the high APR, and the second largest MIX holder had the opportunity to dump some of his tokens at $0.2.

Here are transactions showing this activity:

What we expect to happen is the following loop: THE price increase (cause large actors buy and lock) => APR on pool increase => farmers buy and LP MIX => MIX price increase => large holders dump => MIX price decrease => APR on pool increase.

However this loop depends on THE. For a given price of THE, the LP liquidity stabilizes at a given APR accepted by the market to farm MIX/BNB at current liquidity levels. This APR seems to stabilize between 200% and 300%. The 250% APR is currently reached for a pool size of $6250. Increasing that size requires more votes for the pool, which can be obtained through voters rewards.

As liquidity increases, the market should accept lower APRs because entering and exiting would lead to lower price impacts.

The requested funds will be allocated to voters rewards week after week to try to increase the LP size to chosen targets. Based on total rewards, the cost of a vote can be estimated. Based on THE emission, the reward amount for liquidity providers generated by a vote can also be estimated. Using these data, we can choose each week how much to spend in voters rewards to get a specific APR, which should lead to a specific liquidity size.

The public spreadsheet CGG x Thena proposal - MIX/BNB forecast - Google Sheets will be used to forecast and follow operations.

The liquidity target is set to $35000. At $0.25 per MIX, it would hold 70K MIX token (half of total value), while the next Mixie to be minted costs 23271 MIX. It should be enough for some holders to buy the MIX tokens missing from them and mint a Mixie, reducing the cost of the next Mixies.

To reach that target, the spreadsheet plans to try to reach $15K first week, then increase 8.5% per week up to $25K. According to the forecast, this would cost ~$3.776K. The proposal asks for $4K for flexibility and to account for changes in numbers used.

I suggest to reward with BUSD because Thena has a one week period between voting deadline and voters rewards claim. Voters will prefer stability on their reward value, and the forecast should be easier to maintain.

This program will also be used to assert if it would make sense for the CG DAO to acquire THE and lock them to vote. The advantage is that acquired voting power is not lost while voters rewards are. Disadvantage is long term exposure to Thena, of which we don’t know the future.

But if this DEX seems to work well and attract liquidity and volume, it can be used by the DAO to deposit CGG token liquidity and farm it as protocol owned liquidity.

In that context it would make sense for CG DAO to acquire and lock THE so it can vote for its own pools forever, farm more THE, and use them as additional revenue source and more voting power.

Benefits for ecosystem participants

In this section I will describe several profiles of users and how they benefit from this incentivizing program. One user can match several profiles, so he has several benefits and motivations.

Profile 1: Thena voter

Profile 2: Farmer

Profile 2: MIX whale

Profile 3: MIX holder

Thena voter. It is likely to be external from the CG ecosystem. The motivation of the Thena voter is to earn rewards by voting. For that it buys and locks THE, which is a long term exposure, and vote each weeks on pools based on the voters rewards and swap fees. Their vote leads to more emissions for the pool they vote for, which increases the pool’s APR. The CG DAO would reward the MIX/BNB pool to attract voters, which would increase the APR of the pool to attract farmers.

Farmer. It can be external from the CG ecosystem. The motivation of the farmer is to farm high APRs. When the APR of MIX/BNB gets above a given threshold, mercenary farmers buy MIX to enter the pool, which has two positive effects:

  • increase and consolidate the liquidity at a given level

  • increase the price of MIX

Both of these effects are positive to attract MIX whales.

MIX whale. MIX whales are the top 3 holders of MIX, holding approximately 33% of all tokens. Some of them already minted a Mixie, and it’s pretty clear they are not interested in minting anymore at current mint cost because they have enough to do so. According to debank, all these wallets are active at least on one chain, and the second of them recently sold MIX token and provide liquidity on PCS. The motivation of these whales is to sell MIX tokens, probably at higher prices. For that they need MIX price to increase, but also liquidity to increase because they have many tokens to distribute: one large sell from them currently crash the market.

MIX holder. Many MIX holders probably accumulated just enough MIX to mint one of the list, at lower MIX cost. They did not expected the minting to be locked by lack of liquidity. They would benefit from a higher liquidity so the most wealthy of them can buy their missing tokens, mint new Mixies, and unlock the process for the others. Alternatively, they can benefit from whales dumping so they can buy cheap MIX tokens and mint at lower cost than expected.

In a context where MIX/BNB is incentivized, they can also become liquidity providers and benefit from their current idle holdings. They would expose themselves to losing part of their MIX by doing so (because bought and burn by minters), but they can split their bag to ensure they have enough MIX to mint one at the end of the list, while still earning THE rewards.

Note that THE rewards can be:

  • sold for other tokens (yield source)

  • sold for more MIX (self impermanent loss insurance)

  • sold for more MIX/BNB (compounding)

  • locked for voting (additional perpetual yield source if Thena is successful)

  • deposited on Tarot at 40+% APR (speculation of a Thena’s season so they can be sold at a higher price)

All these strategies offer a wide range of new possibilities for MIX holders. If CG DAO ends up building a long term position and partnership with Thena, this would extend to CGG holders of the BNB chain.

Outcomes

If passed, this proposal would allocate $4,000 from the DAO Treasury to incentivize MIX/BNB liquidity on Thena over a period of 3 months.

If rejected, this proposal would not allocate funds to incentivize MIX/BNB liquidity on Thena.

Links

2 Likes
2

An Update thread from c2ba (Discord):

03/03/2023

Hi everyone, quick update on the MIX incentivizing operations. @IamTroll | CG DAO please create a thread from it. The program has run for 5 weeks and used $1460 / $4000 to bribe MIX/BNB pool and attract ~65.8K MIX into liquidity. A new MIX/THE pool has also been created but is not bribed by the DAO, I’m incentivizing it with some of my votes and might also bribe it in the next weeks. We still have 7 weeks of program to run for an average of ~$362 / week, but we don’t distribute linearly, we try to reach liquidity targets by forecasting the number of voters we can get from a bribe amount, which translates to farming incentives and APR.

The MIX/BNB pool is the second largest holder of MIX and MIX/THE the 4rth.

The next Mixie costs 23,270.86 MIX to mint which is still quite expensive (~$5.7K, with a 41.67% price impact) for current liquidity, but at least possible (it was not a few months ago).

Unfortunately many holders remain inactive on MIX, in particular the two largest individual ones. I may spend some time next week track wallets with more than 2K MIX to see if they are active aside from MIX. In the meantime can you please upvote this proposal to have MIX listed in wallet on debank: DeBank | The Web3 Messenger & Best Web3 Portfolio Tracker Might help in holders discovering the price of their bag.

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03/09/2023

MIX Update, start of the 7 / 12 week.

We bribed $340 and attracted 12,061 votes for the MIX/BNB pool => 710 THE reward = $470 = 155% APR at current 15.78K TVL.

Additionally, the MIX/THE pool received 8,571 votes, which is surprising because there was no bribes, and it’s not my votes. So I guess someone wanted to vote for MIX/BNB but chose the wrong pool. Anyway it’s good for MIX, cause it’s more votes for our pools at no additional cost => 505 THE reward = $334 = 493% APR at current 3.56K TVL.

There is a total of 64,700 MIX in liquidity on Thena.

We have $2200 remaining for bribes for the next 6 weeks.

It would be good to start discussing plans for what comes after the 6 weeks.

My personal goal is to keep using MIX as a farming token. Whether the DAO continues to incentivize or not, I’ll be able to use my own THE stack to maintain a certain APR. I won’t be able to keep the same level of liquidity at the beginning though because I don’t own enough share of the LP. I focus on increasing my MIX bag so I can later increase this share if required.

If the DAO choose to keep incentivizing MIX, I thing it should be part of a larger Thena based strategy covering CGG and MIX. Bribes are great, but not sustainable since the DAO has no MIX/BNB protocol owned liquidity. It was already discussed a bit with @IamTroll | CG DAO and @Dzaius, but the global idea is that CGG owned by the project on BNB chain can be leveraged by the DAO as a way to get revenue from Thena. That revenue can then be used in many ways, one of them could be MIX incentivizing but it also opens many possibilities.
My personal opinion on Thena is that the token is still undervalued based on swap fees the core pools receive. Especially if we take into account the degraded state of the crypto market.
I think a new discussion thread should be opened to discuss that.

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03/15/2023

An update before the end of epoch to give current number of MIX in liquidity, cause I plan to remove some xD

There is a total of 68,825.65 MIX in liquidity on Thena:

  • 44,957.65 in MIX/BNB
  • 23,868 in MIX/THE

I will remove my MIX/THE LP for this week (10,830 MIX) because I will not vote for the pool this week or provide bribe, so the APR will drop. I “only” have 45% of the pool right now which make it capital inefficient for me to incentivize it, so I unpair, lock my THE part, and come back on it next epoch or the one after with a larger share once other farmers have exited too.

The MIX/BNB pool is bribed 500 BUSD by the DAO funds this week, I expect number of voters and its APR to increase.

03/16/2023

MIX Update, start of the 8 / 12 week. - We bribed $500 and attracted 15,148 votes for the MIX/BNB pool => 831 THE rewards = $529 = 167.69% APR at current 16.43K TVL. - There is a total of 69,031 MIX in liquidity on Thena. I’ve put back mine in MIX/BNB. - We have $1700 remaining for bribes for the next 5 weeks.

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03/24/2023

MIX Update, start of the 9 / 12 week.

  • We bribed $400 and attracted 15,329 votes for the MIX/BNB pool => 806 THE rewards = $289 = 108% APR at current 13.8K TVL.
  • There is a total of 67,236 MIX in liquidity on Thena.
  • We have $1300 remaining for bribes for the next 4 weeks.

So we reached a week where bribing costs more than incentives earned for the pool. This is due to THE dumping quite hard recently, -50% in a week.

In such case, it means protocols are paying more on average to get liquidity on their tokens.
I would argue it’s a good time to maybe discuss acquiring veTHE owned by CG DAO treasury, that can be used to perpetually vote for the MIX/BNB, or be used to self farm a CGG pool in case the DAO choose to park CGG token on Thena and farm with protocol owned liquidity.

04/06/2023

MIX Update, week 10 / 12

  • As announced above, we did not bribe this week. I’ve exited most of my liquidity waiting to see how market react
  • As expected, large farmers exited and dumped MIX from ~0.12 to ~0.04, I’ve bought back some. Price is now ~0.055

MIX Update, start of the 11 / 12 week.

  • The DAO bought and locked 653.8446 THE for 200 BUSD which are allocated to vote for MIX/BNB.
  • Note that you can track the multisig holdings here DeBank | The Web3 Messenger & Best Web3 Portfolio Tracker
  • The DAO still have $1100 to allocate and will probably DCA THE over the next weeks.
  • Assuming THE remain at constant 0.3$ price (unlikely of course), this would result in a total of ~4320 THE locked. At current emission rate this 170 THE / week = 51$ of incentives per week.
  • APR of MIX/BNB is 25% thanks to 1152 votes (653 from the DAO, and others probably from farmers of the pool)
  • I’ve added a new ETH/MIX pool. I’ve voted myself for MIX/THE, USDC/MIX, ETH/MIX cause I own most of the liquidity inside. I’ve limited the APRs to ~45%. I will slowly increase across weeks and test several things to see how the liquidity moves from pool to pool. Optimally I would like to own > 80% of all MIX pools to reach a state where I can loop chase bribes, pump MIX with bribes, accumulate more THE from farming, then pump APRs, repeat.
  • There is a total of 50,903 MIX in liquidity on Thena.